In other news, Mahoraba is actually available on Bluray right now. You should watch it. The thing is, I've had these episodes posted on my webpage for over 15 years. I'm having real trouble convincing myself to take them down.

      Also, I have posted the 3D model and video of an accident that happened in my neighborhood recently. A car lost control and hit side of a house going at least 50mph. It demolished the chimney and broke the gas line. Last I heard, all people involved survived.

      I've started learning how to use photogrammetry to build 3D models. I've also decided to post some of the models and photo inputs online for anyone to play with. So far I have two sets from a trip to New Mexico. Jemez Historical Site and Bandolier National Park. Jemez was the first one I posted and has a walk through of the methods and tools I used. The actual webpage for Bandolier should be done shortly.

      It's been a busy weekend

      Have you ever seen one of those old horror movies, where the slow moving ooze creeps out of the swamp and up to some unsuspecting fisherman, the man not noticing the ooze till it touches his hand? Fight as the man does, he cannot break free of the ooze, for the only thing he has to push against is the ooze itself. In the end, the audience watches as he is devoured, screaming his last breath.

      I am now convinced they used, as a prop for the ooze, classic recipe rice crispy treats.

      More to the point, I just posted pictures from the Walters Museum, the B&O Museum, and the original Washington Monument in Baltimore. I have to say, there were a few rooms in the Walters Museum I really liked.

      Let me add a bit more info there. It has been some time since cels were painted and photographed with a camera. Probably some time in the early '90s. If it is, there is normally some form of "barrel distortion" as well as other flaws. Miyazaki's "Conan" is a good example. As Galap said, some studios draw the source sketches on paper, then scan them in for inking and coloring. More recently, many studios have moved to an "all digital" pipeline where the entire process is done on computer using drawing tablets. This saves on material costs as well as scan time.

      You would think that using an all digital pipeline, you would just set your source to 1080p, all your drawing would be in 1080p, scale down to 480 if needed, and you would be done. Well... 1080p images are bigger than 480 images, but it's only 6.75 times bigger. That's trivial, right? In RAM one 480 image is 1.2mb while a 1080 image is 8.3mb. The thing is, that's per layer in an art program. A skilled artist might use 100 layers. It gets out of control fast. Or how about real time encoding? No studio is going to use lossy compression on a work-in-progress, so: 8.3mb * 30fps is about 250mb per second where 480 is about 36mb/s. The average hard drive is about 35mb/s. You just need a (huge) SSD, right?

      One last bit of insight: When registering an Autodesk product, Autodesk will tell you the stats of other users of that product much like Steam will. When registering 3DS Max two years ago, I saw that most users had 4-core or 6-core machines, the latest or near latest video cards, 8gb-32gb RAM, etc. 3DS Max is used by many US and European game and movie studios including Universal, Disney; many of these people have money. I also use Softimage. The lion's share of Softimage users are in Japan. Something like 80% of the user base and the majority of 3D game/movie work in the islands. People like Capcom, Square-Enix, Konami, etc. What where their stats last year? Win7 barely edging out XP64, with XP32 at 20%. More that half the machines are single core (where do you *find* a single core machine?). About 45% had only 1GB RAM. Most where running whatever cheap 3D card would cut it. Wow. Now, I can't promise this applies to anime as well, but if I extrapolate and say that this is the equipment that most low-end studios have to work with, small wonder we don't see 1080p anime. It would take years to render.

      I have heard that many anime studios operate on a knife edge budget. Hope this sheds a bit more light.

      I *finally*, after almost a decade of talking about it, wrote a program to take a folder full of pictures and make an image gallery. Just point it to a directory and it will find all the images that aren't thumbnails, make thumbnails from them, and generate an html file to go with them. I did find a bug that I'm only looking for lower case extentions. Of course my camera only generates upper case...

      But anyway, first post is of a picture trip I took to the tank collection in holding at Fort Benning Georgia. Hopefully one day it will be available to the public. Until then, here you go. Look under "Photo Galleries".

      And I'll wrap up with some error corrections on The Eccentric Family and an observation that our image library makes better looking jpeg thumbnails than Photoshop CS2 at 6KB each instead of 28-60KB. That means I can post more thumbnails, that look better, in image galleries without overloading my bandwidth. Excellent.

      I put up a quick review of The Eccentric Family. Maybe someday I can flesh it out, but it demands that I say something. Basil quoted it as the best anime of the summer 2013 season. I haven't seen much from that season, but that one was amazing.

      So, new toy it is. The new server is now running on a M910 Via Nano QuadCore board. Yes, that is the model name. You try typing that in Google. Who does their marketing anyway?

      I have partially updated the benchmark section and will finish when I have time.

      I also found an old wallpaper I had made from the Panzer Blitz line of board games. That too is now posted.

      Also, I took part in the "Internet Blackout" a few days back to protest SOPA-PIPA. I will post the images I used in a bit.

      On the UPS front, during this last power outage, the UPS ran the Via Nano fileserver plus a compact florescent lamp for an hour-forty without failing.

      In thinking about it. The webserver is very low power and could run off a PicoPSU. That takes a 12v input. I may change from a UPS to a PicoPSU in parallel to a 12v battery and charger. That would be several times more efficient.

      For the record people, in the United States, when a traffic light is off, it becomes a FOUR WAY STOP! Stop running the !@#! things. I only had to clear three lights Thursday and barely got out with my car intact.

      On a related note, the number of reviews has finally broken my webpage. For lower resolution monitors, they won't all fit on the screen at one time. I guess I will have to start looking at how to change the layout, or if an entirely new layout is needed.

      On a second note, I figured out why some of the videos I've created would run on limited platforms (like my pda) and others would not. As a result, several of the videos in the movie section now have an h.263 and an h.264 version. h.263 = DivX. h.264 = AVC. More details on this in on the movie page.

      In looking at it though, I must have a sick sense of humor posting 200-300mb videos on a server that only has a 256kbit upload. That's almost 3 hours to download a 20 minute video.

      Toradora is an excelent "romantic comedy" that isn't terribly romantic and isn't especially funny. I seriously owe that one a review.

      Suzuka is a year in the life of a new high school student. I will probably need to say something about this one as well.

      What does the list look like? Student hosting on 'Athena' back at ASMS, Xoom, and NBC. After getting burned when Xoom sold out to NBC, I started my own server. First a Win95b box running 'personal web server'. Then Win2k running on a bare Pentium Pro board shoved under my bed. At first it was running Microsoft IIS, but after getting infected by Nimda I moved to Apache. Microsoft security has always been terrible. When that developed a fatal hardware problem I grabbed a single Pentium Pro system someone had given me while shopping for a replacement. This one was also running Windows2000 and Apache. With an eye to lowering my power bill and a quieter house, I chose a C3 EPIA MS10000 fanless board. Add a fanless powersupply and the only source of noise was the hard drive. Building on experience I picked up at work, I used Fedora (core 4) instead of Windows. When I upgraded to a 500GB drive, I also moved to CentOS as that was the distro we (were/are) using at work. After serving well for over four years I finally had to upgrade (the MS10000 has no SATA ports). The current system is a VB8001 running CentOS 5.5. What a history.

      On a second note, a friend advised that I shouldn't have profanity, even if edited on my webpage. After giving it thought, I decided it would be dishonest to edit a post after it was made. As such, I feel the post will remain as is and will accept any repercussions. (I do not have the same compunctions to spelling errors.)

      I am now working on a page for Pirates of the Burning Sea. You really need to check out the artwork in this one. This is going to take some time, so I'm posting what I have as I go. You'll find it under the game reviews.

      In other news, The Mysterious Cities of Gold is now out on DVD. An excelent show from the mid 80's. We'll see when I find time for some DVD screenshots.

      Nothing really new on the site, I haven't really been watching much anime for some reason. I do wish there were easier ways to get game screenshots. I'd like to do reviews on Supreme Commander and Legend of Heroes III: Song of the Ocean.

      On another note, let us have a moment of silence for the demise of what was once Pioneer Animation, one of the greats of the anime world. The quality of their work will be missed.

      As a retroactive note. I've added Beating Angel Dokoro-chan to the lessons in heresy. ...Now just need to do Happy World

      Oh, and about that question above; No, I don't want an answer.

      Yet again, Windows is giving me greif about being able to watch mpg-4 (DivX/XviD) videos, but not encode them. No new RealMedia or WMV until I figure out what's wrong.

      Well, I tried to replace some of the Snow Fairy pictures with ones off a DVD I bought only to discover that my DVD-ROM no longer reads DVDs. I've tried a head cleaner, if canned air doesn't work that'll be my second DVD-ROM in as many years. I have great luck do I not?

      Since several people seem interested in the midi files (I'd forgotten they were there), I added some SPC and PSF files. I also included directions for playing them in winamp. There are probably solutions for Linux, but I don't know them.

      Reviews for Final Fantasy Unlimited and Sister Princess are up. Star Ocean EX and Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar reviews have been up for some time. It keeps me in practice writting to do these, so maybe I'll do some more.

      Sooner or later I'm going to get around to doing a video encoder review. True, it may be more for my benefit than others, but I'll share the wealth. Encoders I'd be testing: Divx, Microsoft video3, Real Player 8, TMPGEnc mpeg 1&2, Ligos mpeg 1, Xing mpeg 1, bbmpeg mpeg 1&2, and whatever else I can get my hands on. I'd also test real time codecs like Pic Video and HuffYUV. Two files: One from a DVD or game system with very little noise, the other from a cable signal to test using the computer as a VCR. Should be fun, as soon as I get a new DVD drive that is.

      Wow, I come back to school to find that the address of the page has changed....thank's allot NBC. Anyway, I found that the midi links were invalid and that the *.rar files were banned from the server. For SNES music, please see Zophar's Domain

      Someday I'll put a music selector in here, thanks for your patience.

      This page designed for 800X600 resolution. Any resolution should work.