March | 2007 | A Series of Tubes

Mar 18 2007

Dead Theme

My blog’s theme died for a bit yesterday and today. Should be working again now 🙂

I’m working some more on zPhoto, trying to get a stained glass filter working… More on that when it happens.

I’ve gotten back into Flash (I got a cheap-o copy of Flash 5 back when it was only 1 version old…), and am currently writing a basic game engine in Actionscript. It’s difficult, but I’ve already made more progress than the last time I tried to do this, where I worked for about a week and I never got jumping working. I just need to tweak it a bit so the guy doesn’t bounce down the slopes, but slides. Throw in some animation, and presto! A basic game. Then I need enemies, bosses, items, ~~netcode~~, etc. etc. etc. The whole thing was inspired by The Fancy Pants Adventure, a really good flash game where you run around and off ramps and stuff. I’m not aiming for that kind of quality, that game is amazing. Half that quality would be my best work ever.

Tagged Computers, Internet, Life in general

Mar 15 2007

2 Comments

Life in general

Newest Member of the Family

I bought a Red 4gb iPod Nano a few days ago, with “It’s a series of tubes!” engraved on the back. I really love it, it is way better than my old shuffle. And it can hold about twice as much music as I actually have, so it’s perfect.

I was bored today (I have strep, so I’m at home sick), and decided to make a dock for my new iPod out of the cardboard box it came in and other various things it came with. You can check it out here:

Credit to this gallery for the idea, I used the exact same method but modded a tiny bit for the nano 🙂

Tagged Computers, Life in general

Mar 12 2007

Uncategorized

zPhoto Update

I’ve decided to call my aforementioned Photo Booth hack zPhoto. And I’ve updated it.

New:

“Dots” monochrome/halftone effect
Release as an actual application (no resources diving/replacing, just unzip the file)
New ‘countdown’ icons. They’re fun. 😉

Known Issues:

Blobs still won’t take pictures.
It’s technically still just a Photo Booth hack, so I’m not even sure if this is legal.
It still calls itself Photo Booth when running

If you know how to fix any of the above, please leave a comment or email me!

Get zPhoto HERE!
Just unzip it and put zPhoto.app in the Applications folder. As always, make a backup of Photo Booth first, just in case… But it shouldn’t matter.

Note: This is based completely off of Photo Booth, and thus has the same requirements as Photo Booth. I don’t know what those are, but this is a Universal Binary. I guess you need a computer with iSight, but I really don’t know. Sorry!

Tagged Computers

Mar 10 2007

Uncategorized

Hacking PhotoBooth

I recently figured out how to open the Photo Booth effects in Quartz Composer. Simply view the package contents of photobooth.app, then it’s Video.qtz under resources. But whenever I modified anything, it seemed to either freeze or take no effect.

Well, after a day or two of heavy experimentation with the file, I’ve managed to successfully put my own effects into Photo Booth:

For those that don’t use Photo Booth often enough to notice the new effects, I’ve added Edges, Pixelly, Trippy, and Blobs. There’s also Kaleidoscope in the second panel, which you can see in the image tray at the bottom. Blobs doesn’t actually work when taking pictures yet, it just produces an all-white image. It looks cool, though 😛

If you want to try out these effects for yourself, you can follow these steps:

Duplicate Photo Booth.app – this hack overwrites some of the original effects, so you must make a duplicate if you ever want to use Sepia, Thermal, Mirror, or X-Ray again!
Rename the duplicate something besides Photo Booth Copy.app
Download this file
Ctrl+Click the new Photo Booth.app and say ‘view package contents’
Go to resources
Move the downloaded file to the resources file, click ‘replace’ when the box pops up
Go back to the applications folder and double-click the new Photo Booth.app
Enjoy your new effects!

If you figure out how to make blobs take a picture correctly, please tell me.

Note: This hack will not change the labels for the effects panels. To do this, you have to edit Video1.strings and Video2.strings in Photo Booth duplicate.app/Resources/english.lproj using a text editor.

Tagged Computers

Mar 09 2007

1 Comment

Life in general

Birthday Followup (AKA Presents, w00t)

Well, I’m officially a year older. Whee.

I opened most of my presents this morning, and apparently there are a few more coming in the upcoming days. These are the ones I opened today:

The “Making Of” books for Sith and Clones (and Phantom is on the way)
A 1-Up Track Jacket from ThinkGeek (which was too small and is being exchanged for a larger size, darn it…)
A “No, I will not fix your computer” hoodie from ThinkGeek
A bag of cool vintage pins for my bag
Oh and um…what was that last one…oh yes OVER $230 IN CASH BEEYAW!

So yeah, pretty great birthday other than the injured left hand, which makes it annoyingly difficult to type…Oh well. I’m planning on using the money I got to buy a red iPod nano (4gb, thats way more than I need for my entire music collection), then putting some aside for OS X Leopard, then putting the rest towards my next computer (so I’m ready to upgrade in a year or two). I’m a happy teen today. 🙂

Tagged Life in general

Mar 08 2007

4 Comments

Life in general