Odds and Ends

This is all over the web, and I just wanted to share my thoughts on this. I think Flickr should have extended to video a while ago, but I very much think this is a good thing. Myself and many others are sick of the poor quality we find on Youtube, and quite frankly, there aren’t any good high definition replacements.

We did have Stage6 for a while, but that didn’t turn out good in the end. It was really a shame that they had to close down. The bandwidth costs of managing a huge HD video sharing website are huge, and we know that youtube, with its shitty quality pays millions and millions of dollars a month (due to an estimate done over a year ago) and drains hundreds of petabytes down the tubes monthly. The costs of maintaining such a service in HD is likely to double or even triple the bandwidth costs.

The only reliable, user friendly, cool HD video sharing website at this point in time is Vimeo, which has developed a strong community, although not as strong as say digg.com.

Getting to my point, for Flickr, doing HD video would be fantastic because being owned by Yahoo, they would have little problem paying those bandwidth bills and already have a strong community and extensive user base. So all in all, I’m super excited for the beta this April. Details on when the Gamma and “Loves You” milestones come out were not released.

The very same theme that Odds and Ends uses is now available for download in the downloads section. I’m psyched to finally release 1.0 of this theme, as I’ve been working on this one for a while.

darkPro features a beautiful dark header, widget sidebar, and great typography and content design all around. But don’t take my word for it. Download it using the button below, or catch it later at the downloads page(That’s also where future versions will be distributed).

I’ve been working on a set of icons over the past few nights, and although they’re not desktop icons meant for replacing folders, hard drives, etc, they do work rather well as a starting point for any mac related project.

They are usable under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. If you need to use the icons for commercial purposes or purposes specified forbidden by the license, send me an email and I may extend/modify the licensing on a per case basis.

Grab them at the goodies page.

After writing the post listing my favorite podcasts, I realized that I should probably list some helpful ones for Web Designers as well as the general technology talk.

The Best Podcasts for Web Designers

Boagworld

Paul Boag and his co-host Marcus get together weekly to record this podcast on everything design-oriented.
Rating:5/5

Freelace Radio

A great periodical podcast that comes from the folks at freelanceswitch. Not specifically web design oriented, but they talk about things that every web designer can apply to their business.
Rating:5/5

Photoshop Quicktips

Video Podcasts that really help to increase the speed and efficiency of my photoshop use. They’re really great tips that will help photoshop users of all experience levels.
Rating:5/5

Conferences

These can be really good resources, but you have to know what information to take from them. You can generally get panels and sometimes keynotes from conferences like South by Southwest as podcasts from the websites after the conferences are complete. Listening to Johnathan Snook or Dan Cederholm talk about web design is great.
Rating:5/5

I finally had remembered to pick up a Universal Dock from the Apple Store. I had been meaning to get one for quite some time now, but I always forgot when the opportunity arose.

It’s a much nicer way to recharge and sync my iPod, and because it came with iPhone and iPod touch inserts as well, I won’t have to worry about compatibility for the future. The majority of my iPod usage comes down to podcasting, so I thought I might also run through a list of the best tech/geek podcasts according to me.

The Best Podcasts for Geeks

Diggnation

A hilarious video podcast consisting of commentary on the week’s top digg stories by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Most of the time, Kevin and Alex are drunk. They usually only get through 3 or 4 stories though, with alot of hilarious stories in between.
Rating:4/5

Totally Rad Show

Another video podcast with Alex Albrecht, this time joined by Dan Trachtenburg and Jeff Canata. They do review of movies, comics, games, and talk about any news that they consider “rad.”
Rating:5/5

Buzz Out Loud

Tom Merritt and Molly Wood host this audio podcast of indeterminate length. This one comes out daily, so if you commute, you may want to listen to this one to hear the opinions of two very opinionated technology figures.
Rating:5/5

This Week in Tech

Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak and gang talk about technology news, and each member of the panel has a different personality and different opinions to add to the conversation. Makes for a great podcast if you can only listen to one audio podcast.
Rating:5/5

GeekBrief.tv

A daily video podcast where Cali Lewis talks about tech news and new gadgets. Comes out daily, but rarely is longer than five minutes.
Rating:5/5

Thats all of what will be synced to my iPod daily, along with any new music I download. Enjoy!

Its all I can do for now. I threw out the theme I was making and will start on a new one shortly. I’ll put the “old new one” up for download once I finish it so that you can see just how bad it was. It was pretty monotone… actually, I think I should just show you.

I really want to get back into blogging three to four times a week and not blog every 3 or four weeks. Unfortunately, Sophmore year in High School has stopped that effort in its tracks. It seems I get small chunks of free time, the majority of which I spend fiddling with all aspects of different things, from Warhammer Fantasy to Ruby on Rails to C#.

The only real time I have for blogging at this moment (and it feels like being stabbed to say this) are late nights. And sometimes, even those are taken up by social activity and/or studying. I have a preview of the new theme, but I won’t show it yet. It appears I’m going to be coding it myself, as I don’t want to pay anyone to do it… Therefore, I can’t give a sure guarentee when it’ll be finished. I can just hope that this will be the last “update” post I’ll have to do for now.

While not blogging in the past few weeks, I have been playing quite a few games. I own an xbox 360 since a little after launch (gamertag: swiecki) and am feeling overwhelmed with all the games out this holiday season. I played through Halo 3 on normal, and then I sat down to start it on legendary. I was almost immediately discouraged from playing the game because of how the difficulty is scaled.

On normal difficulty, the enemies do a good amount of damage and have a decent amount of health. On Heroic difficulty, the enemies do a challenging amount of damage, forcing you to take cover more and take better shots to kill them faster, and have more health. On Legendary difficulty, enemies do a ridiculous amount of damage (three plasma rifle shots will take out a shield, a brute spiker can kill you easily from medium range in about a second), and have an extremely massive amount of health.

I will say is once and only once.

This is not how difficulty levels should scale in a video game.

Ideally, difficulty should scale like it did in the game “Gears of War”. For those who didn’t play the game, the AI got smarter on harder difficulties. Sure, the locust had a little more health on insane mode, but that was to make the gameplay more balanced. Their weapons did not do more damage, but rather their aim was visibly better. The AI on insane would try to flank you, charge you while you reloaded, and lay down covering fire for their buddies. It felt as if you were playing against not dumb AIs whose bullets just hurt more, but thinking, adapting, humans. When I say this, I do not mean that some behaviors appear and some don’t. Grunts in Halo 3 will suicide grenade you more often on Heroic than on Easy or Normal. That is just a behavior that directly influences how difficult it is to survive in the game. When you turn up the intelligence level, the game becomes overall a different, more challenging, more realistic, and more fun experience. Its the difference between playing ping-pong with someone who has never played and someone who plays just as good as you.

Most of what I’ve been saying so far has been very high level concepts. I also thought about implementation, so I figured I might as well share that as well. I don’t know if the Halo engine can’t handle the proper pathing or logic for the AI to be that good, or if it is just the Architecture of the programming, but simply changing weapon damage values and health values just seems frickin lazy. I’m sure the Halo engine is capable of smarter AI, but I predict that Bungie would point to the massive levels as a public excuse. As they determined with graphics, Gears of War had much smaller environments and therefore could be saturated with beautiful graphics and calculate the AI movements and tactics without lag.

I guess I’ll stop here… but this is certainly an issue for me to look into.

This is just a thought that I repeatedly found myself thinking during Halo 3 on Legendary.

I’m back after a long break. Its hard to believe that it has been near a month since I last blogged, but I have that kind of break yearly…

Its not that I’ve been doing nothing these past weeks, just that I’ve been adapting to my new workload this year. Even finding time to work on the Odds and Ends site design(in case you don’t know, this one has been but temporary) was not easy to do. The design is in the stages of being coded and if you want you can observer my progress on my Backpack profile here. It should be applied soon, though I won’t give a particular date. Once it is out, I’ll go back to my usual posting schedule.

I’ve been doing a lot of Rails development lately(as you could probably guess by my Rails wallpaper from a few days back), and as it was almost my first experience in Rails, I built an online store. The online store has seemingly become the advanced “Hello World” for Ruby on Rails. I have continuously been adding on to it, and when I wanted to build upon my existing checkout method, I decided that I would try to add Paypal as a payment option. Here are 3 easy libraries to do this with.

Continue reading Paypal For Ruby On Rails

Here are some HTML Entities that might help if you are writing mac oriented tutorials or posts.

1. Command- ⌘ Entity Code: ⌘
2. Right Arrow- →Entity Code: →
3. Left Arrow- ←Entity Code: ←
4. Up Arrow- ↑Entity Code: ↑
5. Down Arrow- ↓Entity Code: ↓
6. Control- ⌃Entity Code: ⌃
7. Shift- ⇧ Entity Code: ⇧
8. Option- ⌥Entity Code: ⌥
9. Backspace- ⌫Entity Code: ⌫
10. Escape- ⎋Entity Code: ⎋