10th Dimension

2011-05-15T20:46:00.001+12:00

I have'nt done much lately on this Dino, I have done more than half the skin detail a few months ago, and will finish it soon. I also did a quick Head Study after Walking Dead inspired me.

I've been making a catalogue of Graffiti (Street Art) that appears around Auckland, which started as just works that I thought were good and could get a good image of, but has morphed into a collection of every piece that I can get an image of, just in case some dumbarse paints over it. Leave a note if you know which Crew or Artist did it. There are lots so I will just post a few at a time.

The next two make up the same wall. This piece is gone now.

This is a great piece of work, I wish it was in a place where you could see it more easily.

Dino Sculpt.

2010-12-24T11:54:00.006+13:00

I really wanted to get a sculpt going, and don't have much free time. My main concern is building an armature with the correct proportions, I'm sure when you have done alot of them you build up a technique like the Shiflett Bros do Here, from experience and familiarity with the proportions much like sketching anatomy with a pencil but with wire.

I wanted to do a dino. I have to finish detailing the feet and work the abdomen abit (well the more I look the more there is to do but I have to stop at some point) then the skin details stage, the clay is very soft. The armature is not robust enough so the model flex's while working on it so I have stabilised it with the pillars under the wrists until its finished . The bottom jaw sticks out too far for my liking, but the model is only an exercise (this is my third sculpt), so I will move onto the next one rather than redo the head of the armature and resculpting it.

I would have liked to put relaxed muscles on one limb and bulging under strain on the other, and define all the muscles and the form with some exaggeration here and there and some more accurate depiction of the neck and a way better head etc etc but I think I just need to do alot more sculpts to be able to achieve those goals, and perhaps work in a firmer clay like sculpy or do bigger sculpts so I can get in there to do the fiddly stuff.

This is not a species its a conglomeration from ref and sketches combined with my imagination.

One more time.

2010-10-31T11:06:00.006+13:00

I had another go at this sculpt. Its been sitting around since June last year and the head I did as a bust in August 2010. Then the other day I thought it would fit together if I ripped the head off the bust. I shortened the fingers and made a couple of other minor tweaks including adding hair to the slave.

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Holiday almost over.

2010-10-30T21:05:00.006+13:00

I started doing sculpting to learn anatomy for zbrush sculpting. I found out that you can't just sit down and sculpt, you need to decide which clay, and buy armature wire etc. So I bought some soft Klean Klay for $30, which never goes hard and found out quite quickly that it was great fun.

But I needed hard clay not soft. I made the following anatomy study in soft clay so I can't get any more details like small fingers because it just gets too maliable really quick when it warms up. So this is as far as this will go.

I have got some hard clay but that is still a bit to soft, so now I'll try super sculpey. Might try and finish the dinosaur I started in hard clay after this guy .

Old and New Study's.

2010-10-29T14:43:00.013+13:00

Heres a few older studies of painting in photoshop, and another attempt at painting today. I chose the goat's head because I sketched one in the morning and it was easier than thinking up a new subject.

Theres a few coloured pencil drawings because I've never used them before to do a complete picture, and I wanted to see what they could look like, The one that is my interpretation of a painting by Stanley Palmer is Pencil and scanned and reworked in photoshop.

I'm reminded when I look at this post that real paintings are not done in a day, and the last one confirms that, so I have a long way to go but I'm one step closer today than I was yesterday, as Hokusai said by the time I'm 110 I should be really good.

The Hobbit is in the hole.

2010-10-29T10:52:00.004+13:00

The Hobbit is in the hole. The groundwork has been done.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/4279251/Jackson-I-feel-enormous-gratitude

Great news for all those of us who wanted to get the films made here, not only for the work that some will get, but for the continuity of the look and feel of the end product with its companion LOTR. Not that the props and scenes could not be reproduced and used overseas, but that the implementation of ideas (the kinds of ideas that we come up with to solve and enhance a scene or situation) sometimes needs more than a workforce, it needs a community and as a small country with ties to the source material, we can do that.

In a hole in the ground lived..............?

2010-10-23T20:08:00.005+13:00

Went to Armageddon AK today, It's much bigger than it was last time I went, which is good. Met Greg Broadmore, which was cool, He signed my copy of Victory and even drew a pic of Lord Cockswain inside the front cover with a Signature " Thanks Greg." I did'nt take my copy of The Art of District 9, for him to sign I thought 1 was enough and I have'nt opened it yet, I'm saving it for my Birthday, as a present to myself.

I also meet a few other nice people the Sheehan Bros who have a lot of very cool stuff, they had a booth with alot of other peoples work as well as their own self Published 5 Episode Comic The Inhabitants.

Another person I met was Jeremiah, from a group of artists who had some very good Anime, and a guy from his crew had a cool SuperSculpey Hellboy that he was showing off, but was not there. Unfortunately the card that he gave me, has a link to a site that is under construction.

The 501st was there, that was cool to see, you know that your local event has reached maturity when you have a local outpost of the 501st. Here's one of the only shots I took, I thought the other guy looked alot like an old prospecting buddy of mine from Sub Turrel 9.

Happy Holidays.

2010-10-20T20:55:00.018+13:00

Almost at the holiday I've been waiting for. I want to catch up on a few things, if I can, so I have to plan carefully to take advantage of the uninterupted block of time. I want to finish my dino sculpt in clay, get upto speed on ZBrush 4 , so that my christmas break is on doing creative stuff instead of technical stuff.

I have been doing lots of sketch's of character poses which are basic mannequin type silhouettes. So I want to progress onto types of characters and translate those into photoshop concept characters (eg: clothes,armour and weapons = warrior. etc). Heres some quick sketches to lay the foundation for those areas and keep warmed up for my holiday which is in 2 days.

I'm still learning alot of the painting technique so the last image is an exercise to see if I can get from sketch to painting, so I did'nt finish it.

Thats All for Now.

2010-09-12T13:46:00.010+12:00

Did'nt get much done this last week, sketching wise. I did some anatomy study sketches which I will concentrate more time on and try and do lots of and a couple of sketches. Heres a Beast of some type and a Demon of some fiendish place, just my own take on some stuff I've absorbed somewhere. The Goatish type is of Egyptian influence.

I did'nt step back from the Beast sketch to check the overall form and consequently it ended up a bit skewed in the chest and some other areas. I also sketched in the outlines too heavily in black ballpoint and they show through.

The Demon doing a Batman type leap, is part bat and rat, with little hair like things coming off the arms like crayfish (lobster) have, and rudimentary claws for hands.

Dinosaurs but Warhammer.

2010-09-02T20:31:00.006+12:00

I did a few more sketches of Dino's I'm watching David Krentz's tutorial again and drawing as I follow along with the steps in the Tutorial.

I saw a Trailer for Warhammer Ultramarines on the weekend and it reminded me of how cool the drawings are for the Beasts of Chaos, I have'nt had much to do with Warhammer except my interest in the art, which was started when I saw Game Cinematics for Mark of Chaos, Battle March, Age of Reckoning and started finding out more about the Warhammer Universe.

I was always told that art was about originality, so I have'nt spent much time copying other art or subjects from life, except on the odd occasion that I copied a piece of art, once or twice. Now that I realise that is the only way to add to and enhance your minds store of reference and improve, I am making a concerted effort to fill up that store of reference now.

I watched a Bobby Chiu Interview with I think it was Jason Seiler (Check out these great interviews) and Jason spoke of how he got a copy of an art book by one of his influences and went through the whole book drawing each picture until he got them right, he pointed out, not to do this to draw like another artist but to add to your repetoire.

I don't have time to render any sketches into finished work in Photoshop at the moment although I would just love to be able to sit down and spend a couple of 12 hr days and work on some, until the end of next month when I will be able to do that, so I'll concentrate on thumbs,anatomy and turning poses in space until then.

So at the moment I'm working on getting these thumbs to a stage where I can draw them from memory and looking as much like the Warhammer stuff as I can with a bit of personal flavour and then I can do some action poses with them.

I'm working on a Klean Clay Dino Sculpture which I will post some pics of soon. It looks a bit like a naked chicken at the moment.

2010-08-29T12:59:00.020+12:00

Whew 5 years, I must start updating more often. I bought some great books and have spent the last few years (when Im not working) drawing, anatomy and action and quick poses. I purchased 3dsmax and ZBrush, but found that I needed to learn how to draw from scratch to put them to proper use.

I started with Stan Lee's and John Buscema's - How to Draw the Marvel Way. I soon realised that I thought I could draw, because I could sit down and put something on paper, but never could work out why sometimes it was good and sometimes bad. This took the fun out of it and so I didnt do it very often.

I found out after reading How to Draw the Marvel Way, that I knew nothing except perspective and shading, and I learnt them when I was 10, and that was the end of my art training because I had'nt learnt anything from that point on, despite attending classes and searching for the information I knew was out there somewhere.

How to Draw the Marvel Way, has taught me to break it down into primatives, circles sqaures and triangles and cones, and then to capture the action line and gesture. I've spent the last 2 years sketching thumbnails and action poses, silhouettes. I wish I'd had this book 20 years ago.

I also purchased Artistic Anatomy by Dr Paul Richter, and a Gnomonworkshop tutorials by Ryan Kingslien Skull and Muscles (no longer available)but check out his youtube channel, and Zack Petrov - Anatomy Part One. These have been useful references and I expect they always will be referred to.

I bought a sculpting tutorial from Gnomonworkshop by John Brown, and used that to learn how to build an armature and sculpt form and applied the knowledge gained from the anatomy tutorials.

I have had several attempts into ZBrush and have kept upto date with the releases and ZClassroom tutorials and any others I can find especially on youtube, but have concentrated on drawing, I have a very limited amount of free time working 50 hrs a week, so I have to concentrate my efforts. I draw at any opportunity even while sitting at the traffic lights waiting for them to change, that makes you draw quickly believe me.

I made a conscious decision to draw as much as possible while watching a documentary (Scene by Scene might have been Jonathan Demme)one night about writing by DeLuca (sorry cant remember his first name, I think he's a director or producer), whoever he was interviewing said "There's no such thing as writers block, you just have to give yourself permission to do crap, if you do enough crap, eventually something good will grow in it."

So I bought 2 reems (500 sheets per reem) of photocopy paper and started drawing I just got my 3rd recently.

Just when I thought I was making progress I found Xia Taptara's idrawgirls.com and his tutorials on youtube, they looked deceptively easy but it was all an illusion. He was an economist with the line and this lead me to some new insights regarding the line.

I spent a while doing photoshop sketches until I could sketch as well as with a ballpoint pen, but realised I still have a long way to go before I can do work like some of my favourite artists like Feng Zhu, David Hong and Dermot Power and Greg Broadmore.

So back to more sketches and I concentrated on putting thumbnails into scenes and trying to increase the size of the drawing, which I find is very difficult.

I recently started putting warriors into larger thumbs fighting dinosaurs and wanting to get some realism into the sketch, so went in search of info so I might be able to flesh it out into a clay sculpt. With the recent release of ZBrush 4, I saw while visiting ZBrushcentral.com, Cesar Decol Jr's - Sculpting Wrinkles in ZBrush at Gnomonworkshop, so I bought that and while Googling for clay sculpting dinosaurs I found David Krentz's Anatomy and Sketching Dinosaurs.

Thats where Im at now so I can start keeping this blog upto date, well more often than every 5 years surely. Heres a few of the sketches in the order they were done since June 2010.

Back to Front

2005-11-13T20:31:00.000+13:00

I feel abit like Scott, when he slipped out saying "I may be gone some time". Except I came back, not sure why yet. I have'nt done a productive piece of 3D for nearly 12 mths, but I have'nt been sitting on my hands.

I've spent the last 4 mths looking at Maya and gave up with Maya PLE because I could'nt see any detail in the work I was attempting while learning to use it, because of the water mark.

I bought a copy of 3D Studio Max, a while back and was looking at a switch to Maya, because I had reached a point where I wanted to do facial animation like Krishnamurti Costa, and did'nt see anyone using Max with similar results.

However I have retraced my steps and I am now attempting to do what I want with what I've got.

So I have started work on a project that I attempted last year, and could not continue until now, and I am putting it in my blog so that I am reactivating both at the same time.

This is a Female model that I want to rig and animate, I have blocked it out and have now started adding detail, so I can skin and rig it.(first attempt at inserting a pic into my blog post).

Vodcast, ViPodding or Vlogging, video Podcasting.

2004-12-19T16:34:00.000+13:00

Will Apple keep up or will they get left behind on this one... lets wait and see.

There is another interesting article (As there always is.) on Wired.com , this time about video Podcasting. Following the links in the article leads to some useful places and info about Vlogging. I've only had a brief look through the me-tv Wiki, but there is vast amounts of info there and obviously it will only get bigger and better, being a Wiki.

Now if we can turn a TV off with TV-B-Gone, and replace it with a vlog from our wireless hand held...that would be very MaxHeadroom.

I think its time to get something together to Vlog, this development is definitely getting closer to the idea I had for 3dpodcast.com. Although I don't envisage being able to use it to download manually as I am now, except by cutting and pasting html, I can put stuff up for others to subscribe to.

me-tv video blogging Wiki.

me-tv video blogging aggregator project.

vogbrowser video blogging aggregator project.

Ant Not TV desktop video viewer project.

videoblogging info

To some of the people who have contacted me and are still waiting on replies, I don't have a lot of time right now (like everyone else, I suppose.) but will get back to you as soon as time permits and maybe even get some time to podcast and try a little vlogging.

Electric Clothing - Place Your Message Here.

2004-11-16T14:06:00.000+13:00

I was reading Josh Rubin's CoolHunting Blog yesterday, and he has a link to a video of a NYX sweatshirt that can have a message scrolling across it. The idea is that you can enter text into a Palm running an application called NYX software and have the text appear as a message in a panel on the front and back of an item of clothing. This suggests all kinds of possibilities, apart from the commercial advertising you might be able to put more detail and have pictures.

GizMag says about the NYX Clothing, that you can sync the message to a sound file and have the message pulse to a beat. GizMag also points out that NYX company CEO John Bell, says that a prototype can be purchased for US$900 and that a consumer version will be available early 2005 for US$250.

This technology is similar to an idea that appeared in July at E3 and had people talking about it called T-Shirt TV. Which places a small TV screen on the chest of the wearer, and has been used to good effect recently to advertise the movie I-Robot.

T-Shirt TV is an advertising tool you can't go out and buy one for impressing your friends or to provide information or even to show people your work. Where NYX is a communication device, when you purchase the clothing and the software, you can use it for what you want. Sure its not available until 2005, but there will be more of this kind of technology and eventually better choices.

What will people use it for? I imagine people will start of by putting cheeky things on them and eventually get sick of that and start using it to communicate. Imagine when you are standing in a line and the person in charge who is directing people waits until you reach the front asks you a question and then directs you to where you want to go. The question and answer could be displayed on the Shirt.

I'm sure people will come up with some very ingenious ways of using this technology.

Back to the Blog

2004-11-15T22:24:00.000+13:00

I just had to slip out to another dimension for a moment. I've been listening to the podcasts being posted on audio.weblogs.com that cover sessions held at the recent BloggerCon III. Today I stumbled across a link at the Internet Archive, to a video of Adam Curry's Podcasting session and noticed in the heading it was Part 3 of 4, and on returning to the site found the other parts there, and that 16 people had dnld'd the 3rd part and 6 the other parts. I hope if any one searches with Technorati they will find this post and all the links.

I heard in Robert Scoble's session " Blogging Overload " while discussing how to aggragate blogs into more user friendly lists by users defined attributes, mention of a site called TenbyTen and went to have a look...wow....what a cool idea.

There have been a few sessions posted and thankyou to all the people that put so much effort into bringing this to the desktop's of those of us who didn't/couldn't attend, I'm looking foward to listening to more of them.

It looks as if the Beeb are experimenting with Podcasting, a Melvyn Bragg Radio4 show RSS feed has been posted on their Radio website, in mp3 format, for download. This appears to be to see if its a popular and postive way of distribution. I'm sure it will be and I'm going to be listening to the next one.

Here is a direct link for those without an iPod and using a PC to hear their Podcasts.

Are you receiving me?

2004-11-02T10:29:00.000+13:00

I have recorded my first podcast, and submitted the link to ipodder.org for consideration, and I'm hoping that I will see it posted on the audio.weblog.com latest 100 list soon. I expect that the US election will be taking up a bit of peoples time over the next day or two so we will see what happens.

Its a bit daunted recording something on your PC and putting it out there for the whole world to listen to or laugh at. Unless of course it is a comedy Podcast.

I'm still working on links here and there to make everything work in unison, on the different hosting solutions that I have. Its coming together slowly and seems to be working. I've just added an XML Feed link to this page so people that have iPodder.NET or iPodder running on their machine can subscribe to my Podcast.

As for the Podcast, I've called it the EscapePod, and I think the name speaks for itself. I listened to a few versions of my 1st Podcast and decided to release the one that I did, even though there are still a few things I wasn't pleased with. There were a few parts where I rambled on a bit and a level issue with the first song but other than that I could live with the other minor blips in it. It's supposed to be more spontaneous anyway I think that's the whole idea, to be more real and less zeal.

The format is a loose framework at the moment, so that I could keep track of what ideas and items I had covered, so I'll work on that over time. I would like to have some CG content, but have been concentrating so much on the technical issues involved in the delivery of this Podcast that I haven't been keeping up to date with the developments in the CG and 3D Art community lately. But that will change soon enough, so if you are interested in 3D or Cg then stay tuned for more.

So my first post regarding CG is that Lord of the Rings - The Battle for Middle Earth, RTS is due for release this week. Being made by EA LA this game will have a full 3D environment and characters, it has a lot of features that have been designed to make the playing of RTS games more challenging and enjoyable and it also has some great graphics. I'm a bit disappointed in some of the animation timing and the polygon levels are pretty low but I think that these factors are probably due to budget constraint and CPU usage rather than vision and skill. I've enjoyed following the development of the game and have been watching the "Inside the Battle - Video Interviews."

My next task that I need to complete is the reduction of my Demo Reel from 89mb to 30mb so that I can fit it on the server space that I have so I can link to it.

No time to change Lightblulbs.

2004-11-01T14:38:00.000+13:00

I'm in the process of producing my first Podcast,......maybe post it tonight.
I recently purchased a website (3dpodcast.com) and I am working on all that as well.

Check out Dave Winers latest Podcast " Music of the Blogospheres.

BitTorrent & the Beeb - Edge of the Network

2004-10-26T17:54:00.000+13:00

I read a couple of articles pointed out by Derrick Oien from the $250 Million Radio Show, about Disruptive Technology and MegaMedia and the way that these technologies are about to change everything. The links that Derrick provided follow a logical progression, but the two that meant the most to me were, an Article in the latest Online version of Wired, and an article by Mark Pesce.

The first article in Wired, goes into the changes that are being made in the way we experience Media and how its marketed, and how that is being achieved. eg: When you go to Amazon and search for a title, you get suggestions made to you of similar titles by subject or titles that others who bought this title also bought. This has changed the dynamics of product sales for items like books so dramatically that it is estimated that the top 10,000 titles sell as many,but often less than the next 10,000 tiltles. This means that there could be a market for all kinds of things like books and film and music that is twice as big aspreviously thought, maybe even bigger.

The second article (Warning: Some of the Languge may cause offence.) goes onto explain in another way how media distribution has effected us and what we can do about it. It also gives an example of what the BBC is doing to make distribution of its content more effective using web technologies that take advantage of technologies like Peer to Peer networking and BitTorrent. Making it possible to brake the mold of the old broadcasting format of transmitting one program at a time at a predetermined time.

Here's an excerpt from Mark Pesce article discribing a trial being run by the BBC:

BitTorrent & the Beeb.

The BBC doesn't have the bandwidth to netcast its programming to all 66 million of its viewers. Fortunately it doesn't need that kind of capability, because the BBC has cleverly designed the Flexible TV application to act as a node in a Peer-to-Peer network. Anyone using Flexible TV has access to the programs which have been downloaded by any other Flexible TV client, and can get those programs directly from them. All BBC need do is provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and they handle the work themselves. More than this, because of the P2P technology used by the BBC (more on this in a moment) a Flexible TV user can get a little bit of the program from any number of other peers; rather than going through the process of downloading an entire program from one other peer, the Flexible TV client can ask a hundred other clients for small sections of the program, and download these hundred sections simultaneously. Not only does this decrease the amount of traffic that any clients has to handle, it also means that it produces a virtuous cycle: the more popular a program is, the more copies of it will exist in the network of peers, and therefore the more easily a peer can download it.

In other words, the BBC has cracked the big problem which has prevented netcasting from taking off. In this system of "peercasting" the network is actually more efficient than a broadcast network, because more than one program can be provided simultaneously, and failure in any one point in the network doesn't bring the network down. In other words, this network can't be hacked, can't suffer from a power outage (unless it spans the whole network, which is very unlikely) and achieves unheard-of efficiencies in the distribution of audiovisual programming.

How is this bit of technological magic achieved? Through the use of a new technology known as BitTorrent - something some of you may have already used. BitTorrent is a P2P filesharing system specifically designed to prohibit one of the biggest social ills which plague P2P networks - a phenomenon known as "leeching". A leech grabs files from a P2P network without providing anything in return. With BitTorrent your download speed - how fast you receive your data - is determined by how much data you're sharing. This means that a torrent starts slowly - because you haven't much to share - and then increases nearly exponentially; as you have more of the file, you have more to share, so your bandwidth increases, until the file is fully downloaded.

Edge of the Network.

I think that Podcasting with BitTorrent is the way to go then you can subscribe to a peer to peer feed, and take full advantage of distibuted computing. Dave Slusher already has a BitTorrent feed for his Podcast, and I had a look at that the other day and was going round in circles. I will have to have a closer look at that again.

Desktop vs Handheld

2004-10-25T16:53:00.000+13:00

I'm still new to this Podcasting phenomenon, and as I've pointed out already, I don't have a handheld device. So I'm still trying to find a setup that enables me to use this technology, as a PC user. I should also point out that I am one of those unfortunate people who upgraded just before PC's reached the 1 Gb mark, and I got WinME with my machine. Otherwise I would be installing iTunes, and trying that out and using iPodder.

I have now removed Jaeger, which kept updating everything I've subscribed to everyday, instead of only what I had'nt already downloaded. I've installed Active Web Reader as my news aggregator, and I've already discovered that I have 4 compulsory folders of feeds, oh well I suppose thats why it's free.

As far as Podcasts go I'll continue with iPodder.NET and I'll manually edit the config file to incl/excl the feeds that I want updated. There is a checkbox in the prog that doesn't seem to work, which I'm assuming is to toggle the feed.
Maybe it's just good luck that this prog works the way I want, it could be it is designed only to sync an iPod with playerlists as well.

I am looking into a hosting package with a company in NZ, because if I need support I can call their free 0800 number. They offer 100mb space and 4Gb traffic/mth, for $12.49 a mth (US$10.45). Then I can at last podcast some content, instead of just listening to everyone else's great stuff. My ISP recently offered to reduce my "All you can eat." dialup package by $8 a mth, which would offset some of my hosting costs.

Just a note about the fact that I'm concentrating my efforts on a desktop deployment of this idea. I think that there might be two markets for this application. The mobile and the desktop/lounge, I mean its going to get more like Tivo and therefore become a Home Media app as well. And the mobile market might tend be listening to Podcasts that cover all subjects, while a less mobile market might tend to listen to more specialised subjects.

To Podcast or Podcatch, that is the question.

2004-10-23T14:41:00.000+13:00

Well both is the answer, of course, but how.

I listened to the first 3 Trade Secrets Podcasts this morning, after installing Jaeger and leaving it running all night with my 56k connection. I don't have a handheld to sync it to, and I'm not sure there is one that I would pay for anyway. Dave Winer and Adam Curry were discussing a wish list for a device for Podcasting (I assume it's for creating and listening.) and Podcatching.

That device would be:

- 60Gb Hard drive
- Wireless
- Be able to rec multiple simultaneous sources
- Dock to a computer / becomes router of audio (audio for one app and rec another.)

This is something that is similar to a handheld that I have envisaged for several years now.
After hearing about 802.11 and sniffing and mobile wireless base stations, and reading about hotspots and about some amazing apps people have created (Like Skype and Audacity and iPodder and Jaeger). I have been looking at all this and thought a handheld that runs windows Pocket PC (and the other handheld formats and OS's I've heard.) can do all that and if it has a hard drive big enough can run anything. Being a PC user running Win I've looked at solutions I can use.

So this leads to the question of how.

Well at the moment an iPod has a 40Gb hard drive, but its USB not Wireless. I've heard that soon a video capable iPod is to be released, (When - Days).

An Ipaq has wireless capabilty but uses Flash memory (upto 1Gb I'm told).

So the storage and Transfer of data seem to be on different OS's and different devices. How long before someone pulls the guts out of these devices wraps 1000 mile tap around it and calls it a PodPaq (or OneHand) and runs everything from both in one hand.

Where I live a 40Gb iPod is NZ$799 (thats about US$556.) a 2nd hand one is upto NZ$530.
an IPaq is around the same price and of course there are alot more 2nd hand at around NZ$550. So at the moment just playing with the idea of combining these two devices on the cheap would appear to be a $1000+ exercise, then you have to do all the work of getting it to work as one device.

Well from where I am standing this looks like something that will happen either in a market where these devices are cheaper 2nd hand, or in the future when they are superceded by newer technology and therefore become cheaper. At the moment a computer Desktop or Laptop, for NZ$250 (US$175), can do all the things required to Podcast.

So the solution to this question is a smaller computer, is it really that simple. Isn't that what a handheld is?

Fill her up with diesel. - Nanotech Cellphones.

2004-10-22T11:33:00.000+13:00

Cell phones and other devices like laptops and handhelds may be powered by small jet engines in the future that run on diesel. A miniscule stack of coils and a magnet on a silicon wafer, can produce enough energy to power a cell phone, as the magnet spins it generates power.

Nanotech is the science, outlined by Eric Drexler in his book "Engines of Creation", which is, creating engines like this and other microscopic devices. An example would be a tiny robot that could be inserted into a human to do exploration of the human body and send data and video back to a controller.

Other studies in progress are manipulating atoms to create similar engines, which would be even smaller. Forget the top of a pin you could fit 100 on the top of a pin and still have room. It has been proposed that by creating small machines, that create smaller machines atom by atom, these microscopic devices could be manufactured successfully.

Of course because they are so small once it could be done you could make billions of them cheaply (scary?). What if they were like transformers and you could program them to transform into all sorts of shapes and machines. Simon says change into a tank, Simon says change into a shipping container, jump.......Splat!

They could land on a planet in a canister and assemble themselves into thousands of bots that do recon of an area. Then when they report back they can reconstitute themselves into a factory that creates building materials from local raw materials for the construction of a base station, where astronauts can stay on missions from an orbital space station.

Sound farfetched, when I was a kid if I had of told my Great Grandfather that I would have a device in my pocket that I play games on and listen to music on, and receive mail with, and talk to people with, he would have told me to stop exaggerating and to eat my vegetables or I wouldn't get any desert. The Net already existed then.

Mr Incredible loves Indy music.

2004-10-21T21:57:00.001+13:00

Only two weeks to go till the new Pixar movie "The Incredibles." I'm really looking foward to this, something fresh after all the hype and rehashing of stories that most movies are these days. Plus Pixar has also designed some nice characters and modelled them in 3D, which sounds easier than it is.

For those running XP there is a answer phone type plugin for Skype, the VoiP program that lets you talk to your friends anywhere for free, well for the cost of an Internet account and a phone line. The plugin is called Telecorder, and it is in beta at the moment but definately worth a look, you can also use it to record conversations which of course is great for podcasting an interview.

Adam Curry mentioned Good Music (Indy) today and I found a great place for Good Music, well Mark Vande Wettering mentioned it in his Podcast. The Internet Archive is a great place with heaps to choose from. Check it out if your looking for music for your podcast, and The Indy Feed is another great place, to find music that is not licensed and therefore can be used by everyone.

I also have had trouble installing iPodder, I keep getting a mscvrt.dl error when I try to start it. I think if I had iTunes installed this may not happen or if I used Win Media Player playlists, but I don't wish to go to that extreme, all I want is Podcasts downloaded to a folder so I can WinAmp them, and would like to be able to manage my feeds, so I can download the ones that I want for today without editing the XML.config which is what I'm having to do with iPodder.NET. So today I downloaded Jaeger to try out. I'm sure iPodder will get better as it's only version 1.0, but I thought I'd try this in the meantime.

Sunday - Funday working out a few glitches with posting and text.

2004-10-17T13:11:00.000+13:00

I'm not sure why I couldn't see both of my posts on my Title Page , last night but they appear there now, so maybe it was just a slow update thing.

I have two different text fonts and I'm not sure why, when I look at the html for the 2nd post, there doesn't appear to be any html to format the text, so perhaps I've posted the content a different way without realizing.

When I look at the html in this post it appears there are no text formatting html tabs here either, so I'm still confused. Hopefully I can delete this post when I've sorted it out.

Blog to the Blog

2004-10-17T10:06:00.000+13:00

First Post: Well I've been looking and listening to Blogs and Podcasts all week, and have taken the plunge and am commiting myself to my own Blog.

I listened to Adam Curry's Podcast of Thurs last night, and you have to admire the way he gets a podcast out everyday even on 56k and by wardriving. I really liked the Bushbite he included from Dave Winer's blog.

I'm going to keep this brief so I can view any mistakes I've made and contribute more later. I'll just test out putting a link to my 3D Projects page and see if I can get it to appear as a kind of Signature at the bottom of my posts.

Podcasting

2004-10-16T23:25:00.000+13:00

Podcasting is definately a great idea, I've been trying to work out how I can use this technology with a PC. You obviously need to create audio (or video) content which I can do based on a few tests that I've done.

I followed some guide lines provided in a video tutorial by Mark Vande Wettering , he used an open source prog called Audacity, which can be found at Sourceforge.

Mark also makes note in the video on a few important points regarding the setup of your recording and playback levels, so check it out.

So once this is done and you have an mp3 you then need to distribute it, as Adam Curry has pointed out recently in his Daily Source Code that can become very bandwidth intensive if your Podcast is anywhere near as popular as his, here's hoping that one day it might be. He mentioned that his usage was somewhere around 35mb/sec or 30Gbs a month ..Wow.

When I first read about this Podcasting phenomena on Wired.com, I thought Oh Yeah! I'd like to know how to do that, and everywhere I went to find info the people that were kindly sharing their knowledge unfortunately knew a lot more than me. So I had to pull the info apart and glue it back together into something that worked for me, a PC user.

Here's a breakdown in languge I hope can be understood by anyone thats interested enough to have found their way to my Blog.

The first thing thats required is an XML file with an enclosure that points at the content file.
Ive put a link on my webpage pointing to a file called video.rss.xml which contains the link to the file in an enclosure. If you have been to my 3D Projects file you've probably already seen the file I used to test this.
Right clicking and saving the link to the video.rss.xml file and opening it in notepad or Word or IE 6.0 will enable you to view the code. The red lines can be clicked on to expand the tree of code, if you open it in IE.
This page has a couple of tools that help to generate the code, the RSS Channel Editor is the best to start with, just click on "Try it" and enter the bare minimum of details, starting down the page at Channel Title. If you've already right clicked on the video.rss.xml and looked at it you will be able to compare them when your finished this stage.

Channel Title = Name of the Website
Channel Link = the folder on the webserver where the xml file is located. eg:http://yoursite.com

Then go straight to Item1

Item1

Title = Discription of the content file eg:Podcast
Link = the link to the file eg: http://yoursite.com/podcast.mp3

Click the build RSS button next to that item.
that will generate the code you need and take you to an HTML page which displays it in IE for you.
Cut and paste that into a text file and save the text file as podcast.rss.xml

Now just clean it up a bit (I'm no coder so correct me if this is not stable code.)
but you will notice it's not exactly the ame as mine yet.

Remove the blank space at the begining of the first line.
Delete the 2nd line
Change the rss version on the 3rd line to 2.0 and remove the blank space at the begining of that line as well.

You should be able to save this file now as podcast.rss.xml and open it in Internet Explorer by right clicking on it, and choosing " Open With -> Internet Explorer ", you will see the code laid out like it was when it was generated in the RSS Channel Editor

Put this file in the main folder of your website or the folder you chose eg: http://yoursite.com

Now all you have to do is put a link on your site, in this case it would be "Podcast" http://yoursite.com/podcast.rss.xml
and when you paste this link into iPodder.NET it will go to your site find podcast.rss.xml get the link http://yoursite.com/podcast.mp3 from it to the file podcast.mp3 and start downloading the file.

The file will be checked for by iPodder at the interval that has been set in iPodder and if the file on the server has newer date than the last one of the same name podcast.mp3 it will be downloaded.

This brings me back to the means of distribution, obviously if you have more than 30 Gbs a month you can start straight away, and you will not have a problem. But Dave Slusher and a few others have been experimenting with Bit Torrent which is a more decentralised form of distribution. So basically you can post a Bit Torrent link somewhere and the first person that downloads the file from you, even if it is stored on your home PC starts sharing the load as others start to ask for the file. This sounds like a great way to me, it a way of empowering people. I'm not sure how this can be done without iPodder at the moment, and as I said earlier I'm using iPoddder.NET, because I can't get iPoddder to work (Start).

So what I have outlines above is probably written somewhere else but not in this way I hope. It should enable someone with a MAC or PC to create a Podcast (read content - Audio, Video, Art, Text.) and distribute it to people that have subscribed to an RSS feed link on the persons Blog or Website because they want it.

There are already a few different Podcast Aggregators that can be used for this I have used iPodder.NET because I don't have an iPod and it still works for me. All I had to do to get it to work was download an update to the .NET Framework 1.1 from Microsofts updates page.

Links to Podcast related sites that I have found helpful.

The Daily Source Code - Adam Curry
Trade Secrets - Dave Winer
Evil Genius Chronicles - Dave Slusher
iPodder.org - Adam Curry & Podcasting Community Outliner portal
Podcasters.org
iPodder.Net - Windows based Podcatcher (Aggregator)
Brainwagon.org - mark Vande Wettering
Engadget Guys - All the Technology When and before it happens
ipodderx - a Mac prog Podcatcher
Technorati - Conversation search tool and more
Podcasting.net - Podcasting list

CGTalk - Everything CG and 3D - Animation, Modelling, Rigging, Texturing etc
EekStudios - Eeks website for Rigging
Krishnamurti Costa aka Antropus - Cool cg head rig and short film "The Plumber"