ShrimpWorks

Seems like it’s only been 4 years since the last time I did this. Really feels a lot longer.

Anyway, I was becoming rather annoyed with trying to keep Ruby Gems and things updated and working, with plugins breaking and stuff with Jekyll, and I recently built a few other websites using Hugo, which made me quite keen on switching.

Hopefully everything’s carried over properly with all the right URLs and things. I’ve also tried to improve some things, and will be expanding the Projects section which I feel doesn’t represent everything that goes on.

As for the style: I just wanted to do something a little more fun and retro looking.

My first website (“Shrimp’s Maps”, the precursor to “ShrimpWorks” and the first website I ever made, which I used for sharing Unreal Tournament levels in early 2000), featured a silly “tech” look with blue gridlines and a cool angular header graphic thing, and all the text was monospace Courier New. Unfortunately it’s completely lost in time.

Once I upgraded to Wordpress in ~2005 after using a system called Geeklog for a while after Shrimp’s Maps, I adopted the content-with-sidebar style, which I switched away from at some point in favor of menus, so for more throwback fun, I’ve replicated that old layout style as well.

It’s perhaps a little busy, but everything’s going to “clean” and stripped down these days, a bit of busy-ness is not the end of the world :).

Here’s how we looked in 2005! Thanks archive.org!

Here’s how we looked in 2014!

And here’s what we’ve just come from.

I recently spent some time in Australia, specifically Sydney and Melbourne, and took a bunch of photos from a few parks and interesting places in Sydney (unfortunately I was pretty ill and didn’t get out very far in Melbourne).

I really enjoyed the number of parks and amount of greenery around the city centres.

All the Sydney images are up here.

Today’s solar eclipse, as viewed from Johannesburg, South Africa, through the lens of a Canon SX50 at 50x optical zoom, through some eclipse viewing eyeware from the 90s.

I’ve been meaning to do some posts on setting up a Java build process using Apache’s Ant and Ivy, but never really get that far.

I’m a fan of allowing build dependencies (beyond the actual Ant binary itself) download automagically as part of the build, rather than requiring the developer to download and install a bunch of different tools and then orchestrating them via Ant. Essentially you should be able to install Ant, grab the code of something you want to build, and execute it.

To this end I have spend many hours trying to get the FindBugs static analysis tool and it’s requirements downloaded as Ivy dependencies as is possible with most tools, but gave up due to some rather weird and seemingly hard-coded dependency paths and file names within the FindBugs project.

Therefore I gave up and just have it downloading using an Ant “get” task, which feels a bit brute-force, but sometimes you need to compromise. Here’s my solution, presented as an all-in-one Ant target:

Continue Reading ...

Here’s a couscous salad recipe I used recently, made by stealing ideas from about 3 other recipes and tweaking a bit of customising. Would eat again :-)

Ingredients:

• 1 cup couscous
• 1 cup water
• 200g cherry tomatoes
• 1/2 cup spring onion
• 1/4 red bell pepper
• 1/4 yellow bell pepper
• 1/4 green bell pepper
• 1/2 cup crumbed feta
• Dressing:
  • 75ml canola or olive oil
  • 25ml lemon juice
  • freshly ground salt and pepper

Directions:

1. Place couscous in a sealable bowl, boil the water, then add boiling water to couscous. Cover and allow to sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Once ready, fluff with a fork.
2. Cut tomatoes in half, finely chop peppers and spring onions, and mix into couscous.
3. Dressing: Thoroughly mix together oil and lemon juice, and mix in salt and pepper as required.
4. Before serving, mix in feta and dressing.

This is a republishing, with some minor tweaks and alternatives provided, of the original recipe by Andrew Muller. I could not find some of the ingredients in local shops, so had to slightly tweak things.

I’d also recommend against using paper muffin cups, as the first two tray-fulls of these were so stuck to them half the muffin content ends up going to waste.

The ingredient volumes below make about 20-30 muffins depending on how big you make them.

The Recipe

• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
• 1 banana, mashed
• 1/2 cup agave (alternative: ~100ml honey mixed with ~50ml hot water to achieve similar consistency)
• 5 cups rolled oats
• 1/4 cup flaxseed meal (alternative: 1/2 cup wholewheat flour)
• 1 tbsp. ground cinnamon
• 3 tsp. baking powder
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 cups milk (almond milk for dairy free)
• Optional toppings: raisins, walnuts, almonds, chocolate chips.

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees celcius. Mix eggs, vanilla, apple sauce, banana & agave.
2. In a separate bowl, mix oats, flax, cinnamon, baking powder and salt. Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Finally, pour in milk and mix.
3. Spray a muffin pan with baking oil or use muffin liners. Pour batter evenly into each liner. If using toppings add them onto tops of muffins now.
4. Bake 35-40 min, test with toothpick if it comes out clean the muffins are done. Cool and enjoy, or freeze in freezer bags if you plan on storing them more than a few days.

Yes indeed, I am posting a recipe now.

This recipe is a combination of a few, and some customisation.

Cheese Sauce - Ingredients:

• 2 Tbsp margarine
• 2.5 Tbsp flour
• 1 cup cream
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup grated mature cheddar cheese
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper (optional)

Cheese Sauce - Method:

1. Melt the margarine in a saucepan until it starts to bubble gently
2. Slowly mix in the flour, ensuring it’s thoroughly smooth
3. Very slowly, bit-by-bit, mix in the cream and milk, keeping the mixture as smooth as possible
4. Once all the milk is in, you should now have a smooth creamy white sauce. Mix the the cheese and stir until melted
5. At this point, you may optionally stir in the cayenne pepper, or other spices of your preference

The same cheese sauce can be used for making macaroni and cheese :).

Potato Bake - Ingredients:

• 5-6 medium-sized potatoes
• 0.5 cup onion, sliced
• 0.5 cup grated cheese
• Freshly ground salt and pepper

Potato Bake - Method:

1. Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees Celsius
2. Wash and slice potatoes (peeling optional - I did not peel them) into 0.5-1cm thick slices, and cover the bottom of a casserole dish with one layer
3. Place a third of the onion slices on top of the potato slices and add salt and pepper
4. Pour out a third of the cheese sauce over the onions and potato
5. Repeat layering an additional 2 times, and top with grated cheese over the final layer of cheese sauce
6. Place in the oven and bake for 1 hour

DONE. Now stuff your face!

This past week, I was supposed to be visiting Mpumalanga’s Parorama Route, taking in the views around the province, and capturing all manner of awe-inspiring photos of Pinacle Rock, God’s Window, and whatever else was visible. Unfortunately, not a lot of anything was visible at all, since my visit perfectly coincided with some extremely heavy fog and rain covering the entire area.

Fortunately, I was surprised to find that I didn’t much mind missing the views, as I was entertained by something much more interesting: the roads.

The same hills and mountains which provide the (supposedly!) stunning views, also need to provide a way to get up there to experience them. Fortunately, the local government seems to have seen fit to upgrade and maintain pretty much every road in the area - no doubt as a result of the 2010 Soccer World Cup, in an attempt to attract and impress visitors to the area. This has left the rest of us with some brilliant roads to enjoy, in a relatively undertrafficed area.

To start with, coming from Gauteng along the N4, I got off the highway and onto the R36, towards Lydenburg (Mashishing). This was the worst road on the trip, covered in potholes and dilapidated patchwork. There were some amazing views, though, complimented by the odd troop of baboons along the side of the road (no, I did NOT get out to take photos).

After Lydenburg comes the R37 and Long Tom Pass. I only really expected the first section - through the Makobulaan Nature Reserve - to be interesting, and it certainly was, especially in dense fog. The steep downhill sections of sharp corners flowing corners were certainly highlights, but I was surprised to find the entire R37 to Nelspruit an extremely enjoyable drive, even with a fair amount of traffic.

The following day, I was off to try my luck at taking a peek at Pinnacle Rock and God’s Window. Back along the R37, bliss. Then off onto the R532 towards Sabie. Another amazing driving road. At Sabie, with time to kill, I decided to try out the (in)famous “Sabie 22” - the first 22-odd kilometres of the R536 between Sabie and Hazyview, primarily frequented by motorcyclists.

I’m really not sure why this route is not more popular or well known amongst the automotive community (at least, I’ve never heard of anyone mentioning it). It really is quite amazing, and I can absolutely picture overpowered R32 Skyline GTRs, S14 and S15 Silvias, FD RX7s, and even DK’s venerable AE86 having touge-style drift battles along this road. It would be a sight to behold. In fact, it would be awesome of somehow an event like the Knysna Hill Climb could be organised here, it would be a massive hit.

While completely out of place compared to all other traffic in my JDM-inspired overly-loud rice-rocket, it felt right at home on these roads.

After heading back to Sabie, we continue along the R532 towards Graskop. This section of road with it’s pine plantations in every direction as far as the eye can see really reminds me of the Stutterheim area in the Eastern Cape, an area we traveled often when I was younger. Here, the road gets really extreme. Sharp 90 degree bends with sheer drops off the side wind you up through the mountains, with the many crosses lining the roadside serving as better warning signs than any number of red and white chevrons.

Eventually, you arrive in Graskop, pass through, realise you can’t see more than 5 metres in front of the car and won’t be seeing any panoramas, visit the famous Harrie’s “The Original” Pancakes, and repeat the glorious journey in reverse, finally allowing you and your car some R&R time.

Returning to Gauteng was a mostly sedate affair, and while not as thrilling as the R37, R532 and R536, the return trip along the R539 “Highlands Meander”, through fields and fields of citrus trees, offers a completely different but equally enjoyable and very relaxing drive.

So all-in-all, did nothing I actually intended to do on this trip, and I think I enjoyed it more because of it!

Just for fun and education:

All of my Debian desktop installs running KDE received an update a month or two ago which rendered the “Apper” package management application broken, failing with the following error:

Unable to open database read-only: Database action 'prepare dependency insert 
statement' failed: table dependencies has no column named items_installed

The solution is to delete the Listaller cache DB:

rm -r /var/lib/listaller/db/

The cache will be recreated automatically with the expected structure on the next run of Apper (or other PackageKit type thing).

Update 1 - one minor upgrade later, and they’re back to the previous configuration in /usr/share/owncloud. Joy. Guess I’ll give it up.

Update 2 - ok, so unfortunately I didn’t give up, and wow 5.0.10 is back in /var/www/. Double-you tee eff.

I’ve been trying out hosting my own ownCloud instance on one of my Debian servers, and it’s mostly gone pretty well, using their official apt repositories.

On around the 17th of July however, ownCloud published an update from version 5.0.8 to version 5.0.9 which completely broke the system as they changed where everything was installed to. I thought I’d write up a couple of pointers to getting things up and running again, if you’ve suffered the same problem.

Firstly, the application itself has moved from /usr/share/owncloud/ to a more conventional /var/www/owncloud/. This means you’ll have to update any Apache config you might have done to get it accessible. They removed the original /etc/apache2/conf.d/owncloud.conf, so if you were relying on that, you’d have to create something new and correct in /etc/apache2/sites-available/ and symlink it in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/.

Next, the config configuration has also changed. Previously, the owncloud/config/ directory used to be a symlink to /etc/owncloud/, but now they have provided an actual config directory within the ownCloud installation. I removed this directory, and created a symlink to /etc/owncloud/ as /var/www/owncloud/config/

Once that’s all set up, you should be able to load ownCloud in your browser and it should perform an upgrade on the DB. In my case, the upgrade process got stuck in a loop, I presume it’s setting a cookie that is not being cleared correctly. The “solution” was to restart my browser.

When you log in thereafter, all your stuff should be present as it were pre-upgrade.

It’s probably also a good idea to make regular backups of /usr/share/owncloud/data/ - thank goodness this wasn’t wiped out with the rest of the previous install location.

With all the anti-NSA “spying” and fears of big corporate data collection stuff flying around lately, a lot of interesting products and tools have been given a bunch of visibility as alternatives to the traditional offerings now see as somewhat  “suspect”.

Ignoring the paranoia, prism-break.org has a huge collection of fun stuff to play with.

Going on two years since I updated this thing?

I’m trying to revive this now, and hopefully turn it into a proper central resource for “me” stuff. I’ve already updated the projects with some of my bigger/older things, which never made it on here for some reason, including Monster Hunt and UnWheel.

Trying to get the “gallery” pimped out a bit as well, with some additional things and events I’ve been snapping occasionally.

Not really happy with this design, it seems a bit too informal for what I want, though the previous design I have used for the past few (8+?) years has got a bit stale.

More stuff to follow shortly.

I got my Sun Java Certification yesterday :-).

Apparently after writing multiple fairly large business-critical Java applications and services for the past few years, this certification means I now know how to write Java code so I should be able to make some fairly large business-critical applications and services. Yay!

Soo, a year since I last posted anything, so I guess it’s about time I did something a little more constructive with this space than leaving it sitting here gathering comment spam.

Everything’s happily upgraded to the latest Wordpress version, complete with reCAPTCHA spam protection.

I’ll begin updating things more frequently now, starting with some continuing development of my most recent project, Out of Eve.

Sup.

Since there are certain people about how hosting a website on unreliable home ADSL is a generally bad idea, I’ve decided to move it to a more stable, permanent home on my little Linode.

Also, since my last post, a number of things have happened in my life in general. Firstly, I bought a really leet car. A brand spanking new Honda Civic hatch. It’s probably the single most awesome thing I’ve ever owned, and I love it to death :D.

Shortly after that, mother and I decided to club in together and buy a town house. We’ve only ever rented places before, so the whole buying thing was a bit new, but it pretty much sorts itself out after 3459094 different companies and institutions shove 459345 different documents in front of you to sign.

The place is in a nice small complex in a quiet corner of Ruimsig, on the very western edges of Roodepoort. Very nice little house, nice big garden (sometimes it’s very relaxing to feel real grass under bare feet :)).

Anyway, work’s been keeping me pretty busy, so I haven’t had a lot of quality time with either of the above new things… Really need to take some leave I think…

I’m only posting now, since I finally managed to drag myself away for long enough to actually do some useful stuff for a change.

I could probably rave on for hours about how awesome the thing is, but then, you’ve probably read a million other reviews already.

Launch day I was up with the sparrows, off to my local Look & Listen to pick up my pre-order, only to realize they open an hour later than I had arrived :D. An eternity later (AKA one hour), I was in as the door opened, at the counter collecting my stuff (and the cashier labelled “Trainee” ended up instructing the manager on how to do the sale, since the pre-order deposit had to be taken into account). I was rather disappointed with their limited game selection, they had no Tomb Raider: Legend, Dead or Alive 4, or Project Gotham Racing 3 - despite DOA and PGR being the main selling points apparently, with huge posters everywhere.

Went over to Incredible Connection who have a branch in the same centre, to be greeted with lovely PGR stands and banners everywhere, yet no actual PGR or DOA stock, and the usual assortment of lame staff who looked shocked to discover that there was in fact this gigantic X'360 stand/area in the middle of the shop.

Anyway, off to Makro next, who luckily had loads of stock of DOA and PGR, and were a bit cheaper than the prices on Look & Listen’s website.

Oh, I forgot to mention just how heavy the darn thing is. Lugging it around the shopping centre was no walk in the park, and my weakling arms were actually quite painful afterward.

Anyway, between then, usual working hours, and now, I’ve been playing, learning, discovering, etc. It was a bit of a schlepp to get hooked up to Live, as it’s not actually supported in SA yet, and since they seemingly don’t allow you to change your country after sign-up, it’s a bit of a mission to set up a profile that is usable. I ended up creating a UK-based Passport and Live account.

On the subject of Live, Sony is going to have to pull off something really amazing to beat Microsoft’s setup, it’s really quite altogether cool (except that, because of Telkom I’m willing to bet, every now and then when communicating with Live, adding friends, unlocking achievements, etc., the machine hangs completely and needs to be reset - probably why Live is not officially supported here yet).

And I seriously need a better spam filtering setup. SpamBayes catches only around 50% of my spam, regardless of how much more I train it, if anything it’s getting less effective over time. Currently looking at Bogofilter.

Anyway, I’m off to see how DOA4 multiplayer works :)

Indeed. I discovered the only thing I didn’t like about this site’s design was the page header image.

So it’s gone, and a leet one is in it’s place. Yay.

Hmmmmm, long time no update. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy recently.

Last month, we released “UnWheel R5”, which seems to have become the (hopefully) final release. I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, all the major bugs are gone, multiplayer is working wonderfully and the online record system is churning records around at a mean rate (and those records still need a monthly rotation system applied, so still some work to be done there). I still haven’t decided if I want to do this all again in Unreal Torunament 2007 or not :).

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing around with DynaBar, and it’s grown a lot. The plugin system has been tweaked to allow better customisation options from the developer side, as well as having options added to improve the user interaction side of things. There are a whole crapload of other options available as well, multiple layers (supporting PNG graphics with alpha transparency), different scanline styles, text prefixes and suffixes, better caching options, etc. In addition, you can choose to have the background be a gradient blending between any two colours, horizontal or vertical, and you can create “groups”, which is a bunch of userbars animated (with fading/blending between bars), and they all remain fully dynamic. Speaking of dynamic, I’ve also added a whole load of plugins, from XFire, to more Last.FM options, to Battlefield 2 and TrackMania, and even RSS headlines and live game server status via Qstat.

I’ve put up a test system here as a sort of sandbox, so feel free to try out all the options and plugins, and if you have any suggestions or ideas for plugins, please let me know. In addition to the designer, there’s a browser available, which lets you easily build the animated groups mentioned above. Also, it all works with Internet Explorer now, which I didn’t bother fixing with the previous version (wasn’t meant to be such a “big” project :)). Source code package will be available as soon as some more testing is done.

In addition, I’ve been re-writing my online Dosage-powered comic viewer - Injector

• again, this time it’s going fully “Web 2.0” (ZOMG!), so everything’s quite nice and quick. This project still needs a bit of work on the administration and installation side of things before it can see a release.

Aside from all that, I’ve also been slowly building a new UnrealZA site, using the Python-powered Django framework. It really is a wonderful thing. Please excuse me for a minute while I run away from a horde of crazy, twisted, Nevow fans (among others). Anyway, I’ll happily recommend Django any day of the week to anyone looking for a Python web framework.

I’ve also decided I don’t like the look of this site anymore, so I guess that’s another thing to go on my to-do list for the near future.

Seems just about everything on my server machine has been running perfectly since I upgraded to PHP5, except this site :(.

So for the time being, the attachments plugin is disabled (the cause of the problem), so no downloads are available until I fixxor it.

Edit: Well, that took all of 5 minutes to fix ;)

Well, only one for now.

Sadly, I no longer need my laptop for work, as I have been provided with a proper desktop machine (this may be a good thing, since I can now boot Debian permanently, as I’ll no longer need to use Delphi on it). Anyway, I kind of liked having my work stuff and private stuff portable with me. So, I got something a little more portable, which I can both work (well, do basic documents, do all my emailing, track to-do’s, contacts, etc), and personal (fill it with random fun stuff) stuff on.

Enter, the iPAQ hx2750 :D. Complete with wireless LAN, so I can connect to networks at home, work, and the occasional Mug and Bean, Bluetooth for sending files between the handheld and laptop, and sending photos to to from the phone (I can even dial contacts on the iPAQ via bluetooth on the phone :P, and of course use it as a dial-up modem when a network is not available), SD slot for extra storage, and another way to transfer files between laptop and handheld, and a bunch of other leet stuff it can do.

I’ve also got PocketPuTTY up and running, so when I feel the urge I can pop onto whatever boxen I need, Python CE has already been helpful, as it enabled me to write a small .tar file extraction script for some other files I wanted. Even though I’m still first and foremost an Unreal fanboy, I couldn’t resist installing Pocket Quake. Pocket RAR and Adobe Reader have also come in rather handy.

Pocket Word is quite reasonable, and maintains document’s original formatting quite nicely. Pocket Outlook works very well for receiving, reading, and sending emails, and if ever offered the option of Outlook or Pocket Outlook, I’d have to choose the pocket version :P. It handels POP and IMAP mail equally well, and even does IMAPS without complication.

All-in-all, I’m rather impressed, and I find myself using it rather regularly throughout the day, especially for keeping track of projects and things at work, which was partly the main idea anyway.

Update: DynaBar 2 is available, the download link below is out of date.

Finally got around to making a proper release of something :).

Presenting DynaBar, a PHP script which can create dynamic images through the use of plugins, inspired by the Userbars.com website.

I thought it would be cool to be able to have userbars with dynamic data in them, stuff like game server status, stats, etc., etc. to make them a little more exciting. I also wanted to learn a bit more about PHP’s image manipulation, so this proved a good oppertunity for that.

Basically, the whole thing works off a plugin system, which lets you drop in a PHP script (the plugin), set up a config file (the userbar), and link to an image. DynaBar then goes about loading the plugin, requesting it’s data (so it goes off and collects stats, or whatever), and building the final image (putting on the [optional] scanline effect, glossy shine, and layering the text data from the plugin on all of that).

I’ve also created a small designer script, which allows you or any users to create new userbars using plugins or whatever, with their own images and content, in a simple wizard-like interface. The end result is ready-to-use forum or HTML code. :).

Here are some examples, using plugins included in the package:

Image lost in time Simple, plain text (nothing dynamic about it).

Image lost in time This one queries LastFM for which song I’ve played most recently in my media player.

Image lost in time Finally, here we have Battlefield 2 stats, coming from BF2Tracker’s clan XML feed.

Grab the download from the bottom of this post. Please read the README in the doc/ directory.

w00t

Finally, got my internet connection back. Turns most of the houses in the townhouse complex we moved into don’t actually have phone lines installed. It’s taken more than 2 weeks of begging and whining at the complex managers to get something done. They finally arrived yesterday (Thursday) with a Telkom tech guy and installed it in around 10 minutes.

Today a not-too-bright Telkom dude pitched up and installed the ADSL. Apparently we should be glad it works at all, since we’re far from the exchange. I guess all that matters is that it actually works in the end :).

The drive up was pretty uneventful, even though it did take 12 hours, around 3-4 more than it should have. I blame retarded truck drivers for that. I must say the scenery around the Eastern Cape is a lot nicer than the barren wastelands between there and Johannesburg. I’ll miss it. The weather here is so dry and hot :(, I’ll miss the humidity too.

Aside from the lack of a phone line (although fixed now), the new place is pretty nice, secure and stuff, 2Kms from work, nice views (guess I’ll post some nice pics I took the other day soon). You’re not allowed to hammer anything into the walls or anything here, or drill any holes, etc, etc, so I’m looking into getting as many PCs on 108mbps wireless LAN. Dodging masses of network cables around the passages between rooms isn’t too hot :).

Work’s just work, but it’s nice not having to fix people’s emails and printers every five minutes, I’m just left alone to write code and stuff. I’m strangely looking forward to work every day much more than I used to in East London, although I’m basically doing the same job (except the lame fixing stuff). Maybe it’s the free and easy access to the coffee machine. Unfortunately the interweb has been owned by a rather nasty proxy/firewall setup that seems to block completely random stuff, even development resources like parts of SourceForge (like most search results) and large parts of the online PHP manual. UnrealZA also works fine, until you try to view a thread… Pretty strange :/.

Guess I should stop babbling and go catch up on some Battlefield 2 :D.

So Korpse pointed out a rather interesting website the other night - Pandora.

Basically, it’s a rather nice little service which allows you to discover new music, artists, etc, by telling it which music you like already. Based on a song, or artist name you provide, it goes off and finds music matching an assortment of criteria matching the provided song/artist. It then proceeds to play a endless playlist. It’s all streaming, but it’s extremely good quality for streamed content, and practically never stutters, even when downloading or uploading other stuff (0n 512k ADSL anyway).

During your listening, if it plays something you don’t particularly like, you can tell it so, and it’ll further fine tune the playlist, the same applies to something you do like.

I do have a few things I’d like to see added or changed though. The ability to play your well refined playlist in the player of your choice

• could play pretty much like a normal streaming playlist. Show a timer/track progress bar thing, it’s just nice to know :). Ability to go back and play previously listened to tracks. Perhaps two additional rating categories - it’d be nice to rate vocals and music separately.

Anyway, my 10 free trial hours are up, and I can’t seem to cheat by deleting cookies or something. My MasterCard should be arriving this week some time, and I’m seriously considering that $36 for an annual subscription…

Someone posted an image of somewhere they’re staying in “Qatar Doha” (no, I don’t know exactly where that is ;)) on the SGS Forums, mentioning how similar it looks to the Battlefield 2 map, Strike at Karkand.

I thought it might be cool to try to make the image look a bit more like the map, adjusting the colour balance, adding the orangey dusty air effect, etc. Further on, someone posted an image with some player characters and a jet overlayed, I though it was a pretty cool idea, so I whipped out Photoshop, my previously modified image, the official BF2 site (for screenshots of vehicles and characters), and got to work.

The end result is pretty cool I think :D. Click for full versions (original on the left, mine on the right):

Lost in time

Update; toned down the colours a bit, didn’t realise the monitor I did this on originally was so off :P.

In case anyone’s arrived here looking for my UT, Tribes 2, etc maps, mods, utilities, tutorials and things, you’ll find those along with downloads and things over on my ‘gaming resources’ site: http://www.unreal.co.za/shrimp/.

Because “Weblogs are things with cat pictures in them.”

Lost in time

Our massive sprawling estate :-)

Image lost in time

So I got myself a shiny new samsung D500 phone!

Since WP supports posting by email and this phone can send them, I thought I would mess around a bit with the concept.

Here’s a rather bad photo taken out my office window…

Lost in time

Wordpress lets you write email messages to a specific email address and
it’ll periodically check for new messages, and post them to the blog!

Cool beans!