Belated, but either way – have a good one!

My celebration of Christmas is already over, got a few presents that I am sure I will use a lot in the forthcoming year, although I’m not really a believer it is still a nice tradition – my family does it more for the closure and family gathering around to have fun and relax.

Hope you all will have a nice new year, stepping into 2010 will be fun – I hope I’ll progress and continue to evolve, specifically within my, for now, primary interest which is game designing og concepting – painting and letting the imagination flow to hopefully create something that is nice.

I’m sure this blog will be more active over the next couple of months as I get back to school – a lot of interesting courses this semester, I hope it will be as fun and challenging as I think it will be.

Well, it’s getting close, so of course I have to.

Books
Dan Brown – Digital Fortress
Dan Brown – The Lost Symbol

Clothes
Scarf White – KappAhl
Pyjamas Pants Black – KappAhl
Cargojeans Dark Brown – Hennes & Mauritz
Turtleneck Sweater Black/Brown
Belt with flexible stopper/length

Computer accessory
Razer Deathadder Respawn – PC mouse

Drawing – Books
The Basis of Successful Art : Concept and Composition
Creative Photoshop CS4: Digital Illustration and Art Techniques
Bold Visions: A Digital Painting Bible
100 Ways to Create Fantasy Figures

Movies
2001: A Space Odyssey (Blu-Ray)
Full Metal Jacket – Deluxe Edition (Blu-Ray)

Various
Wooden mannequin – typically found in bookstores/drawing shops

I just read this article from the team behind WordPress.

And I just wanted to test it out with a small chunk of code from my recently created Flash platform game.

		private function checkKeysDown (event:KeyboardEvent):void
		{
			if(event.keyCode == 37 || event.keyCode == 65) 			// A or Left Arrow
			{
				leftKeyDown = true;
				rightKeyDown = false;
			}

			if(event.keyCode == 38 || event.keyCode == 87) 			// W or Up Arrow
			{
				upKeyDown = true;
			}

			if(event.keyCode == 39 || event.keyCode == 68) 			// D or Right Arrow
			{
				rightKeyDown = true;
				leftKeyDown = false;
			}

			if(event.keyCode == 72 && !mainJumping) 				// H key
			{
				hKeyDown = true;
				sc4 = attack.play();
			}

			if(event.keyCode == 74 && !mainJumping) 				// J key
			{
				jKeyDown = true;
				sc4 = attack.play();
			}

			if(event.keyCode == 75 && !mainJumping) 				// K key
			{
				kKeyDown = true;
				sc4 = attack.play();
			}
		} // end private function checkKeysDown

Seems like it works wonderfully, I don’t know why I haven’t checked this functionality out before now. But I can see a lot of uses for this seeing as I’ve recently learned a lot of ActionScript 3.0 and will start learning more HTML and CSS in the following courses I have. Expect more posts consisting of code-strings in large amounts!

One awesome thing with this “plugin” is that it supports a lot of different programming languages; meaning that the plugin can color-code different syntaxes with various colors typically found within the language. It’s brilliant.

To insert code like this you simply write:

[*sourcecode language="css"]
your code here
[*/sourcecode]

Without the wildcard (*)

If you don’t define the source code language it will be “text” by default (no syntax highlighting). Here’s a list of the supported languages

• actionscript3
• bash
• coldfusion
• cpp
• csharp
• css
• delphi
• erlang
• diff
• groovy
• javascript
• java
• javafx
• objc
• perl
• php
• text
• powershell
• python
• ruby
• scala
• sql
• vb
• xml

Here’s the support post for the Source Code tagging.

My thoughts on how Twitter contests should and should not be done.

Twitter is a nice and simple way to spread the word about what your company is all about. Contests is even better, especially for marketing and creating a big buzz. If you’re able to climb onto the trending topics on Twitter, you’re instantly getting thousands of hits just from people clicking different trends to get a quick input of “what’s hot” and “in”, updated realtime.

How you can do it

Two examples of a good (or bad, whichever way you look at it) way to market your stuff is Moonfruit and Squarespace. If you’re into Twitter you’ve probably seen the hashtags #moonfruit (www.moonfruit.com) and #squarespace (www.squarespace.com) appearing more than once from several people in the Twitterverse (me included, I love freebies, who doesn’t?). If you’re not seeing the marketing value in this example of doing contests on Twitter, let me do an easy mathematical calculation for you: Let’s say 20 people tweet “I love #moonfruit, I want to win the Macbook Pro! Look at www.moonfruit.com for details!”, and for the sake of simplicity lets say that each of those 20 individuals have 20 unique followers who receive their updates. So our calculation would be: 20×20 = 400.

But.. That’s not wrong

Put short, this would get 400 possible users, and clicks, for www.moonfruit.com, possibly even more. Isn’t that just wonderful? Well, some will definetely say that it’s an awesome way to market your new, or old, projects and products. It will certainly get a lot of hype and talk about your new, awesome stuff going. On the other side, some people will say that it’s awful and destroys Twitter.

I myself am split on the middle in this case, while I do find the spam created by these contests (happening once in a while) pretty dull and boring in the long run, I think it is a very good way to put your product up for a show. Whatever you say, it will get you a remarkable amount of attention, either in a good, or a bad way. Bad commercials are commercials too, and can often get you even more attention since people mock it over and over, and over.

How a lot of people prefer you doing it

However, I much prefer the “other way” of doing contests on Twitter. If you’re hosting a contest, great! It means I can win free stuff, and free stuff is always awesome even if my chances are as small as me winning the lottery. So just by saying “Hey, contest over here! Just follow me on Twitter and you’ll be able to win in any contest I host!” you’ll have me hooked, and I have a chance to win without doing anything other than following you. That’s most certainly a win-win situation for both of us. The proper way to do a contest on Twitter is in my opinion the following:

1. Find out what you want to give away on Twitter, something related to your blogging interests, or perhaps your own company products.
2. Create a webpage that explains the rules of your Twitter contest. Your rules should simply be something like “Follow @xxxxxx”, “You can tweet about this contest one time, more tweets will not give you a better chance at winning”.
3. Send out a small amount of tweets once in a while where you explain that you’re doing contests, and a link to where your rules can be found.

Examples of this way to do contests on Twitter can be seen here (Scott Bourne, focusing on Mac and Photo) and here.

Yes, it’s true! It really is, it killed my blog.

So.. I bet you’ve heard this a lot from fellow bloggers, Twitter is taking up the daily need to rant about your life and your thoughts, so you see no need in boasting with huge blog posts for things that can be explained in 140 characters or less. Which eventually leads to less activity on your blog. This has, you guessed right, pretty much happened to me as well. I’ve decided to focus on fewer things for this blog as I will mainly be using Twitter for other stuff I want to write about.

What will this blog be about, then? This blog will basically be some sort of portfolio for my creativity, an outlet I can use to show you my recent doodles, sketches, final images and eventually some tutorials if I find that necessary. Once in a while I will post things that are too space-consuming (140, remember), or just deserves a full explanation not suited for Twitter, on here.

I’m not too fond of using large amounts of time on writing things that already have been written, perhaps in a different way, using different words and images. But basically, it is the same thing nevertheless, and the internet is a huge database. You just have to know what to search for, and how to search for it. I can help you with that, and I am going to, actually I have already done that – by establishing a database of tutorials that have helped me, and that I find useful.

So, yes, that is all I wanted to write. If you want to you can follow me on Twitter. I kinda write about the same sort of tags there as I do here (daily stuff, art, hardware, how to, multimedia, tech, ps3, social media, software), in a smaller format.

Speaking of Twitter, I should ask the author of this WordPress theme to intergrate the possibilty for widgets. I need a Twitter-update widget, badly, and I don’t have my own server, nor my own domain to host on, so I can’t really code and implement it myself. If anyone of you out there know how to intergrate a Twitter-update feed on the WordPress hosted Hemingway theme. Please shout out in a comment.

It’s quiet from this front due to exams and a lot of work.

I won’t be very active with daily sketches nor other posts on this blog the next few weeks. School is getting near the end and there’s a lot of exams coming up very soon, studying my brains off. So, naturally, at the end of the day I don’t have much left besides sleeping and relaxing. But I’ll be back, I’ve squeezed in some time for studying anatomy and figure-drawing now and then, sketches will come up when I have the time to post them.

Anyhow, I have a few links and tutorial-pages I’d like to share. Mostly aimed towards digital painting/concept artists. I’ve also found some awesome, and free, e-books about drawing. Here are the links, I’ll add them to the tutorial page later on.

Conceptart.org – Over 100 free e-books - I would recommend Bridgman and Loomis, very instructional and educational.

IDrawGirls.com – Over 200 free videos, mostly explaining this concept artist’ style. He sells educational videos as well, good stuff.

GFXArtist.com – Collection of different type of tutorials aimed at digital painting.

ItchStudios.com – Mostly a tutorial created by a conceptart.org user who were tired of giving the same feedback over and over. Small, but good, tutorial that covers shadow and light, as well as how different materials reflect differently.

So, there you have some links, enjoy. I’ve also ordered the new Intuos line from Wacom, namely Wacom Intuos 4 Medium. I will make a review and compare it with my Wacom Bamboo (Perhaps I’ll gather reviews on Intuos 3 and compare that as well) once I receive the tablet.

Clean and minimalistic “visit card” for your social network and contact information.

So, I’ve been looking for a simple, yet elegant way to push all of my contact information and social media profiles into a webpage. I’ve tried putting all my contact information in my About page, that works, kinda. Although it looks extremely ugly, so then I started searching for a service providing just this and stumbled on My Name is E.

It’s awesome, really, and it does just what I want it to do; displaying my contact and profile information in a clean, minimalistic, and elegant way. So, there’s a quick tip from me before I’m counting sheep.

And that is how it looks, all wrapped up.

Ooooh, my shiny visit card! \o/

4chan image collection in one spot.

What “4scrape” basically does and is – it’s a webpage that collects pictures (and posts) from 4chan, puts them on a server, and then parses every image found into a huge database for your wallpaper/picture needs.

You can find 4scrape here > Type in a search word to find specific images or press “Random” to bring up every imagepost in /wg/ (4chan subdirectory for wallpapers of all kinds).

The webpage updates continuously, although the script running the refresh-operation tends to break at times – just refresh and start over, the images are showing up at random so you won’t see the same picture too often.

I’ve found a large amount of very nice wallpapers on this page, it’s a nice service and a cool script.

Disclaimer: 4chan is known to contain a lot of nudity and 18+ content, so browsing the webpage is not adviced if you’re for example: at work, a minor, in the public, etc. You can swipe out some of the 18+/nude pictures by searching with the option “No tits”, but it’s not guaranteed that it’ll rule out all those images.

Update: 4scrape is taken down, and has been for quite a while now, just thought I’d write a little note about it on the post here. Here’s hark’s Twitter post, and here’s a blog post explaining why he isn’t going to keep maintaining 4scrape. Anyhow, you can always check out 4chan.org for your wallpaper needs (Wallpaper General) or here (High Resolution), it just takes more effort.

Alternative: 9scrape (Taken down)
Alternative: Fuguri
Alternative: 4walled
Alternative: ImageFlash (“No” explicit content)
Alternative: Nik.bot.nu

Have a happy New Year, best of wishes from me (and Norway).

I wish you all a happy new year! May all your resolutions, whatever they may be, come true.

I myself haven’t really thought about the new year all too much, letting it sink in first. But I do have two or three things I’m definite about

• Excercise
• Getting into game-designing, studying hard to get into a proper school now
• Improving my digital drawing, thinking about buying a touch 22″ monitor with stylus pen support

Google surely beats Chuck Norris!

Why haven’t anyone created fun facts about Google, or perhaps they’re out there hiding from me? I mean, Chuck Norris have had his share of these wobbly fun facts – so why can’t the best thing on the whole internet have the same? It’s unfair, Google is worthy the fun facts.

While I’m at it, what kind of celebrity fun facts exist out there? If you’ll be kind enough to reply with pages containing fun facts of celebrities (Such as Chuck Norris’ fun facts), I’ll make a list.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I hope you all will have a great time together with friends and family, or alone if you prefer that, and that you’ll be able to eat all the food you’ve wanted and get the presents on your wishlist.

We celebrate Christmas the 24th of December in Norway, so yesterday was truly an awesome day. I’ve got a kind of tradition to put up my gifts in a list on my blog, so I’ll do that this year as well (First Christmas with the WordPress blog on my part).

What I got

• Godfather, the Coppola Restoration (In Blu-ray)
• Two Norwegian books (Totally useless fun facts and a “how to” about stuff some people really should not know how to do)
• Black turtleneck cashmere sweater
• PlayStation Eye (Webcam for PS3, compatible with PC)
• Various candles (One that smells like coffee latte, yum)
• Various stuff for my soon-to-be apartment (Plates, cups, glasses, water boiler)
• Cozy blanket for those cold winter days, or cold days in general

And that’s it! I’m very satisfied and happy about the gifts I got, I did get nearly all of the notes in my wishlist. Everything except Fallout 3 for PS3, which I will probably get cheap through the internet either way.

So.. What did you get?

Fun web 2.0 application for generating word-clouds.

What Wordle is, from the creators

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Here you can create your own cloud of words. You can do this by either manually writing down the words you want in your cloud or by crawling an RSS or Atom enabled web-page. For example WordPress blogs (Tags and words written in the blog-post).

Enjoy, it’s a lot of fun and actually works nicely as wallpapers for your computer. Quite nifty, huh?

Ever noticed those short notes on the end of his shows?

Perhaps you have, perhaps you have not. I have, and I love them, a lot of fun and totally (more or less) abstract opinions about anything on his mind. I love most of his shows; “The Big Bang Theory”, “Two and a Half Men”, “Dharma and Greg”, “Cybill” and “Grace Under Fire”, mostly “The Big Bang Theory“, brilliant stuff if you can relate.

Head over to Chuck Lorre Productions if you want to find out what the seemingly sublime messages show. Namely “Vanity Card”, starting from #1 and ranging all the way up to his latest production, it’s a fun read I assure you.

Oh! I am currently trying to get Windows Vista bootable through a USB pendrive, any advice or input on this matter would be greatly appreciated. All the information I have come over this far is requiring the user to already have a Windows Vista installed on the computer you make the boot-drive from – which is something I don’t have nor really want to have at this time.

Update – I’ve managed to pack Windows XP SP2 into a USB pendrive and making it bootable. I assume this method will work with Windows Vista as well, though I have not tested it in production yet so that will have to be a future project. Look out for a new post following up on the steps I did to succeed soon (Tomorrow/Friday most likely)!

That is all.