Valve have recently announced Portal 2, the sequal to the original Portal – a game originally included by valve in the Orange Box.
To describe Portal breifly, it is a short game based on the Source engine (very much like Team Fortress 2 etc) where the objective is to complete various puzzles, with the aid of your Portal Gun. This is a gun that can open two portals (Blue and Orange) so that you can cross large voids, climb large gaps, and many other physical challenges. Portal is also where the phrase “The cake is a lie” came from (just incase anyone did not know where it originated from).
Personally, I am looking forward to Portal 2, as I enjoyed the short, but fun original. I’m also looking forward to having the content in Garrys Mod, a popular Source mod that I have been addicted to of late. Soon I shall hopefully have a website up for my Garrys Mod community, and I shall be making a post about that in the forseeable future.
To briefly conclude, Portal 2 is due for release some time later this year (most likely via Steam), and even although we do not have much information as yet, basing on my oppinion of the original game, I look forward to its apperance for both Garrys Mod content and for the sheer fun of the game itsself.
I’ve been looking over most of my Photo A Day project and I’ve realised that I really enjoy taking Macro photographs. The only problem is, I don’t have a macro lens, nor the money to purcahse such a lens.
The art of macro photography is simply to take pictures of the smallest things that are in our daily lives, whether that be insects, as the more popular macro photographs are usually of, or just pictures of water droplets, and at it’s simplest, maybe just pictures of the things you use daily, whether that be a phone, a watch or even a toothbruch (If you would want a picture of that.)
I have a few options to solve this problem: I can either save up money and purchase a 60mm Macro Lens, or I could buy some magnifying filters. The filters are 30x cheaper than the lens, so I’ll probably go with that option for the moment, although I would really love the 60mm f/2.8 USM Macron, mentioned above.
Macro photography seems like it would be a lot of fun, and I already like taking pictures of nature in general, but it’s the tiny facets of nature that really fascinate me, that’s pretty much the whole reason I’m interested in Macro Photography.
Well, if you have any tips or questions on macro photography, I would be more than happy to receive/answer them,
Calum Gilchrist
Well, this is the first post of the New Year, so I thought I would take it easy and just make a quick post about one of my favourite artists and an album that is very interesting to me. The artist is Pogo, and the album is Symphony of Science.
These artists have one thing in common; they both make songs through Voice Sampling. Voice sampling is simply where you take voice clips and sounds and re-mix them to make music. Pogo makes his music almost entirely from music featured in films or television series, where Symphony of Science mainly uses voice clips from famous scientists, like Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, David Attenborough, and quite a few others.
The main reason I wanted to make this post is because both artists have released a new song for the New Year, so I felt it appropriate to mention them.
I hope everyone has purchased their copy of Killing In The Name – Rage Against The Machine in attempt to beat the X Factor to number 1!
Now that homelinen has moved home (if you pardon the little joke), hopefully it’ll be faster to load and so on. As you probably know, I’m now hosting the site for Calum, and some of his other domains. If you would like me to host you a site or something, then please email me on ross@imlach.info or ross@homelinen.org and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Since I’m hosting it now, I think I have the right to do this:
Some of you may know that I ended up doing Cooking for Independent Living at High School. I do not like the subject, but I guess it’s been a little useful in showing the proper methods of doing things.
Now the only reason that I mention it is because I made a PacMan themed cake. Now it’s not the exact way that I wanted it, but I still have some pride for it.
I wanted to basically make the base, cut a slice out of it and then put yellow icing on the top. We didn’t have enough time to do it, so I may do it some other time. Cake decoration is actually kind of fun. You can see the whole cake after the break, but the cake got damaged in transport so it’s not as good as it was when it was fresh.
Update: It actually tasted alright. I’ll probably be able to make a better one if I make another cake.
Well, tonight was my (and Calum’s) second FalkirkLUG meeting. We did flash talks this evening, which are basically small 5 minute(ish) talks about a chosen subject. I’m going to assume Calum will do a post about his talk, however.
I did my talk on bash (Bourne Again Shell), which is the default linux/unix shell. If you are a Linux user, then you are probably familiar with bash, or the terminal as a whole as it is very useful (it is also a lot more powerful than the windows command prompt). If you would like more info on this, just check out the Wikipedia page or something, because quite frankly, its too much effort to type it all out!
Well, if you are a Linux user in the Falkirk area, I strongly suggest you join FalkirkLUG. All the necessary info is on the page that the image on the right links to.
All in all, I think I have advertised enough.. So yeah.. Linux + FalkirkLUG are awesome.
Well lately I’ve been working on a simple file uploader, mainly for the mobile platform. I thought that I would take the time to talk about how it’s doing and what I hope to do. In the future I’ll probably get a blog going on Amp to make life easier.
Right now you won’t find much on Amp, in fact you can’t even sign up to the service yet. I will be changing this in the near future. At the moment you can upload the standard image formats and view what files you have uploaded. The UI and look of the site are horrible and need a lot of work, and a few basic features need to be added, but right now I’m quite happy that it works.
One of the first things I’ll need to do is make a page in order to view your uploaded content and share it. I would also like to integrate Twitter into the system, as that’s pretty much the whole point in the site. I am trying to think of interesting ways to seperate my simple file uploader from the big daddies like: Imageshack, Flickr, TwitPic and Photobucket.
Later on I will be adding (hopefully) video and audio support, maybe even support for reading documents you have uploaded on your phone, but it’ll be a while before I start thinking about that. I am thinking about making it open source, but I am unsure whether to do that for a web application, so we’ll see where that goes.
Well, I’ll try to keep you up to date with the development and will mention when sign-ups are open, if you’re interested in helping test or even use the site in its current state.
If you have any suggestions or ideas at all please e-mail me at: Calum@Homelinen.org all suggestions are appreciated.
The reason there have been no updates to the site’s theme or even any posts is because we’ll be moving web-host next month. Once I sort all of that out expect posting to resume semi-regularly as I want quite a few changes to the site, in content and looks.
Yeah, I’m going to Paris for about a week tomorrow. I’ll probably be Tweeting quite a bit, or I’ll at least try to. If I have nothing to do I might try and blog from an Internet cafe or something, although I doubt we would be doing that, what with all the historic buildings to visit in Paris. I will come back with a TON of pictures as there’s so much to see in Paris and I’ve never been before so it would be nice to have photographs of the lovely place.
have recently announced Portal 2, the sequal to the original Portal – a game originally included by valve in the Orange Box.
