Playing with Blender

Make your documents look A-ok!

I am a graphic designer.  A frustrated one at that.  I’m more on the technical side.  I don’t really have that much creative juice as the owner of the blog I’ll be linking to in a while.  But I do appreciate appealing visual design.  I do club t-shirts once in a while, and I doodle when boredom sets in.  See the header at the top?  That was what I had in mind when I titled my blog

Now, for those of you who work extensively with words and letters, whether for formal documents, invitations, or anything where you want to write something, make sure they look good and convey the right message visually.  Here’s something from Just Creative Design.  It says it’s for graphic designers, but it sure helps us stop wondering why some of our lettering projects seem to be lacking impact.

The Great Mac Switch and the Great Desktop Makeover

The title may have suggested to you that I’m one of those Mac evangelists.  Well, I was, just because I was impressed by its visuals and physical design.  I haven’t actually used a Mac extensively (I couldn’t afford it yet), and that’s the reason why I now consider myself a former Mac evangelist.  I couldn’t preach what I didn’t practice ;P

Performance-wise, intuitiveness-wise, and visuals-wise, I’m pretty convinced that the Mac does better than Windows.

This is a rather new machine I’m using.  When I bought it last year, the sales staff “required” that it should run Vista, just because XP drivers weren’t available.  What the.  Is this another martial law mandate by Bill Gates?  Well, I had to spend three days looking for drivers in order to get it to run XP.  I will never get Vista.  When I start earning enough soon, it’s switching time.

I’ve had my fair share of Windows blues and (pun intended) blue screens of death.

I got tired of Windows’ bulgy and obese GUI (from a previous post):

I had long been a “non-fan” of Windows XP’s user interface. With all that unnecessary eye candy and emboss effects, it seems to take up too much screen real estate.

Now, since the Mac’s visuals were the first to catch my eye, and I couldn’t afford one, I embarked on a journey to extinguish 99.99% of Windows GUI presence from my desktop.

On my adventures, I met FlyakiteOSX, RocketDock, LiteStep, Styler, uxtheme.dll, Prism, Ashen VS, Bandit VS, etc.  At deviantart, customize, aqua-soft, osx-e, etc., I met people who had the same plight as me (got tired of the Windows GUI).  I could provide links but I think you should have your own adventures, too :)  Now you know what to search for on Google

This is the kind of workspace I have at home.  Click to see the full-res version.

Probably, when I actually do switch, I would still be using Windows, tricked out like this of course

This entry is a response to a Business Week blog post (via John Arens) and an interesting Mac-related page.

Go FOSS! (free open source software)

It would probably be a computer utopia if everything you ever need to spend on while using the computer is hardware, electricity, and your internet connection.  At the same time, your system is still running in tiptop shape.  As an essential step to that, a little help from Lifehacker is nice.

It may be the year 2008, but a whole lot of sucktacular software still rears its ugly head on PC’s everywhere, even when better-behaved options are freely available. Whether it’s molasses-slow bloatware, shameless adware, anemic default apps, or “Your trial period has expired!” nagware, it’s time to replace stinky Windows software with its superior (but lesser-known) alternative.

Science Answer 001

After a little debate with my brother, this is the answer to Science Question 001:

No.  To keep the answer simple, try jumping while on a fast-moving train.  Or much better, try jumping while you are near its tail end.  What happens?  You do not get left behind (or get thrown out the rear door).

:-)

Boredom sets in…

Desktop Screenshot 002

Wandering around DeviantArt, I envied all those minimalist themes they had out there. Now I finally found out how they did it. Customizing it is a little bit geekier than Flyakite. I’m still finding my way around this.

• LiteStep - you need this to fully customize the taskbar, tray, etc.
• ProjectMecha v2 LiteStep theme (I tweaked it to my taste a little bit) [LINK]
• RocketDock
• RocketDock icons are “Litho” from IconFactory
• wallpaper is “Cielo” [LINK]

Keeping track of citations while doing research. In Firefox.

Last semester while doing research for our thesis writing course, citing web sites was a lot of trouble. Authors and dates of publication rarely showed up. I had to bring up Google Desktop’s scratchpad widget to take citation notes if I was able to catch some of that fish.

Enter Zotero. This Firefox extension sniffs out citation notes from web pages. Well, not all pages. Apparently a web page has to be constructed in some way that makes it readable by Zotero–something like the meta tags that Google uses to find out information about that page.

Right now, there is still not much research going on in my academic life.

I be trying out Zotero next semester for our undergraduate thesis.

Science Question 001

What if you hovered in midair for quite some time, will you eventually go over a different place?

Say, you started hovering in the Philippines. You stay that way for 12 hours. Now you want to get back down to the ground. The question is:

Will you set foot somewhere in Mexico or Panama (or some place with the same latitude but on the opposite side of the world)?

Or will you still set foot on the same point from where you started hovering?

Introduction to the Jeepney Science Questions

Always being a curious cat, I have decided to put up a Science Questions category. These inherently quirky questions are beyond Google’s capabilities (or maybe just difficult to formulate so that Google can understand), thus I put them up here for open discussion. I haven’t tried Yahoo! Answers yet. I will sometime.