I haven’t done much drawing the last week as I was more busy reading the second book of The First Law. However, I still managed to produce some images.
The main goal was to see how the main three primitives, sphere, cube and cylinder are the base of basically every object one can imagine.
One of the reasons I bought an iPad was to read digital comics. Now, a year later I not only like reading them but appreciate the art of drawing so much that I started drawing myself. To be absolutely clear, other than art classes at school – which were of no interest to me and are long gone now – I have no experience whatsoever. So I started searching on the internet for resources on how to start. I found something on the iBook Store which in turn led me to a series of Youtube videos by Stan Lee and John Buscema on how to draw comics – The Marvel Way! These videos are so unbelievably old, they’re talking about pausing the tape in order to draw what was just discussed and shown! So I did as I was told and here are the results.
Not long ago I became quite frustrated with the gaming capabilities of my iMac. It’s not that I didn’t know about the expected performance of the hardware since I bought the cheapest version by design. At that time I did not use the PC I had for what it was built for, which finally led to me selling it. However, recently I felt the urge to play some games other than Diablo 3. For one the iMac just couldn’t deliver the performance to enjoy the visuals of modern games as they were designed to be. Secondly what really frustrated me and this is also the main reason why I never really played anything other than Diablo 3 on the iMac, was the poor cooling management of that machine. I have to crank up the coolers manually (using iStat Menus 3) in order to prevent overheating. Otherwise it’ll just get very hot and reboot eventually. As one can imagine this technique only works reliably on OS X.
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With Windows 8 now finally released, there comes a new generation of hardware with a strong emphasis on the input device – the fingers. Touch as we know and love today has been around in common perception since the release of the first iPhone which was in 2007. The first smartphone like phone was actually released in 1994 by IBM, the IBM Simon. Based on todays standards you can imagine this wasn’t a device one would call “a beauty”. In fact, the Wikipedia page lists the form factor as “brick”. From a current point of view you probably wouldn’t want to use and play around with such a type of touch interface.
Bed dear bed
how I loves thee.
In a cold winter’s night
thou keeps warm me.
I close my eyes, I go to sleep,
thou helps me dream
by counting sheep.
Bed dear bed
how I adore thee.
Every night I crave to be,
sung to sleep by lullabies from thee.
Since I first got my iMac I always wondered why the machine would suddenly just wake up from Sleep in the middle of the night. I didn’t touch it since at night I prefer to sleep (or else I must be sleepwalking). I initially found a way to fix this but it came up again with the update to Mountain Lion (which just reset the preference).
Go the System Preferences and hit Energy Saver. There you’ll uncheck Wake for Wi-Fi network access (in German: Ruhezustand bei Netzwerkzugriff beenden). I figured that must be the reason because at night my router automatically turns off wireless and just before I get home from work it turns it back on. For me it did the trick.
Here are two images, one from my machine (in German) and one found on Google for an english machine.
Since the iMac found its way onto my desk I’ve been bothered with the heat generated when playing Diablo 3 (or possibly any other game) – just as with the MacBook Pro. The only difference: The MacBook’s fans were howling to stop the torment, the iMac just swallows the pain it seems. Don’t get me wrong, the system is not overheating and temperature is well within its limits. In fact, the CPU doesn’t even really heat up. It’s more the graphics chip and the power supply. But for me as a former PC user who built all the PCs himself and always had a good (and mostly quiet) cooling this is just a bit unusual.Read More »
The Gameslinger 