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If you are sitting at home bored, and not swamped with uni work like me… heres an interesting picture to make to put on your wall!
Using a few programs you can easily import Half Life II models into photos you take yourself. All you need is:
- A digital camera
- A reflective sphere (which you see in a few photos) to capture the lighting of the real-life scene which you want to composite your model into.
- A small program called HDRShop.
- Big program called 3D Studio Max.
- Renderer such as VRay.
- Tools to get HL2 models into 3dsmax: GFScape, a HL2 Model importer, and a texuture and model converter
Ok, so maybe it isn’t that easy, but with results like the one above, and many others someone has made here, I’d say its worth the effort. If your interested, check a tutorial out here, and I’d love to see anything you guys come up with…
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Indonesia’s justice system has once again proved itself to be one of the most pathetic on the Globe.
Schapelle Corby is an almost household name in Australia, all of the nations people are aware of her situation and the trial and over 96% of Australians believe that she should be released.
At 1:38pm EST today, Corby was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment to be served in a Balinese institution. Outrage filled the courtroom as the deliberation was read, with many Australians (Particularly Schapelle’s Mother and Sister) screaming at the Judges and Prosecutors.
Corby has been given the opportunity to appeal the decision, by Wednesday 2/06/05 however this is a strange process - normally the defendants are given 170 days to appeal the decision from the court.
A calm Alexander Downer gave a press conference on the topic, in which he showed no attempt to fight for Corby’s extradition. He stated that they are willing to give two QC’s towards the case, however they must “re-address” the concept of partially funding the woman’s defense.
Downer believes that “bullying” other countries courts into a verdict is often counter productive, however it seems that BILLIONS in aid after the Tsunami and in other disasters in which Indonesia required help.
Amy Stroud of Harvey World Travel, has informed sandstorming.com that many travel agencies are now trying to convince any Australians wanting to travel to Bali to consider flying to a different nation or to travel within Australia.
A demand of justice will be made when the case is heard in the High Court but until then Australia is still obviously being REEMED by a country who wouldn’t and couldn’t help us if we were in a time of need.
Indonesia has made a big mistake, and the Australian government must fight for a just outcome.
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Billions of dollars has been made off the series of movies called The Star Wars that is beloved by millions. Many big fans of this space opera, do not know that the fantasy epic they enjoy is not a simple entertainment, but Satan’s Battleground for their very souls!
In this “Final Episode� of the Star Wars, EVIL triumphs using the Force - a greater force they claim than God! This is a Dangerous LIE! This is no mindless entertainment, but an attempt by DEMONS to distract you from your real 75 year mission on planet Earth, to give yourself to Jesus! Do not trust a Yodah puppet from Satan’s dream factory, trust in the Word of the Bible!
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I really wonder where people come up with these ideas…
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How do you create a movie to please hundreds of millions of fans, following the storyline of previous movies reputed to have been some of the best movies of all time. You can’t. It’s impossible. I’ll be damned if George Lucas did not go close though. The early reviews of Revenge of the Sith were all surprisingly good, based on the bad raps of the padt two films. Now, as the bloggers and B-class journos have their chance to see the film, the bad reviews are leaking onto the net. Why? I think they want to be different.
The first 30 minutes of the film comes across as a comedy, but it’s a good one. It’s not lame, it’s cute. After that the stunning special effects and roller coaster storyline kick in, and it’s time to strap yourself in for the remaining two hours. This movie rocks, and would have to be rated as one of the best movies of all time. It’s up there with the originals, if not surpassing it. I think the film’s critics can be summed up well by the comments of someone on slashdot:
All these mindnumbingly long reviews are so many wasted electrons to me. “Oh…(according to me, The Most High and Important), Lucas can’t write, he’s a hack, blah blah…or “OMG! they screwed up the CGI, and in scene 42, timecode 1:42:02:0324, the lightsaber doesn’t exactly follow Yoda’s arm movement! The entire movie sucks!”
Get a life. It’s a movie. Escapism.
It is at your own loss if you don’t see The Revenge of Sith. You are missing one of the greatest masterpieces of all time.
10/10
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As you may have noticed, we are huge TV show fans here at sandstorming. We love our TV. TV shows have something that movies don’t… the ability to develop a storyline and characters, to a level not even imagined by movies. There is another big difference though, movies rely on ticket prices to support them and pay the bill, tv shows rely on networks paying for shows, and networks rely on advertisers.
Bitorrent is the latest peer to peer technology which allows users to share files over the internet. Unlike its predecessors, its fast and it’s efficient. Video is being transferred at higher then TV quality, in under the time it takes the episode to play. Why would you not want to download TV episodes, look at the features that it offers over normal TV:
- Higher Quality
- Ad Free
- Available as soon as the episode is first released, no matter where you are in the world
- You can play pause and rewatch as you please
Here in Australia, we often wait several months for episodes to be released, if ever, and then offer suffer horrible programming with the shows often being put on late at night. Many shows are never released, simply because the costs to buy the show aren’t worth what the network expects to receive back. Australians now rate second in the world for downloading TV shows… and do you blame us? There IS no alternative. Buy the DVD? Would you spend $100 to buy a DVD of a TV show that you have to import from another country? It’s like buying 3 or 4 albums all from a band you’ve never heard. There IS NO LEGAL ALTERNATIVE
Let’s look at LOST, without a doubt one of the top-rating shows at the moment. Its strength though, is that it isn’t individual episodes with a storyline each. Its like a 25 hour movie split into 25 weekly pieces, if you miss one… you’re completely out of touch with what is going on. Do the directors of these shows think that they are creating shows so shit that if someone misses an episode they’ll stop watching it completely and then buy it when the DVD comes out? Why waste the money?!
87% of people claim they would download episodes legally off the internet. The reason it isn’t being done is this scares the hell out of the networks. Where is there place in the future if people can get all their needs on the web? The law in Australia is a mess as it is. It isn’t even legal to record tv shows off the TV for personal use in Australia, yet I’ll bet you even the Prime Minister probably does it. I’m yet to see someone get charged for taping MacGyver whilst going out for dinner with his mother-in-law though.
In the future I’d like to see a worldwide company like Coca Cola sponsor and episode. They could put 3 or 4 ads throughout… they’d be assured the users would watch them if they were short and sweet… and at the same time they could whack a logo in the bottom corner of the footage. This would ensure a third party was not cutting the ads out and re-releasing. Everyone wins in this scenario except the TV networks. You cannot please everyone.
No one is winning at the moment. Users are breaking the law. Advertisers are failing. Networks are broadcasting at ridiculous times. Production companies are having there shows leaked before they have even finished being edited…
The 20th century is over, its just no one but the users have realised.
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Bit of a monopoly fan? Can’t get enough Slashdot? Gotta have your boingboing feed? Well monopoly is dead… show that little old man with his walking stick and glasses where to shove it. Print out blogopoly and get to it!
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Starting the 21 st of May, Dr Who will be screening in Australia on ABC. Don’t let the fact it’s not on 7, 9 or 10 put you off though, as this show is definetly in the top 10% of content on Australian TV at the moment.
The show follows the adventures of Rose and The Doctor who travel through time and space in the Doctors space ship, which, well, looks like a police telephone box. If you don’t have any idea of the kind of show I’m talking about yet, take Star Trek… mix it up with British Comedy…. add 2 tablespoons of ridiculous ideas and add half a cup of impossibility… and you have Dr Who. The series is a remake of the original Dr Who.
The show is better then most Sci-Fi around, and a welcomed change from the very typical formulae they now seem to follow. Its also a million times better then watching the skanks in the Australian Big Brother house. So check it out… Saturdays @ 7:30pm on ABC (As of 21/05/05)
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Here is an interesting website with art work from childrens book as far back as the 1800’s. The pictures show how they invisaged future space travel to be, and some are quite comedic. One of the early ones shows what looks like an early biplane flying to the moon and back.
One of the books says that by the time the 1980’s and 1990’s arrived, we would have established a permenant base on the moon. Kind of like the original Lost in Space series I suppose, where they thought in 1999 we would be starting to colonising the planets surrounding Alpha Centauri.
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It’s been a while since we covered hacking here on sandstorming. In fact I don’t think anything has been posted specifically about hacking since my tutorial on how to hack your schools network way-back-when. Well for those of you that decided to (not) heed my advice, and now consider them quite the hacking genius, put aside your FBI cracking skills and nab yourself an xbox.
WindowsITPRO magazine is offering a free xbox to anyone who can manage to hack into a server they have set up running IIS 6.0, Microsofts Server Software. So far noone has managed to pull it off, so go have yourself a go.
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MPAA launched another offensive yesterday, suing 6 more tracker websites, this time of TV shows.
All the news about it here:
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=786
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5705142.html
God I wish they would offer a legal alternative first. Its like offering movies at the cinemasin other countries, and then never showing them on TV… and then bringing them to DVD years after they are orignally shown, whereby if you wish to see them you may import them from another country.
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If you are sitting at home bored, and not swamped with uni work like me… heres an interesting picture to make to put on your wall!
