wget http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/carrot.swf
emerge -av swftools
swfextract -s 31 carrot.swf -o carrot.mp3
mplayer -loop 0 carrot.mp3

Or replace with any other Orisinal song :)

Note: -s 31 depends on the sound index number, which may be different – do swfextract foo.swf to check.

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The ThoughtScore Project

The first project is my ever-incomplete ThoughtScore animated movie. The highlight of this update is that there has been an animation update with a few extra shots added. You can view the ThoughtScore Blender animation here, or click the screenshot below.

You may view more feedback on its BlenderArtists forum thread (page 4).

The project also got awarded its own domain with some content I pulled together quickly in about an hour. See ThoughtScore.org.

I do have a couple more scenes prepped and awaiting animation & rendering, so more updates will be popping up.

live.WIPUP

WIPUP, a way to share works in progresses, has experienced the yearly dip in content due to the holiday season, but live.WIPUP (the bleeding-edge iteration of WIPUP) has received experimental design changes and slight SEO updates.

live.WIPUP -like the projects it was built to showcase- is also a work-in-progress. It’s incomplete, but as always, hopefully a step in the right direction. Text link to check out live.WIPUP – share your works in progress here.

Real Life

Apart from badminton, taking a break from learning Chinese, globetrotting, and client work, this picture says it all.

Well, that’s it for a brief summary of what I’ve been up to. I hope everybody have also had a great Christmas, New Year, upcoming Chinese New Year, and awesome holiday.

Related posts:

1. Back in business
2. Cinematic Perception film entry
3. Getting things done.

Unfortunately I do have a couple of domains left on GoDaddy for legacy reasons and laziness on my part, but this was the final straw to migrate away (to Namecheap, if anybody’s interested). If you own a domain with them, spend the extra 5 minutes to migrate. It’s worth it.

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Related posts:

1. Whatever happened to failnation?

Shanghai is cold. But Shanghai also has a lot of delicious food. The latter excuses the former. When I’m not resisting the cold and tanking up my stomach, I have experienced the usual touristy sights such as The Bund, public parks, ancient Chinese garden- oh, what’s that? No mention of the Great Wall or Tian’anmen Square? Yes, because that’s in Beijing, not Shanghai – which I will drop by and enjoy in the near future.

There was also a brief meet-up with Patrick Lauer (bonsaikitten) which was interesting given my previous geographic inconveniences meaning I could rarely meet up with anybody. If anybody else is in the area or knows of any FOSS events, give me a shout.

Every day is a linguistic challenge as I plough through new words to learn, but probably the best thing about being in Shanghai is that being back in an asian country means I play Badminton twice a week again.

Will be posting more updates to WIPUP in the near future.

Related posts:

1. Any FOSS-related events I should check out whilst I’m in Shanghai?

I was recently asked to convert a .ppt, or Powerpoint slideshow document, into a three slides per page, horizontally centered, one on top of another, with frames around each slide. Powerpoint itself offers several printing options, including a 2ⁿ per page (ie. 2, 4, 8, etc) as well as handouts, which can do 3 per page but are incredibly small and have writing lines besides the slides.

Luckily, Powerpoint can save the .ppt into a .pdf, and there are plenty of PDF manipulation tools on Linux, and are generally much more readily available than on Windows. Scribus is an option, but after some searching I discovered “pdfnup“, part of the “pdfjam” package. This is the command I ended up using:

pdfnup --nup 1x3 --no-landscape --frame true --batch foo.pdf bar.pdf etc.pdf

For a full explanation of the commands, you can try looking at its manpage, or pdfnup --help, which is much more useful.

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1. Tech Tip #9: use Klipper to automatically post to a Pastebin.

Pastebins are a really useful way to share snippets of text. However it’s sometimes a bit cumbersome to have to open a browser window, type in the URL, paste it in, click submit, then copy the URL to share with your friend. That’s why things like wgetpaste exist – small command-line utilities to automate this process and return the URL. wgetpaste isn’t the only one, of course, but they’re all rather similar.

Klipper is KDE’s Clipboard manager – whenever you copy something, via right click -> copy or ctrl-c, it gets added to your clipboard. Klipper allows you to navigate through it – so that you can paste something you copied a while back, or set up custom things to paste, or even – which is what I’ll talk about today – set it to automatically perform an action on the paste. The most common use is to automatically open a link in a browser if you copy a link from somewhere.

What we’ll tackle is to get Klipper to autopaste our clipboard item into a pastebin, and return the URL to us. So just set it up as shown below:

And you’re done! Copy something, press ctrl-alt-r to invoke the actions menu, click “Pastebin”, and now the URL of the pasted item will be in your clipboard for you to ctrl-v to your friend. Neat, eh?

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The homepage of GetKDE is essentially a hub with a teaser. The site structure itself is split into three sections, Software, Community, and Development.

Those completely new to everything KDE will start off in the Software section, via clicking the “Explore how KDE benefits me” option.

It is then important to market only what is relevant to the user – for KDE, this depends a lot on what device you have. KDE’s objective isn’t to convert users to Linux, however happy that makes our inner penguin, but instead to help people enjoy and make the most of their computing experience with KDE Software.

As a result, this is the page they will see. It’s objective is to make it clear what components make up a computer, which are Apps, Workspaces, and Framework. Different components will interest different people, and the availability of components are also limited depending on what the user is using. For example, Windows and Mac users won’t get a Workspace, but will get Apps and Framework. Mobile users get different Workspaces to non-mobile users. And so on.

The reason this initial segregation is so important is for several reasons:

1. They are introduced to the branding jargon that KDE users, eg Apps, Workspaces, Framework and understand how it fits together
2. This allows highly specific and targeted marketing in the next stage – no use comparing Kate to GEdit for a Windows user.
3. Users understand the scope of KDE development that it isn’t just limited to desktops/laptops and are flexible to bend around what people use.

In other related news, the GetKDE.org homepage itself got a bit of a cleanup, which you can check out live via the link here, or in the below screenshot.

That’s it for this post! More to come!

For those particularly interested in this project, progress is tracked via its WIPUP project space.

Related posts:

1. What’s up with KDE.org & Hello GetKDE.org
2. The kde-www war: part 4
3. The kde-www war: part 3