by lusting over these computer setups spotted over at Gizmodo.

All I know is that this guy has a really high electric bill. I really love stuff like this. I used to have a blue light similar to one of the ones in this room, but it burned out.

And this guy……has my dream setup in terms of monitors.

Some of the usual as well as some interesting ones which have crept into here:

I had the ramart theme for over 2 years, since announcing it in this post. I’ve had it for practically the entire life of this blog, so I thought it would be fitting to record how it looked. Perhaps I can go back to it if I can convince someone to redo it as a Wordpress 2.3 compliant theme or perhaps it’s time to move on. I haven’t really decided just yet.

Other than widgets, I think that tags are the best feature of Wordpress 2.3. Up until now I kept adding more and more categories and things were starting to get ridiculous. But now with tags I have a wonderful middle path. Categories are for broad swaths of posts and there shouldn’t be too many. (Or at least not any more than I currently have) But now, instead of making a new category to talk about Compiz or X11, I can just file it under Linux and add the corresponding tags. Plus, tag clouds are fun!

First of all, I was unsuccessful in getting my previous theme to work with the new features. Second, the current theme I have selected is god-awful. However, I really, really like the widgets idea a LOT! So I’m going to need to find a better theme that supports widgets. I tried about 4 different ones, but this one was the best. Really, the only thing I don’t like about it is that images flow out of the boxes instead of the boxes expanding. I’ll work on it or just roll back to my old one and forget about widgets.

I’m going to try and upgrade my theme to work with the latest Wordpress feature - widgets. Therefore, the blog might look a little ugly as I attempt to get the theme to work.

It took around 4-5 hours total, but I finally got everything categorized! Now to backup the database and get on with other things!!!

I’m getting a bit bored and my wrist is starting to hurt a little from operating the mouse so much. I’m not done recategorizing my blog posts, but I only have one year’s range left - March 2006 - March 2007. Hopefully that was a twelve month period in which I didn’t write too much. Boy-oh-boy did I learn my lesson about not backing up. Also, I was jumping from 2.1 to 2.3 so perhaps I was bound to run into those problems. Once I’m done with that, there are some pretty neat developments which have recently happened on vimeo as well as some exciting news on “Sugar” and “Trick or Treat”.

Broke categories….now all of my posts are uncategorized….

everything else appears to be working well….

now to fix the categories again….

I was reading 3D World Issue #95 and they had a tutorial for Blender in the Questions section. It involved having a ball hit a wall of bricks and knocking them down. This is tedious to animate brick by brick, but relatively simple with the Blender physics engine. The following animation only took me about 15-20 minutes to get set up.

Collisions from djotaku on Vimeo.

But you may notice a problem here. The ball appears to accelerate as it leaves the bricks. That’s because the tutorial was just a quick example of how to do the task at hand. So I set about to find out what was going on and why my ball was not obeying the conservation of energy. It turns out that the settings as described in the magazine kept continuously giving the ball energy. So I had to adjust it so that it would only get energy at the beginning. After that, I got something much more realistic.