I am a huge opponent of repeated attempts to extend copyright so that new works never fall into the public domain. I’ve explained this many times and, while Creative Commons is not public domain, per se, it tends to give the same benefits. Namely, someone can take the content of someone else and make something new with it. This new work doesn’t diminish the original at all and enriches the public space with something new and creative. Witness yet another such great video by Remyyy:

Remember before when I had my Tampa pictures included in Schmaps? Well, looks like they’ve chosen one for Baltimore. I hope they choose it for the final version. Here it is:

I’m pretty excited at the prospect of people seeing my pictures when they look at the map for Baltimore.

Available in 1280x1024 and 2560x1024

edit: I was going to write something to go with this and I was talking with my wife and forgot to do so.

I noticed that the previous large image was a bit blurry as well as having bad lighting. So I fixed the lighting, added a wall, and it looks a lot less blurry now. So this is now my desktop background on my Windows computer.

Here are some more test renders I’ve done for Sugar. First I created an advertisement for the beer similar to the ones you see in a typical restaurant. I used the GIMP and the fact that backgrounds in blender are transparent.

Not bad, eh? I did later fix the light color of the ads. It had to do with the materials settings I was using. By the way, do you notice that the ad is encased in plastic as in the restaurants? In some of these shots you’ll see how it distorts the image behind it.

(Title is reference to my favorite Megatokyo tshirt)

In addition to the label for the Ketchup bottle, Pete also provided me with a label for a beer brand. Some people expressed confusion - I was the one who created the bottles and Pete created the labels I’ve applied. As before, click on the image for a larger size.

Power outage last night that lasted longer than the UPS could keep the computer up. Sorry if this prevented you from visiting. As far as I know, everything is now back to normal.

Pete of Penguin Pete’s has recently become something of an Inkscape ace so I asked him to help me with some textures on one of my planned animated shorts. This short is currently titled “Sugar” and I’m working on it at the same time as " Wedge". So here is the first fruits of that collaboration with Pete. I may fix the proportions a little, but here we go:

For a while it seemed as though Debian couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of distros decided to be based on Ubuntu instead of Debian. For months on end people talked about whether Debian was still relevant and whether its long release cycle was to blame. Well, now it seems that perhaps some of those derivative distros were a little quick to jump on the bandwagon! SimplyMepis has decided to be based on Debian again.

The founder said that each time Ubuntu is build from scratch and it was hindering the ability of SimplyMepis to have a sensible upgrade path. I don’t know enough about that side of Linux distros to know how different that is from what most of them do, but apparently Debian does not have that problem.

After 3-4 days of rendering (fluid reflections and tranparency take forever to render), here is the video outcome of the splash shots I’ve been showing here. Enjoy!

Fluid Simulation: Creating a Splash from djotaku and Vimeo.