I expected this to be an awesome triumph because I spent a good deal of the weekend trying to get blender installed on bulletbill. It finally got installed, but it doesn’t work. I had to do some editing here and there to try and get it to work and I think that’s part of the problem. I’m not sure exactly how to redo this in freeBSD, but it’ll probably be another month before I dedicate the time needed to it. That said…..

I decided to give myself a little “final exam” and practice everything I had learned in Blender so far. So I combined soft bodies, the physics engine, and the fluid simulator. It wasn’t exactly trivial - for example - I had to tell the physics engine to consider the towel to be a ghost because of the way the soft body engine works in combination with the physics engine. Also, I had a lot of issues with getting the water resolution low enough to get it to fall into the cup instead of hovering over it. Overall I really liked it and if I could do something different I would have had a bit more water so that it would have splashed out of the cup or done something a little more interactive. Nevertheless, here it is, my final exam:

I got to engage in one of my favorite activities this week - building computers! My father-in-law’s Windows Vista laptop was going so slow, he often thought it was about to kernel panic. So I saw the computer he wanted at dell and spec’d it and found out I could do it for $400 cheaper than dell and it’d have Windows XP so he would have a nice fast computer.

From my in-law’s 25th Anniversary:

They finally got Epiphany-extensions up to the right level! So now the only thing I need to have everything working perfectly again is to finish up editing xorg.conf so that I can get compiz running again. I also submitted my hardware profile to the team via Smolt. Hopefully that means more support for my hardware. YAY!

It turned out to be pretty easy. I used the nVidia tool to generate my xorg.conf and then just had to do a couple of tweaks. First off, since it was running as a non-privileged user, it wasn’t able to save to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So I had to save it to my desktop. Then I had to edit it because the nVidia tool didn’t want my second monitor to be an awesome resolution, so I had to edit that manually. Then I just copied it to the right spot. Now it’s perfect. Here’s my xorg.conf:

Man have I been busy. I’m finishing up the wedding I shot a couple of weeks ago, so I haven’t had time for much. I think I have nVidia up and working now, although still just one monitor is working. glxgears gives me 1340 FPS - is that good or bad? I’ll have to look into my blog and see what happened last time. hmm….looks like I didn’t write anything down before. Well, now I have it here for the record for next time.

Updating via Livna nVidia did not completely fix the problem. As in the last time I upgrade I am now down to one monitor and I hate it! I feel so cramped! I’m still updating some stuff so hopefully this’ll be fixed soon.

While I’m at it….I don’t like the default Gnome icons for Fedora 7. I find them very ugly. Also the font used is very hurtful on my eyes. I wonder if that has to do with font patent/copyright issues.

But that’s my own fault. I thought about switching away from nVidia before updating, but I didn’t. So I’m updating - there’s 1 GB worth of updates. So when I get home today I need to install the nVidia drivers from Livna.

The upgrade went off without a hitch except for one thing: in grub, it did not make my FC7 kernel the default! And, obviously my FC6 kernel was gone. No biggie, just select F7 kernel in grub and you’re good.

Here’s a great mashup Remyyy created with vintage footage and a recent song. It matches up fairly nicely!

You don’t know me from Remyyy on Vimeo