HaXXed Blog

This is the concept I’m settling on, finally. I promise! ; )

Still some tweaks to do, but it should be up soon.

Its really, really time for a redesign. The last (V2) site was made in 2007, when I was still getting grips with CSS/XHTML. Since the latter half of 2007 I’ve been working on a couple of concepts. Here’s where they are so far:

Futureshock Concept (click the image to go to the demo)

Basic HTML Concept

For me, the choice is clear. Go with flash, but tone down on the video, effects, and anything that makes flash a pain to view on lower spec computers. I’m probably going to with black/grey as the background, with glowing lights ect.

The additive colour blending mode intoduced in Flash 8 really got me thinking, and I’ve been experimenting with that a bit. Here’s one of my tests. Orb concept. Again, performance is an issue. Resize your browser a bit smaller to increase performance.

With being a student, comes expenses. With having expenses comes a laptop, almost making up for the expenses. I love my MacBook in certain cases, but I love it even more now that I can share my traditional keyboard layout and mouse with it and my PC. Continue Reading »

Besides being an excuse to use alliteration, I have a good piece of info for all the LG Rumour (Rumor in the US, codename LG260).

But before I go into how good this phone can be, here’s my mini review:

Text entry rocks. Don’t be worried about the small keys, your thumbs will be happy in no time. Tip - Click the orange key twice to lock into number/symbol mode.

On the other side, the mobile browser is pretty much a 3 legged dog. Though it does the job well enough for simple text-based sites, its also slow and has trouble reading just about any file format other than midi, as well as much difficulty installing applications (more on this in a bit).

Just about every site I tried to download free apps from gave me this error:

906 invalid descriptor - Missing Attribute (Content-Type)

Heres how to get around it:

Continue Reading »

Below are a few digital paintings done with Art Rage. Get it if you have a tablet! Now!

Everything real is brown.

Continue Reading »

Nintendo, you rock. Who else can continue a first party series so long. Your horses are still not dead, which is pretty amazing in itself.

(yes, I subscribe to Dilbert daily comics)

While Mario Kart itself isn’t that innovative, playing with the wheel makes it worthwhile. It really is more precise than the analogue stick, and just plain fun. What I find TERRIBLY WRONG with it, is… *rummaging through Nintendo stereotypical response box* onlin… no wait that’s pretty good. My one sort of small issue with this game is the track selection. There just isn’t enough. Repeats are great for nostalgia value, and some of them really are great tracks, but that still shouldn’t prevent them from coming up with 32 new tracks to fill up all the cups. I haven’t seen some really great tracks from GCN either, like Baby Park and Yoshi’s Island.

Continue Reading »

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Though Half-Life Episode 2 has been out for months now, I’ve been revisiting the experience and can’t get enough. Valve clearly has the whole process down, a forerunner in PC gaming IMO. The story is gripping, the action finds you short of breath. It really delivers on the interactive movie dream that seems to be the developer’s grail.

Even more enjoyable than a good story is an engine that runs it well, something very rare. The Source Engine continues to outpace all other engines, offering great looking HDR lighting, extensively used physics, and new cinematic technologies to push immersion forward while maintaining a stable framerate. Valve seems to be the kind of company that takes new technology only shown before in tech demos or written about, and applies them.

If you couldn’t tell already, I’m looking forward to what they do next.

This is the first time I’m using Writer, but I can tell already a lot of thought was given to this deceptively simple app. All major blog platforms are supported; all I had to do was tell it what WP version I was running, the directory, logins, and here I am. Integration is excellent.

Mail is pretty convenient and much needed for a number of reasons. I love having a dedicated non web-based app on my desktop. Its better to let the OS do the interface instead of a browser, IMO.

Photo Gallery is also very nice. I’m not super impressed by the interface - nothing new there; but it does have some really nice quick and dirty photo editing. Very much like an iPhoto with Vista shininess. Also, it does one thing that has been painful unless you have Photoshop, editing skills, or a $50 stitcher program - panoramas. Having this built in is a huge help, and it does a great job of normalizing the images and correcting the distortion.

That said, Vista is still ’slow’ on my machine compared to XP, so I’m sticking to to old faithful. I have 2gb of ram, an Intel E6600 and Vista is still noticeably sluggish on general tasks. With time and SP1 hopefully that will all fade away…

Well, off to get another 2gb of ram!