Woodstock.IsTheGeek.net

Mattahan, born Paul Davey is someone I admire as much as any man. He is a DeviantArt legend. Not only is he a brilliant artist, but he has focused at least some of his creative zeal on icons. ‘Icons?’ you ask? Yes, icons. Those small, seemingly insignificant collections of pixels that you click on to open files, applications and other such widgets on your computer, mobile phone or other electronic device.

It’s all a bit weird, but you know me, I love weird. The perspectives he uses are all just that little bit off centre, so things don’t quite look right, bu still look really cool.

Be advised, the icon collections are quite sizable, but they come in PNG format with a cool script to convert them to ICO files for Windows.

I’m hoping he’ll release some more stuff soon, but until then, you can check out his collection at http://mattahan.deviantart.com/

Hokay, so… we went to the show today. It was, interesting, but it was also not interesting. Obviously it’s been a few years since I visited a Sideshow Alley and ho dayum the prices seem to have sky rocketed, but that’s not really a surpise.

We had a look at the various exhibits including the caged birds which were interesting. There was a cockatiel that had the colouring we think Mario will have when he grows up. But really, that’s as good as it got.

Earlier in the week, Rachel noticed that our resident llamas down the road were missing… they went to the Show too. She was most excited to see them being judged today, including several that didn’t seem to be too fond of the judge. He copped a couple of good kicks which of course meant those particular llamas didn’t win anything. We heard the owner of one on the way back to their pen saying something along the lines of “I won’t be showing him off again, getting too old and grumpy like his old man.” I’m assuming she was talking about the llama, but she might have been talking about the judge.

Not being a fan of rodeos and the like, there really wasn’t anothing “happening”, so we came home. Visiting Mr & Mrs Zillmann tonight in their new box-filled house. That will no doubt be a little more lively than the Show.

Now that I’m blogging again, I need stuff to blog about. (Since I’ve decided to keep work and blog seperate, it’ll have to be something else. So, here we go. The Dell Studio One 19 came to my attention today, so I had a bit of a look at it, and figured I’d post something for nobody in particular to have a read…

At first, it looks like Dell has taken the proven (to some) concept of an all-in-one PC and made a few stylistic changes to make it their own. The Studio One 19 looks nice. It’s less boxy than any iMac today and it comes in a range of colours. While this isn’t a huge deciding factor for most people, I think people must be making their family PC a centre piece of a room – like the TV is for more than most – and as a result, they want it to look good.

Now for the really cool bit… it has a touch screen! This is brilliant. Of course, I’m not entirely sure what most people might want a touch screen for – particularly if you had kids (or big kids for that matter) with grubby fingers. It’s a nice touch, and I guess if you combined it with an application like CoolIris, it would make for a very nice “3D” browsing experience for the supported websites  – google image search, youtube, flickr, facebook, just to name a few.

The choice of a 16:9 ratio makes me think that Dell are also aiming this at a small-scale movie market. Most wide screen computer monitors are 16:10 – for example, my 19″ wide LCD monitor has black bars when watching a DVD or playing on the xbox 360, but it also has a native resolution of 1440×900. I would think though, that the 18.5″ display may cause some people problems – especially gamers – because of the non-standard resolution (1366×768). The ratio change may also cause some stretching if your standard wide-screen game images as well, but that probably isn’t going to be a big problem for many people – we’re past games that use geometrically correct shapes for everything.

Speaking of gamers, the one thing that does let this machine down, is the choice (or lack of) video cards. It comes with an nVidia 9200 or 9400 video adapter as standard, without any real options to upgrade. What this means, is that if you want to play anything substantial (flash games don’t count), you’re pretty much going to be out of luck.

The 4GB of RAM is ok, and I guess the part of me that wants more, isn’t going to be happy with a system like this that I can’t pull apart and tweak anyway. I know that Windows 7 is supposed to be less resource hungry than Vista, but I certainly wouldn’t be locking myself in to *only* 4 gig with a new operating system due out before the end-of-life on a brand-spanking-new PC. I always believe in giving myself some room to grow – whether it’s a computer, a house, or a belt, the same theory applies.

All in all, it has a lot of things to make people say “Oooh” and “Aaah”, but I’m not sure that’s enough for AU$2500 worth of computer system. I can build a faster, stronger, albeit more chunky, machine in an afternoon for the same kind of money.

Greetings and welcome to a new edition of the Ravings of a Self-Confused Indoor Enthusiast. The last time I posted was over a year ago, and the last time before that was almost a year earlier still.  That being said, when I moved all of my old posts over to being Private, they all got datemarked as today. So, if you’ve got access to all of those, you’ll just have to guess when they were written. Chances are, if you’ve got access to those, you can remember when the various things happened. I know that looking back, I know I can put my finger on most of them, at least within a month or two.

There will be many things here that will most likely upset people and cause controversy. As a general rule, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. Names, dates, locations and other identifying details will be avoided at all costs, but chances are, if it is about you, you’ll probably figure it out.

Peace