Download the game here! (Windows)

Phew! This weekend I participated in the Ludum Dare game development competition. It’s a competition where you have to create a game completely from scratch by yourself in a weekend. Or 48 hours to be exact, of which I used about a little over half. The competition was extremely demanding. Not only because there’s a ton of stuff that goes even into the simplest of games but because I’m not a very experienced programmer. When I’m programming, it totally feels like I could speak a foreign language but I only know the curse words. I can always get the point across but, for the most part, it’s not very elegant. Luckily my coding weapon of choice, LÖVE, proved to be a good one. It was very accessible for a novice programmer even though I had only installed the framework the day before!

Graphics and music, on the other hand, were pretty easy for me. Business as usual. It was fun doing all those little funky sprites and I even managed to make the music in less than an hour. Overall, I’m extremely pleased in the end product and I learned tons even though I hit a few walls during coding. There’s obviously a great number of flaws in a game like this but the only one that I have regrets of is the skill level. It’s bloody hard! Basically, EVERYTHING in the game kills you. I was aiming for Super Meat Boy or Trials HD style frustration/fun balance but I think the skill ramp is just too damn high and the deaths can be too unfair at times. If the walls would bounce you around when hitting them instead of killing you in a split second, it’d be much better. I tried to hack together pretty simple collisions for the level blocks but it didn’t work out really well so I just went with the simpler and more brutal model instead. Despite all this, the game CAN be fun if you just bear with it. Just be prepared to die a million times!

But hey! It’s a game! That I’ve manage to make completely by myself! In two days!! My previous game programming experience has been limited to one small prototype made in Processing that had maybe one tenth of “stuff” in it compared to this game so this has been a gigantic leap for me.

]]> http://peeba.gfxile.net/2011/08/21/dystopian-future-underground-city-a-game-i-made-this-weekend/feed/ 0 http://peeba.gfxile.net/2011/07/05/legend-of-grimrock/ http://peeba.gfxile.net/2011/07/05/legend-of-grimrock/#comments Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:11:44 +0000 peeba http://peeba.gfxile.net/?p=805 I just realized that I haven’t told the, quite probably very very numerous, readers of my blog what our very own indie game dev company, Almost Human, is working on. It’s Legend of Grimrock, a dungeon crawl game for iOS, PC and Mac. Check it out and remember to join the growing horde of fans on Facebook!

Download as 192kbps CBR MP3

———

I Want the Sun Back

Let’s start it off easy with some pretty gloomy and dark ambient.

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———

Slim Mind

It starts out as drum and bass but then starts drifting in another direction. That seems to be pretty common for me when I try to do drum&bass. Jyri U. recorded a few guitar things for this to beef up the background near the end.

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———

Acid Rock

I started working on a remix of a silly old Belgian techno song but it ended up pretty damn far away from the original. But I don’t mind that at all. Psytrance.

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———

Genera

Experimenting with a little bit more laid back and progressive sort of sound.

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———

Dark Deeds

Another experiment in the progressive and deep side of psy. I feel I have committed something unholy by using a dubstep wobble bass sound in a trancey tune.

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———

Breaking of symmetry

This is dubstep, I suppose.

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———

Phew. That’s 43 minutes of music right there! Come to think of it, I could’ve turned this into a nicer package; a digital LP with cover graphics and some more polishing, mixing and coherent mastering… Well, maybe later. If you want all the songs, here’s a ZIP package with the MP3s above!

People seemed to like the first dissection so why not write more? I couldn’t figure out an answer for that question not involving any worm holes and time traveling so I suppose I’m mandated to write another one. If you’re interested in the idea behind the series, go and read the preface to the first dissection although I think it’s safer that I repeat the disclaimer that these are the methods and ideas I happen to work with and these writings are not intended to be technical manuals on how to do stuff. Instead, think of these more like an in-depth “making of” documentary that you might watch solely for its entertainment purpose but where you still might discover something useful. There’s a some sort of primitive fascination in discovering how things are made. Some of the methodology I use I have learned from others and some I have discovered by myself. I believe that all experienced photographers have followed a similar path so pick the stuff that plays with your strengths or eliminates your weaknesses.

Photo Dissection

Intro

I believe I may have skimmed over the appeal of black & white photography a little bit too hastily in the first article. To expand on the topic, I chose this photo because I think it’ll illustrate my some of my points pretty nicely and in addition I can talk about composition some more:

It is a photo I took in 2006 in New York. The place is Central Park at the Great Lawn, facing south towards downtown. So let’s go and pick the picture apart!

On the field and picking the shot

I’m afraid there’s not that much to say about the exciting choices I had to make on the field this time or the hardships I had to suffer through to get the photo. One might say it was a walk in the park. But I won’t since it’s a terrible pun, even on a Youtube comments section -level. Anyways, there we were, walking in the park and BOOM, a field comes up, and BAM BAM, I take two photos.

Of these two, the topmost is more appealing to me. The one on the bottom doesn’t have that many interesting things to look at besides the Manhattan skyline. I usually am a fan of simplicity but this photo does need a little bit more to look at and maybe something that tells more of a story would be cool to have too. And those are provided in the other photo by the two characters clad in red in the corner along with the tree that frames the photo’s left edge.

Come to think of it, maybe I’ll have to take back the earlier “BAM BAM” since it might imply that I did not stop to think of the picture I was taking. I always have some ideas of the composition when I shoot a picture. In fact, I’ve found that I very rarely crop my photos afterwards since the composition I’ve framed behind the viewfinder on the field seems almost always to work best. Which reminded me that I dislike working with cameras that don’t have viewfinders to peer through. The viewfinder blocks you from seeing the rest of the world around the picture frame and lets you really concentrate on the composition and how it works and plays with the frames around it. It also helps keeping the camera more stable since you can keep your arms close to your body and you can even push the camera slightly against your face for an additional stability point.

Okay, back to the pictures in question. There’s a helpful guideline in landscape photography that I applied here: decide if you want to show more of the sky or the ground. Usually, but not always, having a composition where the sky and the ground take up equal space end up having very boring and awkwardly rigid compositions. Now this rule, like all other rules, have a million exceptions. For example, it might work nicely if there is some symmetry between the top and bottom halves of the photo, like for instance a tree sitting on the horizon, casting a shadow directly in front of it. I represent the school of thought where you got to know the rules before you break them. Admittedly, the choice was very easy for me to do here. The Manhattan skyline is a very important and dominant element in the scene and it needs some breathing space around it so it won’t feel cramped.

Composition can be an abstract topic at times. So what would be a better tool to analyze the composition than turning the photorealistic scene into something abstract! A lot of artists do it physically by squinting their eyes, reducing the view in front of them into a two dimensional canvas on which some entity or creature, probably of a malevolent origin, has painted an arrangement of vague shapes that have colors and value. I do pretty much the same thing but mentally. I reduce all the elements into simple shapes and try to appraise how the composition works. Here’s a visual representation I quickly whipped together of what is often going on in my head when trying to judge a composition:

With this kind of approach a number of things become more apparent that might have otherwise slipped under the radar. The city’s skyline is, as far as subject matter goes, the most central element of the picture but looking at this abstract composition it certainly does not seem to be entirely so. It probably is the first thing your eyes look at the picture but at some point they will gravitate towards the bottom left corner where the two characters are standing. But its not their shapes that are grabbing the attention. Instead, the gravity comes from how they are placed in connection to the other elements of the picture. They are the only shapes in the photo that cut the dominating horizon line so if your eyes travel along that line, that’s where they’ll end up. Also, if you are looking at the sky, you might end up following the tree on the left hand side towards the characters.

In other words, the characters are in the intersection of the largest dominating horizontal line and the largest dominating vertical line. The vertical line is less apparent since its shape is more vague and it twists and turns but it clearly travels vertically. Maybe the human mind also has a bias of identifying trees as vertical shapes too? Other things to note are how the two people to the right slightly balance off the two people on the left. Also that the red shirts along with the other points about the composition might just push the picture too far off balance to the left. But let’s get back to this issue in a minute.

The way you simplify scenes in your mind’s eye is probably very different from mine. You might want to try and look at the original photo now and form your own picture to see if there are any differences compared to mine. How detailed is your view? Is your treeline one fell swoop or is it a lumpy line? Do you picture in the clouds or do you regard the gradient in the grass? How do you see the people in the scene and is the tree on the foreground a solid part of the treeline in the back? Is the image in black and white? All of the answers are equally valid. What is important is that do you get some sort of useful data from this without thinking too hard so it’s applicable on the field so that your framing, shooting position, zoom or focus can be adjusted quickly while taking the pictures. I don’t go through the mental picture as analytically on the field as I just wrote, I merely take a gander and decide whether or not it makes for an appealing composition and then adjust if I realize some potential for improvement.

Processing the photo

I have to admit something. I often prefer black and white because it is easy. If we consider a b&w picture, it is essentially just values arranged on a canvas. That’s one dimension of data dropped on a two dimensional plane. As soon as you add hue and saturation on the picture, you’ll have to deal with an extra dimension of data. The arrangement of values have to work together individually but they also have to play along with the colors. As far as composition is regarded, they can easily make the picture less organized. And this picture is a fine example of colors messing it up somehow in my opinion. It’s fine that the composition gently draws the attention towards the two dudes in the corner but once we add in the red color of their shirts, they become too prominent. Red, being a complementary color of green, really pops out from the middle of the grass and the trees. It would probably have been great if there would have been a small blotch of red somewhere towards the right to ease the balance but the lone island of red is just too much to handle without upsetting composition too much. If the shirts were of a more stealthy color, the attention of the viewer would be drawn to the characters only after exploring the skyline and possibly other parts of the picture first instead of being violently grabbed by the crimson mafia and held hostage in the corner of the photo.

I could very well just mute the saturation of the reds or turn them into another color in Photoshop but then there would really be nothing exciting in the colors, bringing me back to the point I presented in the first dissection that if the colors don’t add anything of value to the photo, I usually decide to get rid of them. So let’s do that:

Much better already but I think we could still do more to make the picture more exciting to look at. And herein lies the second point about why I often resort to use black and white. You can manipulate the values of a black and white image much further and much more easily than a color photo. If you decide to increase the contrast in a color photo, the colors can easily oversaturate and color noise from the digital camera sensor can be amplified to intolerable levels. It’s just much harder to produce a natural result if you want to go very far with manipulating the values. In this picture, the sky has clouds but they are almost burned through to nearly clear white. There’s no hope of recovering them with natural colors. But with black and white, I can apply a relatively harsh levels layer to pop up the contrast in them and mask it on the picture and still produce a tolerable result. I also fine tuned the composition by emphasizing the lower left corner by having an overlay layer with a radial gradient that is centered to the two dudes standing on the corner, thus arriving at the final result:

As a side note, if you are at this point sobbing that how perverted photography has become with the invention of Photoshop, I remind you that many of these things have been done for many decades in traditional dark rooms. For example, the striking brightness contrast of Ansel Adams’ landscape photography was largely gained through the techniques of dodging and burning to adjust the brightness selectively in the photo enlargement. Dodge and burn are still a part of Photoshop terminology along with a lot of other tools (possibly most interestingly unsharp mask) that have inherited their names and functionality from old school photography techniques. In fact, to keep my post processing tasteful, I often have the mental guideline where I avoid doing manipulations that would be impossible to replicate with a film camera and dark room.

Conclusion

Even though the photo is not among my best ones, I do like it a lot. It’s one of those photos that are fun to look at and let your eye wander around since there’s lots of nice details and textures on the foliage, buildings and the sky. But the people are what makes this stand apart from what could otherwise be a rather unremarkable touristy photo. The topic of the photo suddenly ceases to be the beautiful park with an almost theater set -like city backdrop and it turns out to be a photo about the people observing said vista. However simple, there is a story in the picture now. The symmetrical poses of the guys on the left and of the couple walking on the right are rewarding details for the viewers to observe. In essence, the topmost reason why I like this photo is because there’s lots to discover in a picture that at first appears to be just a snapshot of the Manhattan skyline. The somewhat unorthodox and imperfect composition that emphasizes the lower left corner manages to be functional and appeals to me personally.

Recently a coworker of mine has been getting back into photography and I’ve spent some time advising him and talking about how I approach photography. When I started breaking down the thought processes and some of the post processing methods I’ve used, I realized it might be worth sharing. In this introspective post, which hopefully turns into a series if enough people find this information valuable, I take one of my photos and explore the thought processes behind it, how I shot the photo “on the field” and what did I do to it afterwards and for what purposes. This is not meant to be a step-by-step guide or a definite best approach to photography: I just try to share my approach to photography which happens to be comfortable for me. It might not work for you at all but at least I hope it will make for some interesting reading and prove that taking good photos is not an entirely random process. Whenever it is irrelevant, I will steer clear from purely technical aspects of photography, especially the gear, since there already is too much technology-wankery going on in the Internet regarding cameras. I also have to elaborate why I think whatever picture I pick is a good photograph and I hope that it is understood that I don’t mean to gloat. That being said, all my views are entirely subjective and it’s cool if you disagree with me on any of the points I present. Photography is hard to judge objectively and in this sense it really isn’t any different from any other forms of art. Which actually might be a pretty valid definition of art, by the way, but let’s not open that can of worms right now. ;)

Since this is first of its kind, I’d love to hear if there’s any feedback regarding the content or presentation of the article! Or if there are any questions that I left unanswered in the text.

Photo Dissection

Intro

For this first issue of Photo Dissection I picked this photo of some elderly people I shot in Shinjuku, Tokyo in 2006 (I shot the photograph, not the people… Just so that we’re clear) mostly for the convenient factor that I used this photo as an example in one of our discussions with the previously mentioned coworker earlier this week. It’s been a while already but I can remember the situation and the process behind this photo pretty clearly:

Of course this is just the final photo I ended up with but there’s a lot of things that you might not realize just by looking at the end result and that process of how I ended up with the final picture is the core of this article. So let’s dive in and see how I ended up with whatever that thing is that I ended up with… is! I love ugly sentences!

On the Field

Here’s the four photos I took on the field in the span of 9 seconds:

What attracted me to take photos of this particular scene was the old man standing still, fiddling around with some papers and a cell phone, and the cool geometric background. BTW, that 9 seconds thing wasn’t my vivid memory talking, it’s from the metadata embedded in the picture files. Anyways, the photos are visibly taken in a hurry, the camera is kinda wobbling around from shot to shot and they are all a bit crooked but I had two elements of composition in mind when shooting the photos that are consistent in all the pictures: the old man on the left hand side and, to counterbalance him in the composition, the vertical wall on the foreground on the right hand side. Composition-wise there is of course a lot more going on in the final picture than just those two elements but I used them as the stationary anchors to pin down an otherwise hectic scene. When there’s a lot of stuff going on and the scene is constantly changing, it’s often good to try to find some very simple elements to hold on to and just shoot as many pictures as you can, only concentrating on those pinpoints and letting the rest of the scene live its life. Afterwards you can see if you get lucky. In this case, I think I got extremely lucky.

Picking the shot

When I later had uploaded the photos on my computer and I was checking out the photos, the third photo jumped immediately at me. I feel I was incredibly lucky with how the people happened to be placed in front of the background. The background is essentially divided into a grid and the people are in every other square. Each of them is under a light fixture on the ceiling. All of the people visible are dressed very much alike, facing the same direction. And the fact that the last person (or actually two people if you look closely!) is almost covered by the wall might sound like a bad thing initially, it actually seems to enhance the picture. To me, the photo almost reads like a series of comic panels. Too bad that the unprocessed photo is pretty uncomfortable to look at somehow. It feels like the photo is under a lot of tension. And it is! Let me explain…

Processing the photo

I love photos that look very geometric and graphical in a sense that there appears to be more order in the way things are laid out than there conceivably should be. Often man made things are very geometric, like the background here is, but when taking a photo of such a scene, the distortion of the lens and perspective do their best to instill some chaos to the photo. Generally, geometric grid-like compositions lead to a very static composition. Diagonal lines indicate a dynamic composition. In the unprocessed version, the uncomfortable combinations of these two factors leads to a composition that feels very restless: the sloppy diagonal lines try to lazily push the composition in motion but the rigid grid lines of the background hold it in place, creating the tense feeling. So the obvious solution to this problem is to fix the sloppiness of the lines and make them adhere more closely to an actual grid laid on top of the image:

Quite a difference, isn’t it? I only rotated the picture a bit to compensate the crooked camera and used Photoshop’s transform tools to mangle the image to get rid of the perspective distortion, just like someone might do on the field with a tilt and shift lens. Now the picture is geometric but much more relaxing to look at. Your eye can wander around the picture without feeling like it is being forcibly pulled to other directions by the crooked lines.

Since I often go for sort of a minimalistic look, I prefer to turn my pictures into black & white if the colors don’t contribute anything meaningful to the photograph. Here I thought they served only to distract the viewer so I made it monochrome. The other adjustments I did were some fairly basic tweaking of the contrast by using curves and levels and I also added a little bit of vignetting to make the composition to be a tiny bit more center oriented and to make the details pop out a bit more in the dark clothes. I think I’ll dig deeper into these aspects of post processing with some other photo of mine. I’m sure I have better examples for these simple techniques. To conclude, here’s the final photo once again:

Conclusion

This photo has slowly become one among my personal favorites. It’s not a spectacular scene or an epic landscape but the way the mundane narration unfolds on front of the comic panel background makes it feel there’s something more profound about the photo than was originally conceived. You could easily draw some parallels to the rhythm of modern life from there if you were to over analyze the photo even a tiny bit. Also the fact that if you only glance over the initially boring looking photo you’ll probably miss most of what’s going on regarding the characters and their placement on the background makes it so much more magical to me. Could it be that I’m the only one who sees the photo this way?

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Delta as Indicated. Downtempo electro.

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Muses of Helicon. Goa trance.

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A psytrance song that I just recently did:

Download as 160kbps CBR MP3

———

Some trance that I had to compose because I was dared to:

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This starts out a bit triphoppy, a bit dubsteppy but ends up being a bit jungley:

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———

This is a remix of this video’s soundtrack using the above song as a basis for a hiphop beat:

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———

Ambient:

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Check them out here:
subdivision02
subdivision03
(Java required)

Here’s a few images I created with a custom .pdf exporting versions of the programs:

Download as 192kbps CBR MP3

I’m actually quite happy with the mix myself and I think the timings were kinda solid this time around too. To celebrate the fact, I decided to do some simple cover graphics from an old Holga photo of mine and name it properly. So I present to you: Subspaces.


Tracklist:
1. Nasser - Timeless
2. Duca - The Tour
3. FM Radio Gods - Musak Attack
4. Gaudium - 4 Outputs
5. Paulina Cewe - Incipit
6. Ace Ventura - Presence (Motion Drive remix)
7. Vibrasphere - Follow Me
8. Quantize feat. Buttersonic - Think Different
9. Ace Ventura - Sao Paulo
10. Protonica - Final Step


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During the last few years, there has been a new surge of great goa trance music, a subgenre many people thought died in the turn of the decade. Only the first song here is still from the 90s era but the rest are newer. Too bad that I don’t have Merr0w’s album yet…


Tracklist:
1. Talamasca - Jungle Storm
2. Afgin - Tribute to the Sun
3. Red Gravity - Momentary 29
4. Filteria - The Snail Keeps on Crawling...
5. Antares - Aurora
6. Lost Buddha - Regeneration
7. Vox - Mayana
8. Artifact303 - Energy Waves (Positive mix)


Download as 128kbps CBR MP3

Even though the name of this DJ set is named after an influental month in the Gregorian calendar, I’m not intending to do new mixes every month. I’m just too lazy to think about any fancier names for the mix. Some of the transitions in the mix can be shocking or cruel and are not recommended for children or expecting women.


Tracklist:
1. Talamasca - Obsessive Dream
2. Ananda Shake - Inside the Sound
3. SynSUN - Dancing Machines
4. Space Buddha - Legendary Lighting
5. Wizzy Noise - Sputnik
6. 1200 Mics - Rock into the Future
7. Astral Projection - The Prophecy
8. Technikal - Summassault (Phil York remix)


Anyway, here’s three mini songs I did with Korg DS-10:

Some dubstep-inspired warble-warble-warble with a subbass sound I accidentally managed to produce:

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Goa trance (be careful with the volume since the levels are quite a bit higher on this song than on the previous one!):

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… I don’t know what this is:

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As a bonus, I’m going to include two of my older tracks from about three years back. These are the most “complete” songs I’ve managed to do. Naturally, these are NOT made with Korg DS-10 but with Buzz on a desktop computer. They are both more or less psytrance-ish.

john peeba – iso pala

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john peeba – hyhmis

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http://peeba.gfxile.net/processing/kainalokarvasimu/

http://peeba.gfxile.net/processing/pensseli/

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Tracklist:

1. Vibrasphere vs. Ticon - Dewdrops
2. Magic & Witchcraft - Oudoen
3. Gaudium - Set or Reset
4. Koan - Watermarks (Behind Blue Eyes remix)
5. Dualsnug - Deceptive Noises
6. Human Blue - Atom
7. Vibrasphere - Floating Free (Krama remix)
8. Magic & Witchcraft - Between Colours
9. Wizzy Noise - Lost Atlantis
10. Gaudium vs. Dualsnug - Killer
11. Ace Ventura vs. Lish - The Light


Or actually before the practical stuff let’s be superficial for a moment here and talk about the looks. If you want to be cool, don’t buy this. This is a seriously ugly laptop. And not even in the good sort of nerdy and engineery way the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads are. The tx2500 is just a collection of elements that are considered cool nowadays: silvery plastics, blue LEDs and glossy black surfaces that attract fingerprints miles away. The underbelly of the laptop looks like a plastic version of some amateur modder’s first Quake wall texture: it’s a messy collection of beveled surfaces, grates, screws and it’s got more hieroglyphs sticked on it than the other side with the keyboard on it. The hinge which swings the display around when you convert it to laptop mode also makes the whole thing look more brittle even though the hinge mechanism actually feels quite solid in practice.

Whisky bottle and a robusto sized cigar for scale

This is a 12″ laptop which I think is almost the perfect size for a laptop if you still want to keep it more or less portable. The laptop actually fits into my camera bag very nicely. Typing with the keyboard is also very easy and despite the size of the laptop, most of the keys seem to be positioned and sized correctly. Only the left shift seems a bit slim to me but it took only about three jabs with my pinky to learn to aim at it correctly. The screen’s resolution, 1280×800, sounds quite small but in practice it matches the physical screen size very well. I haven’t yet gotten around into trying to install 3dsmax or XSI on the laptop and I think that with those the display would be almost entirely covered with the GUI stuff. But for 2d applications and some 3d ones as well (like Silo and Mudbox) the resolution works well enough. Actually way better than I expected in the first place since I’ve grown accustomed to the 1600×1200 resolution I usually work with on desktop computers.

Like most, if not all, current convertible laptop/tablet PCs, you can convert this into tablet mode by swiveling it around a hinge and then tilting the display on top of the keyboard. The display latches in place with the magic of some magnetic hooks. Fascinating. The only place I remember seeing such resolute hooks prior to this laptop was in the Hellraiser movies. The Wacom Penabled touchscreen works very nicely. When using the pen, the display ignores all the other touches which is great since I’m used to resting my hand on the drawing surface. To help combat smudges left by filthy hands, HP has even included a cleaning cloth for the screen so you don’t have to stick the laptop in the dishwasher that often. And there’s also a pouch with a zipper included for the laptop if you’re one of those guys who like to bag all of their material possessions individually in the fear of matter meeting antimatter. Anyways, back to the screen. The feel of using the pen is very familiar and approachable if you’ve used tablets before. The somewhat slick surface feels a lot like the plexiglass surface on a Wacome Graphire 3. I have one on my home desktop computer so I felt instantly at home when I did my first doodles in Artrage. The pen itself is very basic. Just a straight ball point pen alike plastic stick with the basic exchangeable Wacom pen nibs, an eraser and a single button on the side. The button (the “right mouse button”) is very hard to press. It’s very flat so it’s quite hard to find and the pressing itself is a surprisingly laborous mechanical process. After using the tablet for a few weeks already, my pen button hit ratio is still around 50%. But drawing and painting with the pointy end is what you will be doing for the most of the time and it is very easy and the overall feeling of it is on at least the same level as on Graphires and even despite the missing ergo-stuff compared to those Intuos pens I haven’t suffered from any discomfort, pain or nausea caused by the tablet’s pen yet. But if you desperately need a more buxom pen, I think there’s one you can order from Wacom.

Actually, writing about discomfort, pain and nausea instantly reminded me of the vast customization options this laptop offers for the shortcut buttons on the lid. You know, the only physical buttons you have when you’re in tablet mode? Along the side there are four media buttons (play/pause, rewind, forward and stop) and on the front, next to the media buttons, there are four others. From one of the buttons on the front you can rotate the display which is handy if you want to work on portrait orientation (which is a bit more tricky than landscape orientation because of the much narrower viewing angles there). Another button opens the Windows mobility center where you can rotate the display which is handy if you want to work on portrait orientation. Then there’s a button with which you can launch a software to watch DVDs. I might be a bit behind the times but I’m used to this workflow when it comes to DVDs:

1. Insert Disc
2. Software starts

But that’s probably just me. Then the last button. It opens the HP Quicklaunch software with which you can launch a software to watch DVDs. What the hell? I surely need to rotate my screen more frequently than I need to move around the canvas or zoom in Photoshop so good call there HP. Ability to launch a DVD player in a blink of an eye, AOL Toolbar and syphilis were the top three items on my wish list when shopping around for a tablet PC and HP graciosly fulfilled two of my wishes.

But okay, who gives a damn about the default configuration since you’re going to customize it anyway, right? The funny thing though is that you can’t. There are some menu items somewhere in the control panel that claim to customize two of these buttons but apparently launching a DVD player is still such a brilliant discovery by HP engineers that they won’t let the customizing change things because the customers don’t actually know what’s best for them. Besides, who changes their brush size in Photoshop in this day and age anyway? So it was time to move onto heavier tools. There’s a brilliant application called Autohotkey which lets people do loads of powerful customization regarding shortcuts. The four media buttons were customized easily. I even scripted one of those buttons to alternate between two different keystrokes so I could alternate between two tools in Photoshop with a single button. Sadly, the screen rotate and the Windows mobility center buttons’ funtionality is so deeply buried somewhere that they can’t be manipulated even with Autohotkey. Luckily the two remaining buttons could be scripted with a bit of extra work since they required that I replace an exe-file (luckily Autohotkey has an exe compiler too!) and catch a command line argument to separate the two different button presses from each others.

So there I was, I had six customizable buttons on the lid which is just enough to use Photoshop with relative ease without constant tapping with the pen. After I got things set up in Photoshop just the way I wanted, I flipped the lid to enter the tablet mode just to see that the media keys don’t work at all while in tablet mode. Yes, the laptop disables half of the buttons on the lid, that are most easily and ergonomically accessed while in tablet mode, when you switch to tablet mode. There are some media buttons on the regular keyboard as well that can be accessed with the fn-key so there’s no reason whatsoever for anyone to use the four buttons on the lid, ever, so I would’ve preferred if HP would’ve shipped the computer with a loaf of bread instead of those four useless buttons that sit there mocking and laughing at me. Devices like this are the sole reason why we see so many alcoholics on the streets these days.

I decided I had been suffering a bit too much for my art so I decided to do something more lighthearted instead and I decided to install the drivers for the Behringer BCD3000 DJ console. It’s basically a MIDI controller for software DJing and it has an integrated sound card. A nice piece of kit for its price. This will hardly surprise anyone at this point but of course the sound card part of the drivers didn’t work at all. Neither the regular driver or the ASIO driver. But I was okay with it since who needs audio when DJing anyway? So in addition to the raging alcohol problem I gained from customizing the buttons, I was now starting to think that satanism really isn’t that bad of an idea. Self mutilation and all. Sweet.

So, I guess now it’s time for some sort of a conclusion. Drawing with it is really enjoyable and for the same price range you can think if you want to have a 12″ tablet PC or a 12″ Wacom Cintiq, which is in many ways a tablet PC without the PC (many people might disagree with this simplification but luckily I don’t listen to reason). Lack of customization still bugs me but luckily I had an extra Nostromo N52 pad lying around. It’s basically a small piece of a keyboard with a palm rest and a dpad for the thumb designed for gamers but it works with Photoshop and other programs just as well so that solved my shortcut woes pretty efficiently. Although using the Nostromo limits the ergonomy and portability of the whole thing a bit so I think I’ll only be using it at home. As if just using a tablet PC publicly wouldn’t make you look like a big enough of a dork already… And as for the BCD3000 drivers, I’m still awaiting a reply from Behringer but I don’t mind that much really since I’m only a bedroom DJ and I can do the mixing on my desktop computer just as well. So even though this computer made me feel like a Linux user from time to time, I like it very much now but I wouldn’t recommend it to others before HP gets its act together.

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What you’ll find posted on this blog will mostly consist of my photography and computer graphics (2D/3D) and a bit of traditional media too (well, mainly limited to pencil sketches for now I guess). If you want to know who I am, you can check the about page.