After carrying out a handful of tabletop role-playing game events for schools, colleagues and such, I believe it is time to offer these services actively instead of sitting down and waiting while I do other stuff. As such, I have created a new YouTube channel. The first video, the intro, has been posted below. I plan on doing interviews with other tabletop gamers concerning education (especially language learning) as well as training and teambuilding. Check out Hishgraphics Games & Training (still not sure about the ampersand). I’ll try my best to upload new (and old) videos about my running tabletop RPGs and other such events. Please subscribe and wish me luck for my future plans.
Continue readingCategory Archives: Hishgraphics.com
A Second Wave of Posts
The blogging muse also hit me hard this weekend and I struggled to post backdated articles as many as I could. So many things I ignored over the last two years. Here are all the blog articles I posted this past couple of days: ART: Renegade Jennys and Boilerplate Jacks (3 Dec 2020) Anya Visits Lakes and Mountains (26 Dec 2020) The Cousins at Kangar Street Art 2.0 (27 Dec 2020) A Woodball Weekend (13 Mar 2021) VTR: The Atlanta Requiem (12 Dec 2021) Aidiladha in Selangor (12 July 2022) More Aidiladha in Selangor Tales (15 July 2022) Kangar Jaya After Dark (22 July 2022) Alien RPG: The Mei Mei Scenario (7 Mar 2022) A Book Writing Project on Pulau Pinang (25 Feb 2022) Ten this week. I don’t know if I can maintain my backdated work output in the coming weeks…
Continue reading
A Wave of Posts
Some months ago, I threatened to post new blog entries after the long pandemic-induced funk I was in. I have seriously not been writing new blog posts this last couple of years. Perhaps posts on social media were easier to write. Whatever I wrote on this blog was not enough to fill out the happenings over the year. Until this past weekend. This Past Weekend I sat down, picked the blog entries I wanted to write, resized photos, and made a number of posts. More than a few. In this blog entry, I wanted to document all the posts I made over the long weekend so I would remember that these posts belonged to this batch. Anya the Co-teacher – 2021/12/27 Anya Surprises Irfan – 2021/12/31 A Translation Project on Pulau Pinang – 2022/01/23 Old School Mates in Lumut – 2022/05/01 An Aidilfitri in Sitiawan – 2022/05/04 Lazy Unboxing of […]
Continue reading
The First Post of an All-New Hishgraphics Blog
The blog is thirteen years old this year. It has gone on for far longer than I could have imagined back then, with now over a thousand entries. I selected the CMS formerly known as Pivot to build my blog back in 2005. Two years ago I replaced old, vapourware Pivot with PivotX, its successor. Little did I know that the PivotX was already also vapourware by that time. Welcome to the Hishgraphics WordPress Blog! For the time being the old blog still exists at its original URL here, but I have decided to install WordPress into the root folder of the web server and eventually use WordPress for everything. I decided on WordPress because it is currently actively supported by developers. Meanwhile PivotX will slowly continue to fail as old PHP functions are depreciated over time. Over the previous weekend (and after two weeks of experimenting on a test […]
Continue reading
Hishgraphics Illustrations Video
I’ve been playing with OpenShot Video editor on this Linux Mint laptop. I downloaded the one in the repository, which was v1.4. Keyframe animation was a joy with it, but I was not able to copy and paste animation properties from one video clip to another. I did a little digging and I discovered that OpenShot 2.0 had been released recently and this version allowed me to copy paste animation properties. After the upgrade, I discovered that I had less control of the animation than I did with 1.4. (For example, I could go to and easily set the values for the start and the end of the horizontal position each clip with 1.4.) In any case, this is the result of my tinkering about with OpenShot. I am certain I will get the hang of it as I keep using the program. How is this for a TV commercial?
Continue reading
Three Structures
It appears that I have upgraded the blog from Pivot 1.4 to PivotX 2.3.11 after many months – no, years – of fretting if the CMS which has been vaporware for quite some time would die on us without warning. It was either get left behind by technology, or to upgrade. Upgrading runs the risk of causing irreparable damage. Especially to the ones and zeros that made up this weblog’s flat file database. Last weekend, I made the plunge. It took me seven hours plus change just to import the old database to the new and there are still issues to be resolved. For example, the URL of each entry used to be ^blog/pivot/index.php?id=(number). Now their URLs end with ^blog?e=(number). I need to read up on htaccess code to allow all the multitude of links I have dropped all over the internet over the years to be redirected to their […]
Continue reading
Happy 10th Anniversary To This Blog
This blog is now 10 years old. I don’t belieeeve it! That means it nearly time for Vin and Sila’s 10-year anniversary.
Continue readingHishgraphics Gallery v3.0
[[image:2013-gallery-index.jpg:The Louvre… or something:center:0]] If you hadn’t noticed, the gallery on this site had been out of commission for many, many months. Any links to it, such as the one at the top of the left column of this blog’s index page, points to the DeviantArt gallery instead. It died because of my monkeying around with the v2.0 gallery‘s Coppermine CMS. I have now rebuilt the gallery using Zenphoto, and have spent all last night and this morning populating gallery. I’ve also ensured that there are links to released products. It’s not nearly finished. There are some more customers’ gallery to set up and populate. Click here to check it out! What’s v1.0 gallery, you ask? It was the one before the Coppermine gallery, which was made from HTML files that I wrote. I remember at the time being sad I did not have any artwork I could post that […]
Continue readingWhat Happened at the Coral Reef?
[[image:evagoestothebeach-cover.jpg:Well, she does!:left:0]]I wrote, dedicated and presented this book to baby Eva – currently less than half a year old – at the gathering last week. I hope some day Mei & Andrew will be able to read to Eva, and she will wonder what a crazy nut Uncle Hisham is for writing this book. Eva Goes to the Beach is now on sale on Lulu.com. It’s a perfect book to vex 4-8 year old young ‘uns with a simple storyline involving a trip to the beach, a swim around the coral reef, an undead shark and ice cream. I asked earlier what happens to the little girl who was diving at the coral reef? Check out the following image for a continuing image, and click here to purchase Eva Goes to the Beach at Lulu.com. Believe it or not, the book has a happy ending! [[image:eva-page-07.jpg:ZOMBIE SHARK!!!:center:0]]
Continue reading
Secret Library Revamped and Re-released
After a long time taken out of the market, I’ve finally re-released the old The Secret Library children’s book as Irfan’s Secret Library. The story is basically the same, with some edits to the body text. There are no new artwork. Everything is from the older version of the book. It’s up on the Products page here [Page no longer exists]. You can see samples of the interior at its Lulu page here. It’s been a while since I worked to create a brand new children’s book. I should get back to it. The next one should concern animals or dinosaurs or something.
Continue reading
Tagging The Entire Weblog
I seem to be on a roll this weekend. Yesterday, I spent some hours trying to fix the layout in Internet Explorer, as noted by Sila in the previous article’s comments. This morning I’ve started to activate the Pivot weblog‘s Tag feature. This should help further categorising the articles herein, and to search them based on the Tags. I find that its more versatile and faster to implement than the Categories feature. I will leave the Categories feature on the left column for the time being. If it still feels redundant to have it on after some time, I will remove the Categories block. After tagging the last 80 entries, I have discovered that the tag cloud looks like this:
Continue reading
The Layout Goes South
I’ve been trying to code the CSS file for the weblog all morning. I woke up and thought, how nice it would be if the site was optimised to a width of 1024 pixels. So I tinkered. And after altering and jury-rigging a bit of code here and a snippet of script there in the CSS file, I have arrived at a temporary solution before I needed to stop working on it. Here’s how it looks like using three different browser types on a 1200px by 800px screen: The left column is still there. It’s just overlaid by the centre column. I shall return to fix this for IE users.
Continue reading
Dreadwind Rising: A Blog Upgrade
Many, many months after the latest version of Pivot had been released, and remember that this weblog uses the Pivot content management system to… manage its content, Hishgraphics blog has finally been upgraded. It was for a very long time running on version 1.30 codenamed “Arcee”. As of yesterday, this blog has been upgraded to version 1.40.5 codenamed “Dreadwind”. It feels great performing the upgrade manually – uploading files individually and rebuilding everything – instead of using some automatic upgrade application. After about 4 man hours or so, it’s back in business. Not that it really matters for the regular visitors of the blog, but there you go. As a behind-the-scenes bonus, here are some pop-up images of the administration interface:
Continue readingThe Gallery Is Upgraded
After a long time of uploading images and hard coding the html (and later php) files into the Hishgraphics Gallery, I’ve now deleted the old setup and replaced it with a proper Coppermine Gallery CMS. It took some time to get the hang of the system, but I think I have it down enough to get by. There are still a bunch of stuff from the old gallery still not updated to the new place, but I’ll fill it up as time goes by. Sorry, I don’t intend for the gallery to be a community site – that’s what this blog is for – so comments and ratings are disabled. Just enjoy the stuff I got on there. [[image:gallery_upgrade01.gif:Dark Finale and Symphony of Light:center:0]]
Continue readingFinally Playing with PHP
Referring to some help sites and pulling back the curtain to look at source codes, I finally got the nerve to save some text files which I wrote on a text editor as php files, which I usually always do in html! Not really ground breaking stuff; all I did was to include the navigation and the footer parts into the main files from separate php files. Later I’ll see about learning to link the php files to a (gasp) MySQL database! I should have started to learn this stuff earlier. It would have gone a long way in teaching me stuff that would help me in my project paper for college. But in the meantime, both the Hishgraphics Gallery and the workplace website are now fully php-ized! Yeah, they look the same from 2 days ago, but the Legos I used to build up those two sites are all […]
Continue reading
This Weblog Is China-Friendly
It’s been in the news since last year that China has been censoring internet into the country. So, thanks to a website called greatfirewallofchina.org, I am able to test whether the subject matters of Hishgraphics blog entries are forbidden to be view from within China. Apparently, we’re not blocked! Yay! (Or, who knows, perhaps because of this post we will be before long, heh.) Greetings to everyone reading from China! Peace, y’all!
Continue reading