I was given a mission to run the English Theatre Arts co-curricular course once again this semester. After seven weeks, we completed the entire run. Like last year, yesterday morning we carried out the seventh and final week performance under the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, this semester after preparing for a live online performance the students who are on campus informs me that there would be an internet outage until Tuesday, three days after our performance day. Within 12 hours, the four theatre troupes led by their directors, produced full videos of their plays. Each student acted at their respective locations recorded it and sent it to the editor. After the editing, they sent it to me in time for a livestream session. In a worse turn of events, unlike last year, I was unable to connect to YouTube live to livestream their video. This was after a […]
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A Virtual Eye For OBS
Finally OBS Studio virtual camera works! The Story So Far… I have been using OBS Studio to record classes online. I post these recordings on YouTube so students would be able to review the class. The students would do well to review the lesson delivery, activities they did and instructions I vomited out my piehole. I had been attempting to use OBS Studio for another thing, which is as a virtual camera to be used in Google Meet or Discord video chats. There are a lot of neat things you can do with it such as live transitions, camera switching (if one had more than a single camera), overlays and neat filters as well. In Recent Days… I have been having problems with installing the plugins that would allow me to use the OBS screen output as a virtual camera. I cloned the two different modules required, obs-v4l2sink and v4l2loopback, […]
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Mint 20 is Here
I noticed that there as a Mint update notification at the system tray yesterday. When I looked it up, it was the upgrade to 64-bit Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon. Its codebase is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS codenamed Focal Fossa. Since this is a Long Term Support system, I decided to upgrade ASAP. It took two hours or so, and in the end I was running Mint 20:
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Theatre Arts Final Livestream
The English Theatre Arts co-curriculum class of 2020 have finally reached the end, which meant it was time for the final performances of their plays. The first and second classes in past years performed live, the former in a classroom and the latter on stage, for their seventh and final week. However, the third class were unable to perform live on stage thanks to the Covid-19 outbreak. Not only it was forbidden to hold mass gatherings (such as a stage play), most of the students if not all were away from campus at their respective hometowns under light lockdown. So I decided for the students to write screenplays instead of stage plays, then film their parts separately. Each troupe had a director, writer and video editor as part of their non-acting crew members. They submitted their scripts for assessment and their videos so I could organise a livestream of their […]
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Newly Minted OS
The Situation Last year some time, I upgraded the Linux Mint on this laptop from 17.0 to 17.3. In the last couple of months, I pushed it higher, upgrading from 17.3 to 18.0 to 18.3. However, this was where I hit a brick wall. I was unable to upgrade further because of an mdm display manager issue. None of the troubleshooting guides I read solved my problem. Additionally, the 18.3 build I had was noticeably getting slower to boot up AND it froze for three minutes or more intermittently. The freezes were happening a lot when I had a Nemo file manager window open. Saving on LibreOffice also immobilises the machine. This was a frustrating new development. Even more worrisome, because I had to use the machine for online teaching. Finally, I have been wanting to use the latest Discord and Blender programs (among others). There are no new 32-bit […]
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Remote Teaching
One thing after another throughout my life, I have needed to familiarise myself with matters that I had never considered before. Because of this excellent plague year, I now teach my course online for the rest of the semester. After a two-week break during a worldwide pandemic quarantine, the university found its bearings. Thus I was ordered to begin teaching week 7 onwards through the interwebs. I taught my students from Irfan’s room in the back. So far it has been good. I still wish that I had an audience to interact with. No, that’s not right. I do have one, but I wish I could meet their eyes to judge their growing understanding of the lesson. In the meantime, I have set up my “studio” so to speak. I address my classes via Google Meet. However, the laptop which runs on 32-bit Linux Mint 18.3 has a slight defect. […]
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Desktop of a Street at Night
My latest desktop on this Linux Mint machine is “Tokyo Street Night” by an artist named arsenixc. I love the colours on this piece. It overlays a sense of peace over what could be a bustling street. Click on the image below for the bigger picture pop-up. Click here to see the image at its DeviantArt page. Bonus: Here’s the same street in the day and at sunset.
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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?
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New Gear From Atok and Opah
Although having accepted a new job, there are many problems that we have yet to overcome. One of the biggest perils to my final semester in my attempt to finally earn a Bachelor’s degree (even though I’m married) was that the old laptop, who was my companion through adventure and hardship, is gone forever. (Or not; you can never tell with these techno-organic life forms.) Its hard disk drive gave up the ghost a month before we moved up here. I have a whole semester of assignment writing to complete and no new-fangled electronic typewriter thing to do them with. Not to mention, no money to buy a new one. Then one day, Atok and Opah Irfan sent me a package at my office (because being out in the sticks, we were not certain if the post office would deliver to the right house) and in the box was a […]
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This Pangolin is Precise
So it came to pass that if I needed to use the new Bamboo Pen graphics tablet, I had to upgrade my operating system. Long story short: I decided on totally replacing my ArtistX 1.0 OS with Ubuntu’s latest Long Term Support distro, which was 12.04 also dubbed “Precise Pangolin”. After installing the sucker, I finally came face to face for the first time… with the Unity desktop! Click on the thumbnail above to see the desktop, including the Dash HUD. Searching Ubuntuforums.org, I discovered how make a 3rd generation Bamboo Pen work with the Precise. I also reread on how to set up the Benq scanner using Snapscan’s binary file so I can scan using Sane or GIMP. Finally, I installed MyPaint I found on Ubuntu Software Center and discovered that it worked great with the Bamboo. Below is my first doodle-type sketch using the tablet in conjunction with […]
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Arise, Newer Graphics Tablet; But Not So Fast!
Once upon a time, I bought a Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet. With its stylus I made many a drawing, til its USB cable died screaming. Actually it died quite some years ago. In the interim, @plasticstitch had told me he had an unused Bluetooth-connected Graphire tablet and sent it by air mail to me where I made many more drawings. This device acted finicky with a Linux operating system, and I was using an Ubuntu distro. One day I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 by dint of installing the Ubuntu fork named ArtistX 1.0, and the device refused to talk via Bluetooth to the tablet. Today I bought a new tablet, a Wacom Bamboo Pen. Its matte-black housing looks sleeker than the silver-hued Graphire. I’d prefer to have purchased a Wacom Cintiq 24HD, but the Bamboo Pen is the only one I could spare cash on. Incidentally it’s the cheapest […]
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Wallpaprometheus
I appear to have a new wallpaper for the Artist X 1.0 desktop. Click to expand it. It’s that ship sent by Weyland Industries. S.S. Lollipop or something. Can’t wait for the movie. I’m not saying it’s ALIEN, but it’s ALIEN.
Continue readingCalibre Ebook Reader
I have discovered and installed the free ebook reader and management application named Calibre to read books and stuff! Apart from reading ebooks, Calibre can also manage your digital book library, search for ebooks in various locations from the Amazon Kindle store to Feedbooks.com and synchonize with a mobile reader such as my smartphone. Seeing that I’m pretty OCD about book cataloguing, I’ve used Calibre to ensure all the books’ metadata, cover image and such are meticulously entered. Thanks to Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, I now have quite a lot of books in the queue to be read. Calibre also has a list of DRM-free ebooks on its website here Below is the ebook management interface screencap. Click on the thumbnails to view larger images. [[popup:calibre-capture01.jpg:(thumbnail)::center:1]] Here is the interface used to edit the ebooks’ metadata, displaying E.E. Doc Smith’s Triplanetary. Calibre could search the metadata and cover image online […]
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This Desktop Has An Owl
There’s an owl on the desktop.
Continue readingLegacy of Tron: A Tron Legacy Review
[[image:tron-legacy01.jpg::center:0]] After 28 years, the sequel to Disney’s Tron is finally upon us. Tron Legacy, produced by the original movie’s director Steven Lisberger and directed by newcomer Joseph Kosinski, had a unique problem. Tron had a connection to the computer and gaming lore of the late 70s and early 80s, with its simple vector graphics and sounds. The home computer for the consumer was still rare. The general public had very little clue on how computers work. The World Wide Web is still almost a decade away. How can one create a modern sequel to a movie based on anachronistic world view of technology? Very simple. Just build upon the even more fantastic elements of the first movie and move on from there. SPOILERS BEYOND! SPOILERS! The first movie appeared to visually be the inner workings of a computer. But if you think about it, how can you make actuarial […]
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Amarok 2.0 Woes… Then a Solution!
A few nights ago, I decided to upgrade the Ubuntu operating system from 8.10 Intrepid Ibex to 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. (Yeah, yeah. I should be at 10.04 Lucid Lynx right now. I’ll get around to it.) Everything went along swimmingly with the applications I’ve had installed… until I ran Amarok. Amarok version 1.something had been automatically upgraded by the OS level-up to version 2.0. The user interface looks somewhat different. But more important than that, there was no sound! Upon executing the application the systray warned me, “Phonon: KDE’s Multimedia Library. The audio playback device HDA Intel (AD198x Analog) does not work. Failing back to default.” Playing any songs, a warning would pop up, “Too many errors encountered in playlist. Stopped playback.” When I played the same songs using Totem, they worked perfectly. So I did a some Googling and discovered this solution which worked. 1. Create the file libphonon.conf […]
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