Pixomania
The blog of galaxyAbstractor
The new TweetDeck – is it a joke?
01 month ago
I’ve always used TweetDeck, and I always loved it. I liked its features – like support for longer tweets through deck.ly, translations, tweet shrinker etc. Then Twitter bought TweetDeck (so it seems). I have never in my life seen so many good features been removed. There is no longer support for the system tray, you have to keep it in your taskbar (which irritates me, it just makes me lose focus and clutters things up, why should a background app be in the taskbar anyway?). Then the option for choosing where the update popup should appear has been removed. Now it just opens in the middle of my second screen (which I don’t pay much attention to when I’m not chatting, that’s where I got my chat stuff like IRC, Skype etc). On another note on the popup, it suspiciously looks like some sort of IE frame or something, right-clicking it gives options to go back/forward and reload, and doing so completely breaks it.
Deck.ly support was removed, tweet shrinker was removed, translate was removed. A lot of other functions I’ve seen but never used are just not there anymore. I do understand that it seems like they started over from scratch, but at least add all the previous functionality before releasing a new version? At least release the new application as a alpha/beta until it got the same functionality as before, if it’s ever planned to be re-added.
Non-centered websites?
01 month ago
What’s the deal with these? I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one, but I have a hard time focusing on non-centered content. Like, a really hard time.
I guess it might work better on a 4:3 (example 1280×1024 resolution) screen where it isn’t very obvious and a big issue, and maybe the designers worked on a 4:3 screen when making the page. But, on a 24″ 16:9 (that’s 1920×1080 in resolution) widescreen (like I am using) it just looks horrible and it’s quite hard to concentrate on the text.
The last straw for me being annoyed with this was when the local newspaper, Skövde Nyheter, released their web edition recently. Here is a pic:
Skövde Nyheter
No centering at all. And look at that whitespace…
Update: I just discovered that my adblocker is messing up its centering. The page is actually centered, but I wonder how an adblocker can mess with the CSS like that to undo the centering…
Next up is Lerums Tidning, the local newspaper of my hometown:
Lerums Tidning
Also here you can see the page is waay to the left. And just look at that large chunk of whitespace left by it (one could assume that it’s a space for ads that is hidden because of previously mentioned adblocker, but I tested without adblocker too, it’s empty. The white sidebar is for ads though). The content isn’t all the way to the left though because of the sidebar menu, but still. The publishers other sites for other local newspapers they are in charge of are identical with the same issue.
You maybe have drawn the conclusion that these are smaller, local sites they didn’t spend very much money on the designing-part. I surely thought that was the case then BAM I noticed this:
SVT
This is the site of the Swedish national TV channel, SVT. You may think they can afford to get it centered, when you think about how they are forcing us to pay them because we own a TV. That page takes up roughly 50% of my monitor, 50% is whitespace.
In all of these designs, I’m more aware of the line happening at the middle of the page than aware of the content.
Am I alone being annoyed with this?
Nyancat in our windows
02 months ago
So some month ago I noticed that someone made a megaman post-it figure in an apartment window on the 10th or so floor in my building, and I thought for a while that I wanted to make something similar. I went to the store and bought some cubes of sticky notes, not knowing what to make at the time. Then I saw this, and I instantly knew what I would create. I had to cut all notes in smaller notes for the cat to fit in my window though. Then I had the idea to continue the rainbow in my friends apartment windows too, and I got approval from him for doing so. In total, 2120 sticky notes were bought (thought not all got used, but most of them) for a total price of 333SEK, around $50 USD. This is made on the 5th floor in the building called Skrapan in Skövde, Sweden. Here are some pictures:
Nyancat
Nyancat zoomed in
Nyancat with lights on
Nyancat zoomed lights on
Nyancat in the dark
Nyancat zoomed in the dark
So there you have it, Nyancat in our windows :3
Thanks to:
Sticky notes bought at:
Staples, Skövde
Akademibokhandeln, Skövde
And to my friend for helping me and letting me use his windows.
Updates!
06 months ago
I haven’t updated the blog in a while, so I thought I’m gonna write a short summary of my summer 
.
First, me and my 5 friends went on vacation to Budapest, Hungary. This was a huge succes and I think everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. Luckily, and suprisingly, we were able to live 6 persons in a 2 room apartment during this vacation without any problems, so we saved a lot of money . We managed to do a lot of fun stuff.
Next, when we got back to Sweden we attended DreamHack, world largest LAN party. It was the first time for everyone and we really enjoyed this too but the music was a bit too loud for our taste, it was almost impossible to speak to each other. I also won a 120GB Intel SSD in a Trackmania2 Canyon competition . I traded it and some Xbox 360 games for an Asus radeon 6870 GPU becaues it’s rather fast for Bitcoin mining. I sold my old GTX 460 for about 80% new price, so I’m happy with that too.
I applied for a college-level summer course in Programmingtechnique in Python, which is going well. It’s gonna be finished soon and I’m way ahead in the schedule.
I got into the college I applied to, Högskolan i Skövde, at the Webdeveloper- programming (Webbutvecklare – Programmering). I’m very happy for this. Some of my friends also got in but not under the same programme 
. Me and 2 firends was first looking at buying a 3 room apartment to share to save money, but we weren’t able to take a loan for it and decided it might not be a good idea. So we got each a 32m2 one roomer in the same house instead, but it’s quite expensive at $666/month, and that is without electricity and stuff.
I finally opened the LG P210 notebook I won from Intel in March. No one was interested in buying it so I thought why the hell not. It’s quite nice actually, but it was filled with LG crap preinstalled of course, which I had to uninstall. Here’s a pic of it:
FireCoin
0Lately I found out about Bitcoin, a virtual P2P currency. I wanted to make a way of easier payments and donations, so I created a addon for Firefox. It detects metatags containing bitcoin addresses placed by the site author and lets you donate to them. You can also select and right-click a bitcoin address to send BTC to it. More info about the Firefox addon can be found here.
I also made a WordPress plugin so you can easily add the metatags to your WordPress site like I have done. You can find it here.
Terraria
18 months ago
by galaxyAbstractor
in games
Fetching some wood from the trees
I’ve previously written about Minecraft, the 3D 8-bit like sandbox game that is quite popular nowadays.This time it’s about a similar game called Terraria.
Terraria, a 2D sidescroller/adventure/RPG/sandbox game with 16-bit-like graphics was released on Steam on the 16th May, 2011, for the same price Minecraft released at alpha stage, €9.99.
The gameplay is very similar to minecraft. You explore your world, mine blocks, craft things and fight monsters. The big difference is that Terraria already has far more content than Minecraft. There is loads of monsters that appear at both night and day, like Demon Eyes and Zombies at night and Slimes at day, and many more in dungeons and caves. There are even bosses, like the Eye of Cthulhu, the Skeletron and the Eater of Worlds. In total there is 28 different mobs, against Minecrafts 5.
There is a lot of weapons, about 47 different weapons sorted into categories like melee, explosives, magic, ranged nonmagic and flails. Tools are pretty much the same as in Minecraft, with axes, pickaxes, and hammers.
One of my caves
Another interesting feature is NPCs. There will be NPCs appearing after you met certain conditions (I haven’t been that far in the game yet), that will act as shops selling things like armor, weapons, potions and tools. They will move into houses you build after you have accomplished certain tasks, like killing a boss monster.
There are 9 different environments: Forests, Deserts, Underground, Underground Jungle,The Underworld, The Corruption, Meteorite, Dungeon and Floating Islands. I have only discovered forests and deserts yet, but I haven’t played for long yet.
The crafting system is much easier than the one in Minecraft, as you don’t have to remember recipes and look them up, you only have to press Esc to bring up your inventory and scroll to select what you want to craft. If you are standing near a workbench there will be a lot more items you can craft. Here is a list of items that can be crafted so far.
Crafting Items
There is apparently a magic system in Terraria as well. You will get mana later on which you can use on spells and attacks.
As with Minecraft, you can play multiplayer on the same world too. I haven’t yet done it but I guess it will be the same concept as on Minecraft servers.
So far I think it is a pretty good game. I like Terraria more than I like Minecraft now, as there is more content in Terraria and I like the 2D side-scrolling world more. You can build much in Terraria too and because it has two layers, a foreground layer and a background layer, you can do houses and buildings quite nicely.
The game also reminds me a bit about an old game I used to play ages ago called Jazz Jackrabbit.
There is some stuff I don’t like though and I hope they will fix it later on: it’s 4:3 only at 800×600 resolution and there is no way to change the resolution. I got a screen with 1920×1080 resolution and it looks pretty crappy in fullscreen mode, which still is 800×600 pixels and large black bars at the side.
Here is a video of some gameplay:
Here are some more screenshots I made:
A tunnel I built outside my cave
Ohayou Gozaimasu! Morning has arrived!
The guide NPC is here to help!
The surface
Level E
09 months ago
by galaxyAbstractor
in anime
-
- Battle Pocari
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- Prince Baka
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- The Chromatic Warriors
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- The Bodyguards
Level E is a twisted comedy about different alien species living on Earth without the knowledge of the humans. Although the anime isn’t very clear of why they are on Earth, we could conclude, based on what is shown, that they just want to live on Earth.
Level E doesn’t have a main story that goes trough the show, but more like mini-stories spanning a couple of episodes, with some characters appearing in multiple stories. The show is quite nicely done with decent animation and lots of twisted humor.
If you are into shows with really twisted comedy and humor and don’t care much about a main story, this show is perfect for you.
New skin for Rainmeter – WinGrooves!
09 months ago
I recently moved over from Spotify to Grooveshark after Spotify announced that they are imposing heavy limitations on its free service. I wanted to be able to control WinGrooves, a desktop Grooveshark client, from my desktop, so I made a couple of Rainmeter skins for it.
- WinGrooves – Black
- WinGrooves – Orange
- WinGrooves
Fractale
09 months ago
by galaxyAbstractor
in anime
A Seagull
It’s about a millennium since the Fractale world administration system was put into use. The system is now starting to fall apart and there is no one alive that understands how the system works.
Fractale is a system that creates the ultimate paradise where living takes no effort at all. Everyone has access to their own “doppels”, which are some sort of holographic creatures, that does all the work for the people. The system will give the users its blessing as long as the user prays to the temple (what the reason is for praying is to transfer collected data from the terminal implanted inside the user to the servers in the sky). Many people are very religious to Fractale and unquestioningly believe that its preservation is the sole condition to human happiness.
Our story begins on an island as Fractale begins to show signs of decay. Clain, a boy who lives alone with his doppel parents and is obsessed with data
Nessa
and old-time, pre-Fractale technology, helps a girl named Phryne to escape from being pursued by some unknown people. She then disappears leaving her broach to Clain. Clain, confused at first, finds out that there is data inside the broach and when he tries to analyze it a doppel in form of a girl, Nessa, takes form. They go on a journey to search for Phryne and doing so, they are involved in an anti-Fractale rebel group and learns the truth behind the system.
Phryne and Clain
The animation in the series are just wonderful, almost as good as in any Studio Ghibli movie. The environment is really well thought-out and detailed. The story is quite good, but it has some issues and holes here and there, like sudden jumps and unexplained happenings. Music, sound effects and voice acting was pretty decent. The characters were quite typical in many “boy meets girl” animes, but still were original enough in my opinion.
I would highly suggest this anime as it has an interesting story and beautiful animation. You can find some more info about it from aniDB.
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