Welcome to My World

PIPA/SOPA Blackout

Ean — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 05:45:48 +0000

It’s happening everywhere.

So I painted a silver-breasted broadbill

Ean — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:09:21 +0000

Inspired by one of my friends who is doing a project I decided to try my hand at digital painting.

~3h Photoshart CS5

You can see it either on DeviantArt or on Tumblr.

Please Don’t Buy Windows Phone 7

Ean — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:42:40 +0000

If they give you one free, use it to hold down a stack of paper on your desk.

But please, for the love of the Internet DO NOT USE A WINDOWS PHONE TO BROWSE THE WEB.

It uses Internet Exploder 7 as its rendering engine and it pretty much breaks everything that regular IE7 broke. As well, it looks just plain ugly. The scaling isn’t really anti-aliased and looks terrible.

It’s a terrible browsing experience overall and as a web developer I am afraid I’ll have to hurt you if you make my life harder by using Windows Phone 7.

Thank-you.

Sooty Mouse

Ean — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 00:31:32 +0000

So I worked on a new animation which features an original character. Sooty Mouse is modelled after the mice you see sometimes in the subway.

Frames from the animation walking loop of Sooty Mouse

Swiffy Conversion of SWF animation Sooty Mouse Walking Loop

So I made a pony running loop

Ean — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:07:03 +0000

I’ve been thinking for a while about animation. Here’s an experiment I made of a character from MLP running. It took a lot of patience to vector these 9 simple frames. But my hope is that the more that I do it, the better I’ll get.

A Beautiful Day

Ean — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:04:12 +0000

Thinking about animating

Ean — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:38:27 +0000

So I have had a DeviantArt account for a long time now and I’ve been posting whatever random crap I decide to doodle there for years now. I’ve owned the account since 2004 but hadn’t really posted anything beyond a single Oekaki drawing between 2004 and 2007.

I’ve also always had a minor interest in art but I ignored these interests for a long time because I was drawn more toward computers which seemed to be a solid career path.

I’m starting to realize that maybe I’d like to try to freelance as an animator or artist somehow, but I’m not nearly good enough. So I’ve been practising by trying to vectorize animations from popular cartoons. So far I’ve found this process quite an uphill battle in Flash. I found making vectors really easy in Photoshop or Illustrator (or in the free application Inkscape). But I spent the better part of an hour last night figuring out how to outline and fill just one flat-shaded region in Flash.

After that I was quicker though. I was able to flat-shade a few more regions in no time at all. Well this is a journey of 10000 hours, and I think I’ve just made my first step.

The name Tolkien is being censored

Ean — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 19:52:01 +0000

Tolkien

The Tolkien Estate is being ridiculous. The works they are going after are clearly original and do not fall under copyright. That is all.

An Eye Opener

Ean — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 19:59:08 +0000

I usually save this kind of thing for my Facebook feed these days, but this video really gets to me. It touches me every time I watch it. I figured out the theme pretty much right away, but the reveal was no less stunning.

How to Turn Off the Language Hotkeys in Windows

Ean — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:44:13 +0000

My keyboard isn’t working! Why does question mark not work anymore? Nothing works the way it should!

If that’s ever happened to you, you’ve probably accidentally triggered the language switch hotkey in Windows. In countries where you only have one language installed you may never have this problem, but in Canada I usually get English and French keyboards set up by default.

Windows comes shipped with this hotkey set to default to something like Ctrl + Shift. This is TERRIBLE! I end up hitting it all the time if I’m not careful. So I usually opt to turn it off the first time I get annoyed by it. Here’s how:

In Windows 7 you go to Control Panel,

then Region and Language,

then click the tab Keyboards and Languages,
then click the button on that tab called Change Keyboards,

in the new window that opens click Advanced Key Settings,

then click the Change Key Sequence… button,
then turn both key sequences to Not Assigned and click OK.

Close everything and now you won’t accidentally change languages while typing.

Once you’ve turned off the hotkey, you might want to make sure your default language is set to the one you want.

Hope this helps!