Playing with 3D in Photoshop

Haven't posted for a while due to an insufficient amount of interesting stuff going on my life worthy of posting about... I have, however, been playing with 3D in Photoshop CC:

This could be an abstract for an album cover...

The above render is a mix of two planes perpendicular to each other (to create the walls) and two built-in objects, I deliberately kept it simple because I'm trying to understand how IBLs work. They certainly add an extra amount of realism to a final render. The wall and floor textures are a bit shit but I only quickly added some simple textures in order to see how the IBLs I imported worked on the sphere and doughnut.

Planck Temperature

Firstly can I congratulate Max Planck for becoming a massive part of human history with a name like that...

On to the theory, this is taken from Wikipedia:

As for most of Planck units, a Planck temperature of 1 (unity) is a fundamental limit of quantum theory, in combination with gravitation, as presently understood. In other words, the wavelength of an object can be calculated by its temperature. If an object were to reach the temperature of 1.41 x 10³² Kelvin (T_P), the radiation it would emit would have a wavelength of 1.616 x 10⁻²⁶ nanometers (Planck length), at which point quantum gravitational effects become relevant. At temperatures greater than or equal to T_P, current physical theory breaks down because we lack a theory of quantum gravity.^[2]

Wow, so at a temperature of 142,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 physics breaks down!

So, basically, someone needs to fucking hurry up and understand quantum gravity... count me out, I have difficulty sorting my socks out in the morning.

Interesting Google Search Result

I was bored at work and feeling pretty down so I typed in the following text (in the pic) into Google Search and got some interesting results...

Now I can't decide that the results are based on some very clever SEO or Google's AI-like algorithms... or both.

Fallout Shelter

I've been playing Fallout Shelter on my smartphone for the past month, kudos to Bethesda for bring out such a cool free little game with no pay-to-win or paywalls in sight.

My vault is coming along nicely:

Where's the loo?

It's a careful balance between power, food and water, get them well into the green and you have happy dwellers, if not, they get sick and very unhappy! Although it's advisable to get the power room count up because no power = none of the other resource-producing rooms working regardless of how many there are.

Occasionally raiders will attack and this is where, for all you budding Vault admins out there, I offer this advice: upgrade your Vault door to maximum early on because when it is at max it'll take the raiders longer to get in. Giving you time to move your dwellers into the best positions possible to attack them... and believe me, when they get in, they are a pain as they run around randomly all over the place stealing your resources and killing weaker dwellers. Make sure you've got two well armed dwellers with good body armour guarding your Vault door too as they'll slow the raiders down.

Sending dwellers off into the wilderness is useful for getting loot to equip them later on, but make sure they have plenty of health boosts and Radaways so get the medical and science rooms built early. Also if you do send a dweller out, don't forget them, they'll keep going and will eventually be killed, it's so much the being killed that's a pain because you can revive them but for every mile they go they have to head back the same amount and it can potentially take ages for a dweller to return.

Most of all though, don't take it too seriously, as it doesn't seem to me to be the kind of game where you can lose. I just dip into it a couple of times a day, collect resources, level up dwellers, occasionally build a resources room etc. uses up a spare few minutes of the day ;)

Childishness in Windows 10

I updated to the latest release of Windows 10, started playing with the new Edge browser and found the annotation feature... couldn't help myself:

It's only what millions of others will have done on finding that feature!

Tory MP Tobias Ellwood Apologises After Claiming His £90k Salary Left Him 'Watching The Pennies'

What a tosser

My new aquarium

I decided to sort out my virtual aquarium project today...

I've been mulling it over for the past few months, I wanted an aquarium but didn't want all the mess involved with transferring the fish, cleaning the tank, water spillage, slime, smells etc.

So I decided to make it virtual instead, which would involve a PC and monitor, I have a spare PC that I can dedicate to running the aquarium, I just needed a monitor.

I have some space on my sideboard in my lounge (which is where I would have placed a real aquarium anyway) however the vertical space above the sideboard is limited as the ceiling angles down towards the sideboard and ends roughly 350mm above it. The horizontal space, however, is much, much longer. This meant that I needed to get a monitor slightly wider than normal and with a fairly low stand so it could sit back against the wall and not touch the sloping ceiling.

I did some shopping around and found that LG produce a 25" 2560x1080 resolution monitor, HDMI with built-in speakers. I also needed a 7.5m HDMI because the PC was nowhere near where the monitor needed to be and I couldn't move it.

So today I set out to purchase either the monitor described above or an equivalent, I didn't want to order it online because I wanted to get on with the project today and didn't want to wait for delivery. Even if I did have it delivered, I didn't want to have to have it delivered to my workplace and have nosey management/coworkers asking me what it was for and I didn't trust an evening delivery service to my home to happen when I'm there (Sod's Law dictating that it would come when I'm still on the train heading home).

So I got to [shudder] PC World...

I wasn't surprised to be informed that they didn't have the LG monitor in stock but the girl serving me said she'd be happy to order it for me. I mentioned that I wanted to sort it out today so I went with a second-best choice, which in the end was a Samsung 25" widescreen TV with HDMI and speakers, it has 1920 x 1080 resolution so not as good as the one I wanted, but I chose it because it was the perfect physical size to fit in that area on the sideboard. I also got a 5m HDMI cable.

The cable isn't long enough but I knew that anyway, it does reach but not enough for it to be properly hidden so, for now, I've fudged it around stuff (I rarely have visitors, so aesthetics don't matter). The TV itself was a doddle to set up and the PC's graphics card (a nVidia GT610 low profile card) is working fine at the TV's max resolution... it's not as good as a native monitor res but it's good enough.

As for the aquarium, I've used serenescreen aquarium, $19 for the full version, it's really good, has a shitton of configurable options for different species of fish, background colours, sound and even personalised logos. To start with, I've gone with 7 Lionfish and they look great! The bubbling sound and visuals are very therapeutic, I found myself sitting there for half-an-hour today just staring at it, in fact, with my medical condition the way it is I think it'll really help in the future. I may even fuck Sky TV off and just sit there and stare at it each evening, or maybe just read my Kindle and enjoy the bubbling sound in the background! It's nice to have alternatives to just staring at TV shows/Films when I get home from a hard day's work.

So my little virtual aquarium project is off and running, whenever I'm home I'll have it there, running in the background to chill me out. It'll 'evolve' over time as this setup is very much version 1.0 right now. In the future I'll probably get a better, more widescreen monitor plus a longer cable longer HDMI cable, plus they may bring out a newer version of the aquarium software too or something better may come along.

Ah, it's these little computer projects that keep me sane... some people collect stamps, or paint model army figures, or collect film memorabilia, I collect computers and try to come up with novel ways to use them!

Photography #101

Just try to not feel chilled out whilst looking at this ;)

So tranquil!

I always try to get a few pics like these, they're always an interesting mix of contrast, colours and depth.

Photography #101

Below is a picture of a Red Admiral butterfly I took whilst out on one of my jaunts, my camera saves the pics in RAW format by default... I prefer RAW format because it means the pic is saved with none of the manufacturer's processing and filtering junk.

The other good reason for using it is being able to parse it through Photoshop's RAW filter, if you spend the extra time with it's colour controls it can make a hell of a difference:

The Empire has plans for Pluto...

Clearly...

Hellooo Pluto!

This is the closest ever photo of Pluto, courtesy of the New Horizons probe:

Well done to all the NASA bods for their hard work in getting this photo... nine years in the making! It's funny to think that, if humanity progresses it's collective tech as scheduled (and we don't destroy each other with said tech) probably in a 100 years' time getting a photo like that will be much quicker. Probably involve a quick jaunt over to Pluto in one's local space skimmer, take the pic with some sort of cyborg-ish Microsoft built ocular implant that will immediately upload it to the galactic Facebook wall, via Google's neural net.

Microsoft Fail

My Xbox One Kinect sensor has been acting up, suspiciously around when the warranty for it ended.

Thanks Microsoft, thanks a lot.

World of Tanks Update

Last weekend (Sunday actually) I spent a fair few hours playing World of Tanks (Xbox 360 version)... I've now acquired a Tier 7 Heavy - a Black Prince to be precise.

Although I'm reluctant to ditch my Churchill Mark IV as it's been a joy to fight... I've even gone as far as to choose a completely new crew for my Black Prince as I wanted to crew on my Churchill IV to continue to level up in it as I'll be playing it between Black Prince matches (for when I get pwned early and can't arsed to wait for the battle to finish).

So onwards and upwards... can't wait for it to come out on the Xbox One... w00t!

Google Neural Network

The bods at Google Chocolate Factory have been tinkering (as usual) and have created some sort of neural network... at least that's what we think they've done. The side-effect of this supposed 'self-learning' network is that it creates some pretty trippy images from image content these Google bods added... and they've now released the source code.

Trouble is, all the normal folk on the web have no fucking idea on what's required to get it up and running.

It appears that you have to install Python, a whole bunch of dependencies, add a few drops of the tears of a unicorn and voila! You have a partially functioning command line based 'thing' that only an advanced alien species would understand.

I took a look at it because from a graphic designer's point of view the art produced from it looked awesome. Shame really as I was looking forward to putting a few of my images through it to see what it would make of them...

The picture below shows a post that pretty-much sums up what people have been wanting to say in response to Google's source code release of deep dream.

Things I hate...

We have all acquired pet hates as we shuffle through life, these are mine:

Littering
Bad Manners
Ad breaks
Hip Hop/Rap Music
BMW Drivers
Reality TV
Celery
People walking behind me
Sunburn
The words said to me: "I know you're busy, but..."

Damned Stomach...

Despite it being Friday, it didn't start well...

I thought I'd come into work early as I'd got a complex vehicle wrap to work out (crap artwork that I had to pick apart to get printable), the previous evening I had what I thought was a reasonably healthy evening meal - some risotto 'vegetarian friendly' mushrooms (nuked in the oven) with some green, yellow and red peppers with some cold pre-cooked barbecue style chicken.

However around 2am Friday morning my stomach disagreed...

Two visits to the toilet in the early hours and one after I'd got up around 5am meant that my digestive system was dictating things for when I began my walk-train-walk to work.

By the time I was within sight of where I work I was struggling to avoid a potential disaster in my nether regions and the last few metres required a waddle-style dash, a struggle to unlock the front door and a further dash to the waiting arms of the works' toilet, just as I sat down heavily my arse exploded.

Not good, not good at all...

I think if I'd have had a greasy kebab instead of my 'good intentions' healthy meal I'd have been skipping to work instead of a sweaty mad dash to avoid soiling my pants.

A big 'Well Done' to our England lasses!

I feel really sorry for poor old Laura Bassett... that own goal was a bad way to end a great tournament for us, however stuff like that happens and she'll get over it.

Laura, you and your teammates have done our country proud in this World Cup.

Now our men's national team need to forget about how much cash they're earning and step up...