Seriously, what the duck is up with OS X not being able to open password protected .zip files? Windows, being the laughed at victim of OS X, has been doing this for 12 years, out of the box!

As a selfnote I ask myself this:
Does the Unix command unzip -P password file.zip work on Macs? Actually, I ask you. I have no Apple stuff.

I just want to know what to tell my clients. If nothing else, this should be able to handle common .zip specification on OS X.

I just discovered pown.it (totally unrelated to PowNed television).

I cannot really summarize the content in a picture so just check it out.
It's filled with thousands of Flash-loops. Most are crap, some are genius. Just press random a hundred times.

Some gadgets are okay. But they are hard to (re)discover between thousands of crap gadgets. So it pisses you off when you discover the "Windows Easy Transfer" wizard didn't include them in it's backup when you are (re)installing Windows 7.

How to migrate your Windws 7 Gadgets

So to help you do it yourself, copy the following folder to your new installation of Windows 7:

%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\

Ofcourse, if you've already installed Windows and you have your old installation sitting on a drive mounted as W:, you'll be looking for:

W:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\

You can skip Cache and you're gonna have to manually merge Settings.ini if you've already found some new gadgets you also wanna keep.

Copy, overwrite, log out, log in.. tadaah! :D

Note:
If you didn't have any gadgets in your new Windows yet, you need to right-click your desktop and click on Gadgets once to activate the 'sidebar' (because that's how your invisible gadget overlay is called).

I thought I'd post this little fact because I couldn't find this anywhere on google.

"Wat? Die slet botst zomaar tegen je aan? Hier, ik houd haar vast en dan kan jij haar op de bek slaan!"
Met een knipoogje naar de camera was wel mooi geweest. Maar ik houd niet zo van acteren wanneer ik ff aan het winkelen ben.

Wanneer een chick en een dude op de winkelstraatstoep tegen elkaar botsen en in discussie gaan zijn er over het algemeen 7 serieusheidstekenen. Wanneer je ernaast zit krijg je dit:

• Met theatervolume sprekende.
  
• Meid is 21 maar draagt kleren van een 40 jarige vrije school moeder.
  
• "Nou meneer, U botst zomaar heel hard tegen me aan! Een excuses is wel op mijn plaats, dunkt mij!" zijn geen woorden van een hedendaags chickie van 21.
  
• Gangstertje is 20 en heeft EO-stoerlook incl. metrosexueel sjaaltje, attitude past niet.
  
• "Wat? Ik moet mijn excuses aanbieden omdat U tegen MIJ aan botst?" is natuurlijk het niveau van Dicky Dick.
  
• Zelfde toneeltje op de zelfde plek werkt niet als je de herkenning van de uit de Hema lopende bezoekers van hun gezicht kunt lezen.
  
• De enige mensen die opvallen door te kijken, niets doen en stil te blijven staan, zijn zij die even verderop nonchalant bij het statief met videocamera staan.
  

Half twee. Vanmiddag. Ik maak waarschijnlijk onderdeel uit van de geen-verantwoordelijkheid-neem-en-negeer groep in dit poging tot 101 experimentje van ik gok een groepje 2e jaars MEM studenten van Stenden University?

Maar jongens jullie hebben wel lef, ben benieuwd of je ergens leuke reacties hebt gekregen. Doe maar even filmpje in commentaar zetten!

I saw this music video on TMF NL. The budget for locations and actors must have been extremely low. But still, the video works. It looks good. Any idea why?

There's a hint in the lyrics:

Aaaaaah
Don't you push it, push it;
Aaaaaah
Don't you push it too far!

Ehh..

Double WTF?

• Openingstijden supermarkt checken.
  
• Naar de desktop voor Weerberichtgadget.
  
• 3fm (internetradio) op play zetten als het nieuws begint.
  
• Pidgin (IM) starten om te kijken of ik kan messagen ipv bellen (goedkoper).
  
• Op mijn server kijken of er nieuwe rss downloads zijn.
  
• Laptop aanzetten om snel ff dropbox te synchen.
  

Een ezel stoot zich geen twee keer aan de zelfde steen, maar oh wat gaat het er moeilijk in als de internetprovider een storing heeft.
Here we go Telfort! Deze storing duurt nu al bijna 24 uur?

Stel; je staat in een drol. Want je bezighouden met geldzaken is irritant. Gedoe met papier, met post verzamelen wat verdeeld wordt over je ouderlijke huis, je oude kamer en je huidige woning.. en het netjes archiveren. Gelukkig zijn er de afgelopen jaren steeds meer bedrijven en instellingen die een online rekening aanbieden. Vaak als downloadable pdf. Dat voelt als een stap vooruit.

Online rekeningen - Een stap achteruit

Maar helaas, al snel merk je dat je dat je weer een stap achteruit moet zetten. De drol weer in.

Wat doen al die baklappen? Ze sturen je een email om te melden dat er post of een rekening online staat. Stuur *dat* dan naar mijn ^%@#$! postvak!

Nee. Je moet je rekening zelf ophalen bij hi.nl. Die vet lelijke langzame vaak eruitliggende site zorgt vaker dan niet dat ik gewoon 5 minuten zit te kutten voordat ik mijn rekening heb. Stuur ze dan gewoon naar mijn emailbox!

Dan de IB-Groep: "Er staat een nieuw bericht voor je klaar. In dit bericht kun je lezen blah blah zeggen we lekker niet, ga beneden maar ff lekker je telefoon van de lader halen want je moet inloggen met die kut digID en je SMS-bevestiging overtiepen maar je wachtwoord ben je toch vergeten dus vraag maar lekker een nieuwe aan, hoerenkots. Oja niet te vergeten dat die site ook vaak teringtraag is natuurlijk.

Zo zijn er een aantal meer en ik wordt er knettergek van. Nee je kunt geen suggesties doen. Ze weten het toch allemaal beter: Ze willen (en ik quote even de reactie van de IB-Groep) een veilige omgeving creëren waarbinnen je je privépost op kunt halen want we gaan er van uit dat iedereen een achterlijke mongool is en dat een email sturen neerkomt op het publiceren van je post in de krant.

Van een ander kaliber (want de berichten zijn openbaar) zijn de stadscampusmeldingen van mijn bloedeigen Saxion Hogeschool. Bij alles wat mij(n opleiding) aangaat krijg ik een mail: "Er is een berichtje voor je. Check de stadscampussite!" Deze site doet tenminste wel normaal en binnen 1 pageview van 1 seconde (wat een verademing) heb ik mijn berichtje, maar is dat nou nodig? Als je dan TOCH een mail stuurt...

Ik zal maar zwijgen over de bullshit van MySpace en Hyves, die sites waren 5 jaar geleden al verloren. Ik snap niet dat er mensen zijn die nog het geduld hebben om daarin rond te browsen.

Kijk snel wie er jarig is! Tsk. Wat een bullshit. Ik kijk wel op de kalender als ik op de plee zit. Dit is toch geen service man! Dit is keihard legale spam om 'leden' naar die lelijke site te trekken. He misschien krijgen ze nog een dubbeltje omdat een verloren bezoeker maar van ellende op een advertentie klikt.

Aan alle andere instellingen die digitale post verzorgen:
Doe die shit gewoon in mijn mailbox en je bespaart me een kwart van mijn leven en een derde van mijn bloeddruk!
Het is toch mijn verantwoordelijkheid om te zorgen dat mijn post privé is, net zoals bij een analoge brievenbus.

Speciaal voor Bassie, omdat ie moest lachen toen ie dit storyboard plaatje zag.

"What was that? You want all clips from your timeline exported in full RGB color scale to use in a compositing program? Sorry I cannot do that, I only do cropped YUV export of MPEG." Première CS3 said.

Okay, I'll just do that myself by writing a script that converts edit decision lists to VirtualDub joblists to use in conjunction with my AviSynth batcher.

Do you still have that decade old Half-Life CD and an old(er) computer running Linux?

The crash-on-load you see for example on 'load game' or when the train from new game reaches the first loading point is not some wine error or incompatibility like I thought. It is in fact a file permission problem. Half-Life somehow just really really wants to write an update to the save folder even if you just load your game. And the logged on user who last played the game 'owns' the file, so the game crashes in every other account until some superuser sets writable permissions for all users on all saved files again.

I have fixed the permission-mess crash in a way that gives every user their own private save games, which is convenient because you cannot name the saves so it pretty quickly becomes a mess if two people play the game anyway.

The desktop shortcut to start Half-Life simply points to this file (or you can run it from a terminal or alt+f2):
/usr/local/bin/hlExporting __GL_FSAA_MODE is for 2x anti-aliasing on nVidia based cards.. you might export some vars specific for your card.

Happy gaming!

As promised, here's the heaviest video of the moment!


(Now, in HD if you go here!)

Download HD:
090600 Solidary Trust - Hell On Earth.702p25.8M256.mp4 (278 MB)

Sorry for the delay on the download; I spent the entire day trying to find out why x264.exe fails on me when using Windows 7. Even though I provided debugging backtraces and all, no one can tell what the problem is. Aparently, I am one of few with this problem. Temporarily solution: Use AviSynth 2.5.7 instead of 2.5.8 in Windows 7.

Admittedly, my compulsive urge to use Windows 7 sometimes makes me lose a day that wouldn't be lost in XP. But hey eventually it's inevitable so why not early adopt.. just saying.

I was occupied last week by a little in-between project, a rocking video of Hell On Earth by Solidary Trust. Finding public domain footage to use and fixing it for usability in a HD project turned out to be a days work. Another two days for editing the video and another two to figure how to work around the f4%!ing bugs After Effects and Première CS3 annoyingly have and that probably never get fixed because CS4 is in the stores now.

Most annoying bugs I still can't figure out:

• (Pr/AE) *Some* proxies, most often certain MPEG2's, will not render out. Applying invisible effects or titles *sometimes* fixes this. After 70 minutes of exporting, another failed shot soon adds to annoyance.
  
• (AE) Non-rasterized layers with other positional data than their parent sometimes completely screw up their position in conjunction with certain effects that actually have nothing to do with the position.
  
• (AE) Like I mentioned earlier (somewhere else) the rotomask loss of sync with the composition apparently also sometimes happen with normal footage. This is really annoying and strange since it shows correctly on screen and in RAM previews, but only fails after a real render. One hour for render and one hour for AVC transcoding because a sequence isn't previewable real time, imagine the joy when you find out the lame bug isn't gone. And with 7000+ frames, my render-to-single-frames script I created to circumvent that same bug in The Encounter is too slow adding 7000+ render jobs to the queue and hangs AE.
  
• (Pr/AE) Too many open frameserve handlers SOMETIMES eats away so much memory that everything stops working. You can fix this with proxies which you'll need to use for the final render also, but take care not to bump into the first bug on this list.
  

Okay blahblah, I guess since I can't do nothing useful when this machine is rendering all the time, annoyance-listing is second best.

So, in better news, the video will probably be online tomorrow. And next week I'll get back to my Sonic Plague video, which will turn out to be a rather dark video when it's done. I mean literally. Not really daytime scenes.

There's some rotofun going on though. Like a real professional, I also mess up my screens. It's like they say in the industry: Green screens are only there to show the compositor where rotoscoping needs to be done.

Some roto- garbage- and transparency mattes in progress:

Yeah! I won the first Brandfighters battle with the videocompetition for GoFast.

I wrote a little script, and together with my friend Martin I shot the whole thing in one day. The following two and something weeks I worked fulltime on it, compositing it into shape.

Download HD version:
090500 GoFast08.720p25.8M256.mp4.mp4 (176 MB)

Watch on YouTube:

(Or go there for HD version)


On May 28th the battle was over, and I won the 1st price in creativity and 4th price in virality!

The 4th virality price was a Canon Legria FS 200 videocamera. The competition hosters advertised this as a €400 camera though it was in the shops for €240. I sold it for €200. Admittedly, I was convinced that I would win the 1st price (€5000), which is why I spend so much time on it in the first place. I entered after seeing the submissions so far. But this competition was more about viral 'marketing' than anything else so three movies that were probably finished in a day beat me fair and square. The Brandfighters hosters changed their ranking policy after this match though.



Reveiling the shots

Let me show you just a few pics for your entertainment. You've probably noticed this yourself, but:

Air-drinking was accomplished with a little gravity. I made some funny shots but didn't fit the movie at all. I just used the most normal one.



The fake mobile phone screen was another impulse decision. I was gonna really send a text, but it would suck for retakes. Besides, the small letters on the real screen kinda sucked.




For added chicken reality I grabbed a real one. No chickens were harmed!




And finally, to illustrate how my expensive wire studio looks, you might have noticed some of the wiring I forgot to paint out.





Critiques

I've rushed a few things, some bad. Most notably the lame title at the start. This was because of a wakeup call when the real deadline appeared to be 4 days before the one in my planning. My final pre-deadline upload timing was really a matter of minutes!

Here's some other concessions I had to do to finish in time:

• The first guy train shot is pretty terrible. It is actually a retouched version of my draft shot. Because the different shots used in the composition are a bad match I'd need at least another day to make it look somewhat better.
  
• Some shots have draftlike motion blur settings. You can actually see the iterations per frame setting is low. But I couldn't rerender them, as even though the comps look quite simple, they took (and I don't get it either) 10 minutes per second to render!!
  
• Particles... the splash is poor and the chicken feathers fly like there's a small breeze in stead of fullblown lift-off.
  
• I didn't master the sound track at all. Sound goes second-last in my workflow, so I just quickly grabbed some foley from my schools library.
  
• Couldn't find a sound that fits with the burning.
  
• Multilayer smoke and roto'ing burned places on the target would look a lot better, but that would quickly take days.
  
• Just some noise was layered on top in stead of video grain. About an hour before the deadline, the videograin render would still take 1h20 to render. So I cancelled and quickly replaced it with some noise, and the render took 15 mintes.
  
• Shots aren't color-matched in post.
  
• Not a concession but a side-note: The last TWO shots are purposely not passed through CC/grain to emphasize the reality check of falling into the water. Even though only the last one represents a subjective view, the CC changed earlier sort of like a L-edit but with CC in stead of sound. Only now that a few people mentioned it I think they feel like it's a mistake.
  

More timelack

I wanted to do a big make over after the competition, but my ongoing mission to graduate soon holds a tight grip over my time. I will probably introduce some minor changes if (if) I submit this to the Beeldbuis Filmfestival.

It is true what they say you know. You never finish a project; you abandon a project.


Software used

• After Effects CS3
  
• Première Pro
  
• Photoshop
  
• VirtualDub
  
• AviSynth
  
• DGIndex (Circumvent AE's MediaCore)
  
• FFMpeg (for MP2 proxies)
  
• x264 (for final MP4, way better than AE's MainConcept)

I just discovered something remotely entertaining.

Do you know this annoying thing where you cannot point the cat to the fly/moth? The cat will just look at the tip of your finger.

Next time an insect is flying, call the cat and pretend to throw something at the insect. The cat will lock onto the insect like a guided missile!