Another monster

Working on a monster for a friend of mine.  She wanted a smaller monster than Monday was, and I prepared the head to be smaller, but the body wound up bigger for some reason.

So, this monster is a pinhead :~D

I'm sure she'll love it anyway.

BTW, first sitting monster for me.

4 more pumpkins!

Painted these orange w/highlights then blackwashed them with watered down black paint. I'm going to try painting them black and orangewashing them next time. ;~D

She's Monday!!! And she's done!!!

Monday has arrived. My monster is done and now resides on my desk at work. My next project will be a rainbow monster for a friend of mine and one Pack Guar which is a character from the game Morrowind created by Bethesda.

My Monster Monday

This is Monday, as my friend Pat says:
Monday is a pretty scary name... It gives the sense of impending doom and the start of something that will suck the life out of you for the next 5 days... ;o)



Then my friend Tyler wrote her a little poem.


Ms. Monday Beatrice Frost
had 10 fingers, but 2 got lost
With eyes of yellow
and her staff of power
Her weeks became mellow
...and a little less sour.

She came from a village
fraught with peril and danger
With neighbors came pillage
her village became stranger

She went to the tree
of wisdom and lore
Wisdom she did see
against all the gore

She asked for help
from the tree of the wise
She was just a whelp
too old to despise

Tree reached out
and took her deep within
She wanted to shout
but knew that a sin

"One day" the said
"another will recreate you
not out of needle and thread
but of paper and glue"

Awesome! I'm going to try to paint her tonight. I said I would last night, but my workout took longer than I expected.

I bought a book by Dan Reeder from Amazon a few weeks ago called Paper Mache Monster Turn trinkets & trash into magnificent monstrosities. I love hideous ugly things, so I thought I'd make my first monster. You should check out his blog. It's most excellent. And while your at it, another amazing paper mache artist is Scott Stoll. Check out his Stolloween site. Scott makes the most amazing Halloween props I've ever seen.

Paper Mache pumpkins

Working on my Halloween decorations. Almost done with 2 pumpkins, the big one is Johnny Rotten Pumpkin seed and the small one is Mr. Bill Gourd.

One note to myself, make the arms seperate from the actual pumpkin and make them detachable. He's freaking heavy and cumbersome to take outside for drying. Not to mention, his arms collapse from the damp clay.

Now I need to figure out how to make fake pumpkins guts for Johnny's mouth.

Slackware and wireless networking

This is something I've been afraid of for a long time. The thought of setting up wireless in Slackware used to make me shudder. Well, on Black Friday I decided to peruse the internet for a cheap PCMCIA wireless network card that "Works in Linux" and I found one on amazon.com for just under 9 bucks. Yes, you read that right. Nine bucks. I also picked up a Belken wireless G universal range extender and my card is a D-Link G650 card.

I had troubles at first. I tried the madwifi drivers and for some reason I could not get it to work.
Madwifi wanted ath0 as the net name, and would for some reason add wifi0 which is a virtual device to my ifconfig list. That didn't work at all. The software compiled fine, installed ok, loaded up the drivers like it was supposed to, but for some reason, must have been something I was putting in the config files in /etc/rc.d that made it not work right.

So I popped in the CD with the net drivers and copied over the net5211.inf and the two .sys files from /Drivers on the CD. I ran ndiswrapper:
ndisrapper -i net5211.inf
ndiswrapper -l
ndiswrapper -ma
ndiswrapper -mi
and did an insmod ndiswrapper to load the module.
The tricky part was figuring out the config files in /etc/rc.d/
rc.inet1.conf
rc.wireless.conf
I finally figured out, after hours of screwing with it, that these lines:

## Pick up any Access Point, should work on most 802.11 cards
*)
INFO="Any ESSID"
ESSID="any"
;;
## ---------- END SECTION TO REMOVE ------------

Need to remain uncommented just like above in rc.wireless.conf

I added wlan0 into rc.inet1.conf and it worked! Now my network is a little strange. I have everything wired, running into my DSL modem except for my Mom's laptop in her house (same property, seperate houses). She has a net cable running into a wireless hub, and my repeater just connected to the hub at her place with no troubles at all. I'm typing this on my laptop using wireless! I can now take my laptop anywhere in the house or yard and use my computer.

Viva Slackware!!!!

Operatika - The Calling

I'm a big fan of Symphonic Metal. I love bands like Nightwish, After Forever, Epica and Within Tempation so when I heard about Operatika I figured I give them a listen.

The members are:
Vocals: Slava Popova
Guitars: Bill Visser
Keyboards: Anna
Drums: Yuri Liakhovitch
Bass: tba

When a genre of music becomes popular due to several very good bands, bands that sound very similar come crawling out the the woodwork. Operatika is one of those woodwork crawling bands. I don't dislike their music, but there's nothing new and exciting with this band. The guitarist loves his sweep arpeggios, uses them to boredom in his solos. Their vocalist is good, she has a very nice voice, but the female opera vocals have been overdone. The music is average at best, they're a "been there, done that" type of band.

The track listing for "The Calling" is as follows:
1. Intro
2. Gladiator
3. Tears Of The Sun
4. Dark Horizon
5. Ice Queen
6. Life Saving Flame
7. No. 3/23 In A Minor
8. Mask In The Mirror
9. Secrets Of The Past
10. The Storm
11. The Calling
12. Last Quest

Life saving flame is the best track on the album IMO but it's still under par. The instrumental No. 3/23 in A Minor sounds like a blatant Yngwie Malmsteen rip.

If you are looking for good Symphonic Metal, pass on this one. Check out the other bands that I mentioned earlier or check out Symphony X.

Century Media Podcast for November 2008

Century Media Podcast for November 2008

I love this podcast. Very little talk and a lot of great music.

Host Tim Binder

1. The Haunted - Moronic Colossus
Great tune, The vocalist, though he's a growler/screamer, mixes up his vocals enough to make them interesting. The guitarist(s) are top notch, they don't over or underplay. Good song, I'm going to get more to listen to.

2. Cursed - 1917
Starts off very mellow for the verse then picks up a little for the chorus. The vocals are pretty good, he sings in a non-english language. I'd have to hear more from the band, this song doesn't grab me the way the first one did, but it's pretty good.

3. Poison Black - Left Behind
This is a pretty perky song, interesting vocals from what I can tell, although they're a little buried in the mix especially in the chorus. Good arrangement and orchestration.

4. Duff McKagan - No More
Verse Reminds me a little of The Stray Cats has a swing feel to it, very 80s sounding. The bridge at the end was the best part of the song. The verse get's a little monotonous after a few times through.


5. ????? - ????? (couldn't understand the band or song name can anyone clarify?)
Not thrilled with this song, female vocalist, power metal-ish with a celtic twist. The vocals are irritating, she doesn't have a full voice like Tarja, it's thin and sort of shrill. The death/growl vocals in the middle are better.

6. Helheim - Det Norrøne Alter
A Dimmu style dark, slow song with viking/black style vocals. I like this band a lot, I'm definately going to pick up one of their CDs. The chorus (?) is very well orchestrated, very church-ish souding. with an organ at the end, fantastic musicianship, great arrangement.

Erik the Viking's Top 5

7. Lacuna Coil - Heaven's Alive
I've always loved this band. Christina has a great voice, fits the music to a tee. They're a dark, dreamy, atmospheric, gothic sort of band. They have two vocalists, Andrea (male) and Christina. They mix up the different vocal styles well. This is a fantastic song, one of my favorites by them. They're coming out with a DVD soon called Visual Karma. Pick it up and grab a few of their CDs.

8. Candlemass - Lucifer Rising
These guys have been around a long time. Straight up metal, very old school. Good song, I like the vocalist, great set of pipes and great range.

9. Enslaved - The Watcher
Interesting song. The verse is very viking/black like, then the chorus breaks into clean layered vocals with a very haunting melody, very beautiful actually.

10. Burning the Masses - Gerascophobia
This song would make a great pit song. Very in your face, then backs off. I like the time changes, gives a good jerky effect to the song. guitarist is very good, very quirky style.

On the record - Stu from Into Eternity discusses their new album. The Incurable Tragedy

11. Into Eternity - Diagnosis Terminal
I love this band, seen them live twice, very quirky, twisted band. Thier new album "The Incurable Tragedy" is fantastic. They mix up the time changes, stops & starts with growling vocals and beautiful harmonies. If you're looking for a band that's really different, I highly recommend Into Eternity.

12. Turisas - To Holmgard And Beyond
Very good power/prog metal. The middle of the song reminds me of a soundtrack for an RPG game.
Excellent harmonies, seems to tell a story.

13. In this Moment - Forever
Female vocalist, she has pretty good power, nice vocal melody. I like the guitar melody line in the song, very catchy. this song was written to be played on the radio, very catchy and commercial.

14. Stick to your guns - Part of me
Not my cup of tea, devoid of any melody, and the riffs aren't all that interesting. The vocalist is the typical shouter. Nothing original here. Mercifully, the song was short.

My Zen > than your ipod

I bought a Creative Labs Zen Vision:M a year and a half ago, it's a 60 gigger and I do so love my zen! Love it so much I decided to do a little cross stitch pattern stating so.

If you like it you can download the pattern here. Right click on the video and select "save as".
It's done in pcstitch format, I've included both the original file and the jpg of the pattern.
The graphic is a bit fuzzy, I don't have zoom on my digital camera but you get the idea. Feel free to change the colors to match your Zen :)


This is copyleft Creative commons share alike licence.

Felt Penguin Ornament

I am a Linux fanatic, I love any penguins that look like Tux. I was in Walmart a few years ago and found a penguin ornament. I bought it for my works tree then promptly made a design based on that.

This is a very rough draft of my penguin ornament. Use whatever colors and things you'd like to dress up Tux =]

What You'll need:

Felt, Black for the body, white for the belly, a goldish yellow color felt for the beak, red and white again for the hat and color of your choice for the scarf

Small google eyes. Not sure of the mm
12-08-06: 7mm eyes

A small white pompom

Directions:

Cut out the body, cut 2. Attach the white belly to the body using DMC 310 one strand, folded in half, knot the end just like sewing thread. Refer to the picture in the same area you find the pattern.

Wrong sides together, sew the body together with black sewing thread leaving the bottom open to turn and stuff later. Make sure your stitches are small and as close to the edge as possible without missing any areas. Turn the ornament right side out and check for any missed areas.

Stitch the hat together wrong sides together then turn right side out. The hat base (the white square) fold into a long square then sew together with white sewing thread making a circle. Turn that right side out and glue that to the bottom of the hat. I use a hot glue gun because it seems to stick a little better. But be careful of your fingers, I've burned myself a few times already =] Also, using hot glue, attach the pompom to the end of the hat. This is the reason his hat is flat at the tip...To accomodate for the pompom.

Take two small eyes and glue to the top of his belly part. I use just craft glue for this.
Fold the beak into a triangle (in half) and using the hot glue, glue the beak just below his eyes. Again, be careful on the little pieces.

Glue the finished hat onto his head with the hot glue. You can also put some fiberfill (stuffing) into the hat for body, before you glue it tho. =]

Cut a 12" by 1/2" strip of felt whatever color you'd like and tie that around his missing neck above his arms and below his face. You might want to experiment with the width and length of the scarf. You can also cut the ends in strips to make a little fringe. Tie that around him, you might want to glue a small section of the back down, as well as underneath where it's tied just so it doesn't come apart. He'll catch cold if he doesn't have his scarf on =D



Stuff his body to the desired girth you'd like him to have. and sew up the bottom.

Attach thread or ribbon to the back however you'd like to.

I had some christmas buttons I bought last year, so I glued one snowflake to his hat, and a present to his hand. (fin). Embellish how you'd like to.

This pattern is release under the Creative Commons Licence Share Alike
licence...Copyleft of course.

Viola! You have a penguin ornament! =] Email me if you have any questions. gsmraxe[at]gmail[dot]com

Hail Satan!!!

I created a little cross stitch pattern for all your Satanists out there. Someone did one as a joke and had hearts around it. So, I modified it to replace the hearts (yuch) and put inverted crosses as it should be. It says "Hail Satan!"

If you'd like the original pattern for KG-Chart to modify it, email me at gsmraxe at gmail dot com and I'll send it to you.

HAIL SATAN!
:)

KG Chart for Cross Stitch

KG chart for Cross Stitch is a fantastic little freeware program to create, edit and view Cross Stitch patterns. It has an export feature so you can export your patterns to PNG, JPG, BMP (evil), GIF or whatever you'd like. It's not as feature rich as pay programs, but it's fantastic to do your little graphs.

KG Chart

Download it and use it. It rocks.

Last Fm, What am I listening to?

1968 Mustang

When I graduated High School in 1987 my Mom bought me a 1968 Mustang. Most of my friends were getting brand new cars, but we all knew that I got the best graduation present of all of us. Well, I still have her. A little info: 302cu, 4bbl Holley carb, custom exhaust, custom stereo, deluxe interior that includes a tilting steering wheel, floor and overhead console with map lights, disc brakes, turquoise interior is stock.




















A few years ago I rehupolstered her. The seats were ripped to shreds, the carpet was gone except for underneath the seats. The carpet underlayment was gone. I had my feet on metal basically. So I decided to rehupolster the car myself. I went through my Mustang catalongs from Virginia Mustang, National Parts Depot and CJ Pony Parts Most everything came from Virginia Mustang, but I did have to order a few things from the other two places.









Some of the things I replaced:

• Seatbelts
• Seats and foam
• carpet and underlayment
• dash pad
• instrument bezel
• package tray
• Door panels
• arm rests

It took me 2-1/2 months to finish most of it. I still have a few things to do, like fix the backseat panels and get a new package tray. I tried to cover a cardboard one with vinyl fabric but it didn't work out the way I had planned (too bulky) but now they sell them covered.
I also stripped the rust off the seats and sprayed them with rustoleum or rubberized underspray along with the floor pans.


















































About a year later, I bought new rims and tires from CJ Pony parts. I got 15" MAG wheels R7 They look a lot better than the 66 hubcaps that were on there.

















I also changed out the mufflers to a ultra-loud exhaust (already had hedders). I'm hoping to add bigger tailpipes when I get my tax refund check this year. They're 2-1/2" right now, I'm hoping to go to 4" with turn down tail pipes under the car to maximize the sound. I also added a custom stereo from Custom Autosound with two 12" subwoofers and a 500W power amp. The subwoofers are mounted on a board which is custom made to fit just behind my backseat and the power amp is mounted in the trunk. I also splurged and bought a 10 disc CD changer to bring me into the 21st century =P

Century Media Podcast October 2007

Century Media Podcast 10-07 hosted by Tim Binder

This is the first metal podcast that I've listened to. This is a great way of hearing new bands. If you like metal, this one has a lot of great new metal to check out.

1. In this moment - Beautiful Tragedy
A fantastic song, strong yet pretty female vocals but she can let out a scream too. This song could make the radio, very catchy. They're on the road with Ozzy and Rob Zombie.

2. Firewind - Falling to pieces
Great melodic metal from Gus G.

3. Himsa - Big timber
A little similar to Arch Enemy and In Flames. Death/Scream vocals with melodic guitars. Pretty good tho.

4. Divine Heresy
Death/Screams with Clean vocals. Same guy I think. Good band, a good mix of heaviness and melody.

5. Arch Enemy - Blood on your hands
One of my favorite bands. This is off of the new album Rise of the Tyrrant. Amazing album, much more in your face than Doomsday Machine though I liked DM as well.

6. The agony scene - Barn Burner
Fun song, reminds me of a cross between metal and punk but not thrash.


7. Unsure of the artist - song: I will never let you down off of the awakening

8. Shadows Fall - Crushing Belial

9. The agonist - Business suits and combat boots
Great song!

10. Suicide silence - the prince of beauty

11. Nuclear Blast All stars - Disfunctional hours

12. Gotthard - Master of Illusion

13. After Forever - Energize me
Another of my favorite bands, great song, get their new album if you like Nightwish or Power/symphonic metal


14. Behemoth
Fantastic guitarists the hard core brutal black/death metal isn't my thing usually, but this band is pretty good.

Three successful Slackware 12 installs

Two of my machines used to run Fedora Core 8. One is a Compaq laptop 32 bit system, the other is an AMD 64bit (non dual core) chip. I had quite a few problem with Fedora, as I stated in KPLUG emails between myself and Carl. When I started with Linux, my first distribution was Slackware ( 3.5 I think). I decided to try the latest (Slackware 12) on both of these machines and install it on my Mothers HP laptop.

Slackware still has the same text install, partitioning the disks is still done manually before setup is run. Although, after it installed and rebooted, I was anticipating a lot of manual configuration with the sound cards and video. To my amazement I only had to run alsaconf to configure my sound card on both machines, my laptop has an ATI video card which required no extra configuration.
The NVIDIA card in my Moms laptop wouldn't work with the standard VESA driver or nv but it did find the NVIDIA card on my desktop. I downloaded/installed the drivers from nvidia and added nvidia into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and X came up. I did run into the disappearing mouse cursor on both machines that have the NVIDIA card, but adding Option "HWCursor" "Off" brought the cursor back and adding under input device:

Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

allowed me to use the middle scroll button on all three machines. My MP3s play, and Amarok doesn't lock up my system anymore. Not as much configuration as I thought I'd have to do, or as much as I used to do with older versions.

I have a DLink DWL-G122 wireless USB device, I don't use it at home anymore, but for the December meeting, I wanted to have wireless on my laptop. I searched for the card model # and the REV B1 and found open source drivers for Linux. It was a painless installation, I loaded the module and the light on my NIC came on. I don't have access to a wireless network at the moment, so I'll have to wait until the meeting to see if/how well it works on a network.

CDRoms, USB drives and other removable devices have to be manually mounted, which is something I'm used to with Slackware, until I figure out how to set it to auto-mount when inserted. I did have a little trouble with the HAL daemon using all my CPU and grinding my system to a halt on my laptop. I stopped the daemon and took the executable flag off the rc script and the problem has stopped. Something I need to look into though.

I haven't yet tried:
USB HP Scanner (It's a few years old 3400 I think, it worked with Fedora)
Built in USB Card Reader (Desktop)
2 Digital Cameras (one Kodak 3600 one HP)
HP Photo Printer (can't remember the model)
Logitech USB web cam Quick cam I believe

We also have 2 printers, one older HP laserjet BW and I have an HP color laserjet 2600n, both work great with Slack.

Slackware vs Fedora

This really isn't a debate on which distro is better. Just which one I prefer. I had Fedora core 8 64Bit installed on my desktop. And the 32 bit version on my laptop. One of the main functions of my desktop is to play mp3s with Amarok. Using Fedora, Amarok would lock up on me, and the OS was slow too. Waaaay too slow. Fedora doesn't play mp3s by default, you have to tweak it to get that functionality (because of legal issues).

Desktop: AMD 64Bit processor (can't remember the model, but not the dual core), 1.3Gig RAM, 250Gb HD

I'm going to give a presentation on Amarok and mp3 players to my local Linux User Group on December 13th. http://www.kernel-panic.org/
So I need to be able to play mp3s with Amarok on my laptop for this presentation. Fedora refused, I did exactly the same thing on my laptop as I did my desktop. Still no mp3 playback. It played OGG and FLAC, but not mp3. It was also very slow.

Laptop: P-IV 2.4Ghz, 786M RAM, 120Gb HD

In my frustration, I decided that Slackware was good enough for me before, I'll install it on my laptop. I haven't run Slack on this laptop before...Slack can be a pain to get hardware configured. It's not like Fedora or Suse, it doesn't always auto-find everything for you. It won't automount USB sticks or mp3 players, that has to be done manually.

Slackware installed beautifully, configured X fine, I didn't need to tweak xorg.conf to get the video settings right. I just ran alsaconf and it found my sound card immediately. Amarok loaded up nicely, doesn't crash or hang, and the system is FAST!

I installed Slackware on my Desktop last night...Didn't get a chance to play too much, it installed, and rebooted in under 15 minutes =]
Again, it configured my video properly, used alsaconf for sound and it worked like a charm! I have no idea why in the world I ever strayed away from Slackware in the first place. It was my first distribution (Slackware 3.5) and I'm back to it again =]

Even more computer stuff

I hooked up my new DSL modem, it has PPPOE in the modem, plugged it into my switch, hooked my new server into the switch and everything seemed to work well. I've totally changed my network, rather than going through one computer to get to the net, we all go through the modem. I had to change IP#s on everyone's machine, my internal network was 192.168.1 but my modem is 192.168.0 which is no biggie, easy to do.

I can't run my home webserver this way, but my torrents are a lot faster since there is no firewall. I'm debating on just leaving it this way, or setting up a router just after the modem to send all web traffic to the one machine. But, on the other hand, I could just run an intranet web server instead. I also can't ssh into my machines at home...I'm not sure if that's all that important either.

Another thing I'd like to do is setup a SANs, a hard drive (networkable) enclosure and put a few HDs in there to store stuff. I have 2 computers as file servers right now. I could do away with both of them if I get one of those. I don't want a USB drive, I want all the files accessable from any computer on my network.

Computer stuff

I just appropriated a new (to me) computer from my job. They love to just "dispose" of their older computers so if it's worth it, I take them home and put them to good use =]

I "appropriated" a Dell server, 2.8GHZ HT machine with 2 40 gig HDs and a Gig of RAM. I thought this would be a good time to replace my Linux server which is a 1.2Ghz PIII. This server acts as a firewall/gateway for the other computers on my network. It's also my webserver http://gypsy.sytes.net/ which isn't always up, but I'll get into that later.

I have DSL at home (6M/768K) which isn't bad, it's pretty quick normally, with a dynamic IP# and I use a Dynamic nameserver to get my gypsy.sytes.net address. I use Roaring Penguin's PPPOE software to connect, which works great, but my problem lies when my IP# changes and I lose my name on the machine. It's difficult to get it back again, I've written scripts to try to bring the name back to the current IP# but it always wants to hang on to the old IP. I'm hoping with this new modem, and a new server, I might be able to get this to work right. If I'm still having no luck, I'll call the TELCO and get a Static IP ($5/mo extra) and use that instead. Here is one script I use

#!/bin/sh

RMM="/sbin/rmmod"
MDP="/sbin/modprobe"
START="/usr/sbin/adsl-start"
STOP="/usr/sbin/adsl-stop"

EXTIF="ppp0"
EXTIP="`/sbin/ifconfig $EXTIF | grep 'inet addr' | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/.*://'`"
HOSTIP="`/usr/bin/host gypsy.sytes.net | awk '{print $4}'`"
#TIME="`/bin/date '+%m-%d-%Y %w %T'`"


if [ "$EXTIP" != "$HOSTIP" ]; then

/usr/sbin/adsl-stop
NPID="`ps aux | grep noip2 | grep nobody | awk '{ print $2 }'`"
/usr/local/bin/noip2 -K "$NPID"

/usr/sbin/adsl-start
/etc/rc.d/rc.firewall
/usr/local/bin/noip2
/usr/local/bin/dynubasic.sh
fi
exit 0


Now this bash script gets the IP#s of my ACTUAL IP and the one that's attached to gypsy.sytes.net and compares them, if they're different, it tries to get it attached to the new one. This script isn't working right. If I get this to work, I'll post what I did.

DSL Modem trouble

I fix computers as a side job (UTT). I thought it would be good to blog about this, maybe I can remember in the future how I fixed something! =]

I went over to a friends house to fix his computer. He said he had no internet connection. He has DSL with our local TELCO and the old Westell modem that doesn't have the PPPOE in the modem. He had contacted tech support twice already. I fiddled around with it and figured out that he was getting a connection. I could ping in DOS, do a correct nslookup even ftp into my machine at home. But, the problem was that he had no web browsing capabilities.

I did an ipconfig /all in DOS and noticed that his netmask was 255.255.255.255 which is incorrect. It should have a 0 as the last one. I contacted tech support yet again, got to the 2nd tier and they said he had a good connection, they even went so far as to suggest I reload his entire computer to it's original format. Ugh, no way...That takes hours. I had a feeling that the modem was at fault. It just so happened that I had a newer modem in my car. Another friend had given it to me ( I also have the old Westell modem at home), so I hooked it up, logged into the built in webserver and plugged in his login info, and BEHOLD!!!! It works great now. I managed to scam another free modem for myself from work, so I can try it at home.

I dunno if anyone will benefit from this, but it was interesting, because AT&T said that is WASN'T the modem. But that netmask was really suspicious, and the settings weren't hard coded in the networking settings. It was all supposed to be DHCP. So the address wasn't set by us...It was getting the wrong one from the TELCO. Probably going to be one of the last times I call for tech support. I don't for my personal (they don't support Linux), I just go with my gut feeling =]

Cheers!