Concept art by Andree Wallin

The third open movie, Sintel, is coming out really soon and is in its last few weeks of development. Like the first two open movies, it is being produced by the Blender Foundation, inviting the best talents to work on it for six months in Amsterdam and introduces several more improvements to the Blender software. As an open movie, the guys creating it are not restricted as with commercial movies and have all the creative freedom they could have to create it. This time around, the third open movie will be an epic, action-adventure short movie set in a fictional fantasy setting.

Video of their intro video at the Blender Conference after the jump

Blender Conference Intro Video from Project Durian on Vimeo.

Big Buck Bunny

How Much Is That Bunny in the Window?

Meanwhile, as I was looking for the SM/Nokia dropbox where I could dispose my old batteries, I was surprised to see Big Buck Bunny looping on some monitors of a computer store window. Not that I don’t want them to show it there, it’s great that they are. It’s just that Big Buck Bunny has been out for almost a year and a half now…

For those of you who also have no idea about Big Buck Bunny, it’s the second open movie project by the Blender Foundation after Elephants Dream (see To the (Open) Movies).

If you found this information useful, buy me a coffee.

Don’t have World of Warcraft yet?
Buy World of Warcraft (PC CD-ROM) at Play-Asia.com

Buy World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack (PC CD-ROM) at Play-Asia.com

If you found this information useful, buy me a coffee.

Learn more about Max and the Magic Marker from their official web site.
If you’d like to subscribe to GameTrailers Wii, click on the following button:

If you found this information useful, buy me a coffee.

Pre-Order your copy of Muramasa: Demon Blade from PlayAsia to get it as soon as it comes out!

Click on the following links for the other games in the lineup:

• New Super Mario Brothers Wii
• Wii Sports Resort
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
• Sin and Punishment 2

If you found this information useful, buy me a coffee.

P.S. Yes I know I said I’ll be posting about iPod and Ubuntu. Don’t worry, we’re getting there.

Add/Remove Programs…

Click on Applications then on Add/Remove Programs…

The Add/Remove window will appear and you’ll be presented with a lot of applications that you can install, organized by category. You can quickly find an application by typing in the first few letters of its name (while the application list is focused), clicking on one of the categories to trim down the list, or by entering a few keywords in the search bar on top.

Tick the checkboxes of the applications you want to install and click Apply. After the applet downloads the package files and installs them, no questions asked (no pesky options which you’ll ignore and clcik Next anyway).

Synatic Package Manager

Installing GNOME Raw Thumbnailer via Synaptic

Synaptic functions much the same way as the Add Remove Programs, except it displays the packages themselves instead of the application. Most applications are composed of multiple packages, though you don’t have to worry about that because when you choose to install a package (ex. miro), it automatically prompts to install all the dependencies (packages which miro needs to run). Go ahead, try it for yourself. Oh, and as with the Add/Remove Programs method, there are still no pesky questions aside from the “Apply The Following Changes?” confirmation. Whereas the Add/Remove Programs… applet offers you a user-friendly interface to pimp out your Ubuntu box, Synaptic offers you a way of choosing specific packages to install (more often than not, instructions on the net will tell you specific packages to install), while still remaining relatively user-friendly.

Debian Packages (.deb files)

Installing the Skype .deb

This method is perhaps the most familiar to Windows users:

1. Download the deb file (Win users might be more familiar with the term installer)
2. Run the deb file
3. Agree to the End User License Agreement (EULA)
4. Select destination folder and click Next
5. Select Full or Custom Install. If Custom, select the appropriate options.
6. Click Install

My bad, there are no steps 3, 4, and 5.

Aptitude

Aptitude is the command-line utility used for installing packages. Now before you go dissing off Aptitude because it’s a terminal command, consider that when you’re installing a lot of programs at once (or following instructions off the net), it’s quite faster and easier to type (or paste) in the command-line sudo aptitude install blender miro mirthkit scummvm filelight deluge frozen-bubble than it is to find and select those 7 applications.

Source Code

When worse comes to worst, you can install most open source applications by performing the following steps:

1. Downloading the source code (usually distributed as a .tar.gz file)
2. Extracting it (Right-click > Extract here… or tar -xzf file.tar.gz)
3. Entering the extracted folder via the terminal
4. sudo aptitude install build-essential if you haven’t done so already
5. Typing in ./configure
6. Typing in make
7. Typing in sudo make install
8. If you want your program to be removable via Synaptic/Aptitude, use sudo checkinstall -D. This will create a package first before installing it.

A more thorough explanation of the compile process can be found eleswhere on the Internet. Just Google it.

A Word About Dependencies

One of the fundamental differences between programs in Unix/Mac/Linux and Windows is the way a program is packaged. As you install more and more applications, you’ll notice that fully-functional programs only use up a few kilobytes, sometimes only a few megabytes, and you might begin to wonder how Linux programs get to be so small when compared to their Windows counterparts.

This is because of one of the unwritten rules in writing programs for Linux, writing many small applications with a single purpose rather than 1 massive application that does many, allows many programs to use and share libraries or even other programs. These libraries or programs that an application uses are called dependencies. In Windows, save for a few Windows DLLs, each application needs to include everything in its installers (haven’t you ever wondered why you’d hardly find any CD installers for Linux?).

There is a term called dependency hell. I personally experienced this back when I was using Red Hat. It describes what happens when you have an application with several dependencies, where each dependency has a few more dependencies themselves or is dependent on a specific version of an application. Thankfully, the package manager for Ubuntu (and Debian for that matter) is very robust in automatically handling these dependencies for you.

If you found this information useful, buy me a coffee.

Editing Project Victory with Blender

After 9 months in the making, Project Victory is finally completed! It tooks us 6 months to shoot, spread over 2 countries in 6 different locations, and 3 months of post-processing the images building the three collages and getting everyone’s approval, editing and re-editing the video, implementing new ideas, and having fun all the way.

You can watch the video over at the Project Victory website.

Project Victory was a photo project that my batchmates did over the last couple of months, and we recorded most of everything that happened along the way. It was created with a mix of open-source and closed-source software in Ubuntu, using BibblePro for RAW conversion, GIMP for some graphics and editing, and Blender for the 3D scenes and the video sequence editing. Read more at the Project Victory website.

Stay away! You're wallet would be safer with a thief!

“7,750?” I asked. “7,795 po”, the saleswoman corrected me, the tone of her voice proud, as if they were selling the deal of the century. Indeed, Datablitz’s price is one of the lowest, compared to around 9,500 pesos in the toy shops of the large malls like SM Toy Kingdom, Toys R Us, and that toy store in Landmark Trinoma. If only people knew that they were actually selling the WiiFit more than 200% of its real price. At Yodobashi in Japan, the Wii Fit sells for 8,360 yen or about 4,180 pesos. And it would have been even lower if it wasn’t for the bad foreign exchange right now, and since Yodobashi is like a huge chain of super stores, you could find an even better deal if you bought from other smaller stores. An imported Japanese DSi would set you back 17,800 pesos here. It’s SRP? 18,800 yen (9,400 pesos). A Wii console costs 22,000 pesos. It sells for 25,000 yen anywhere in Japan. And good luck looking for a Y30,000 Xbox 360 Premium. You’d be lucky to get it here for 20,000 pesos (Y40,000). Apparently, I’m not the only one being miffed by this whole situation; this situation has been going on since the PSX and is not likely to abate any time soon.

Sadly the state of gaming here in the Philippines isn’t limited to overpricing. Piracy is so rampant that the ones who would dare buy *gasp!* original games/software are considered weird! Not rich. weird. Rich peope here still buy pirated games. And establishments “for the masses” like SM don’t help the situation at all with their overpricing. I don’t quite understand it. Some say that this is a third-world country, and people simply can’t afford buying original. Yet, these same people can afford DVD players, PSPs, DSs and Playstation consoles?

Their response? “Well, it’s because we save our money to buy that PSP. But that’s it, we can’t afford to shell out for an original game every month”. Read that again, I urge you, and tell me there’s nothing wrong here. It’s not that people can’t afford it. It isn’t frugality or a sense of economy. Rather, it’s because people here are too cheap, piracy has become the norm, and you can practically hack your PSP at the nearest convenience store.

My Tips To Stay Pirate-Free:

1. Buy online. Datablitz is good, but you’ll find great deals on forums like Pinoy-N, Pinoy XBox, or your favorite local gaming forum. You can buy new original games from P2,000 all the way down to P1,000 sometimes. Plus you get to meet new people.
2. Set aside money for 1 game a month. If you followed #1, you will only have to set aside P50-P100 each allowance/working day to do this.
3. Actually TRY TO FINISH all games that you buy. Try this, and it will make #2 even easier. When you buy pirated, you get tons of games, and maybe play for a good 10 minutes and that’s it. Not only did you bring the value of the game down by pirating it, you also bring it down by not playing it through.
4. Get your siblings to pitch in. If you’re like most families, you’ll have at least one. If they don’t like it, they don’t play. Simple as that.
5. Buy 2nd hand games. Come on, don’t be stupid. This isn’t a car or computer, this is a piece of software. Unless he sells you something that looks like it was scratched by a paper shredder, it’s still worth it (especially when you can get one near-mint condition for P500! Oh yeah!)

Hey, if you have any more tips that we all could use, hit the comments!;)

Note: BY-SA, BY-NC-SA, and BY-ND are among some of the combinations of Creative Commons (CC) licenses: BY – Attribution, SA – Share-alike, NC- Non-commercial use, and ND – No Derivatives. For more info on CC licenses, go to http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/.

I think there has to be a better solution, which is why I submitted an idea to Ubuntu Brainstorm, an Ubuntu website where you can send in your ideas or suggestions to help improve Ubuntu and the Linux community in general.

My idea is a simple one: what if you can add the Creative Commons license of a piece of music directly into its ID3 tag which was somehow machine readable? That way, you can easily distinguish or search for music by license in Rhythmbox or your favorite music player.

Probably, the most common CC combination is the BY-NC-SA, which allows you to share music to others and even adapt or incorporate them into your own work, as long as its non-commercial and you share it with the same license.

I think this feature would be of great importance to people who regularly need the use of music for commercial work, such as freelance audio/video producers and restaurant or coffee shop owners, as playing CDs they bought in a local record store might possibly consitute a copyright offense. They could easily do a quick search in Rhythmbox or their favorite player for CC music that doesn’t have NC in their license.

The Jamendo blog is great for discovering new CC music. And if you appreciate the free music that much, you can easily send a donation directly to the artist. This is a better business model than paying for a CD where only a small fraction actually reaches the artist.

Have an CC NC-licensed music you want to play in public? Licensing a CC work is still by far cheaper than paying Sony, BMI, or whatever big record company, period. For as low as 8 euros a month you can sign-up for a Jamendo Pro Radio to play music in your bar or coffee shop (And if you do, put in “punong_bisyonaryo” as your referral code as a way of saying thank you for sharing you this info).

Well, to get you started on free music, why not check out the Jamendo Blog for great, new music!

Happy FREE listening!

The XBox 360 dropped out in the very first round while the Wii and PS3 continued on duelling it out till the end. Applause! Applause! Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t get a 360 after all…

Note: I urge you not to perform this test yourself, but feel free to do so. I waive all responsibility.

Social Bookmarks:

Well, the Guardians of Space are back, and they’re kicking Ryu’s ass in this video of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom for the Wii! Watch the video to see the beautiful, head-bashing visuals:

After the break, we have Ghostbusters coming to the Wii



About a decade after the Ghostbusters movie, you can now relive the adventures of Pete, Egon, Rey, and Winston as they zap the crap out of Slimer, the Staypuft Marshmallow man, and other new ghosts in the upcoming Ghostbusters video game, coming out for multiple platforms:

Visit the Ghostbusters home page for more info.

Last, but certainly not the least, if you haven’t heard of The Conduit (you haven’t heard of The Conduit?!), it’s an upcoming FPS for the Wii that is going to push the limits of the Wii’s hardware. While most developers were still too busy playing with the motion controllers of the Wii and testing the Wii waters (Wii Music, anyone?), the Conduit creators decided it was better to make a splash and created it’s own engine for the Wii, called the Quantum 4 engine, and as showcased in this video:

Developers take note, the Wii’s hardware may not be as powerful as the PS3, but it certainly isn’t weak (and the controls, of course, well, there’s nothing like it). Please, please, please, snatch up this Quantum 4 engine and give us better-looking, envelope-pushing games!

And here is the Quantum 4 engine, as used in The Conduit. Enjoy!

Social Bookmarks: