Archive for November, 2007

More site changes

Published
by
wild
on November 20, 2007
in Uncategorized and Website
. 1 Comment

So as it turns out, the anime community is full of freeloaders who think bandwidth grows on trees. Here’s an interesting fact you may not know: it doesn’t. The server is in Australia, where bandwidth is actually rather expensive. The site used 3.72Gb of bandwidth in September, and I can tell you from looking through the Apache stats that a fair chunk of hits were not from actual page views on this site or hotlinked through my own use. I estimate around 20% of the hits this month have been hotlinks not of my own. I know this is very rough, but if you take 20% of 3.72Gb, that’s a whopping 700Mb of bandwidth.

So I’ve decided to put a stop to that before it grows out of control. From today, hotlinking from sites other than what I’ve allowed will not work. You’ll instead get a pleasant picture of a LOLcat with cheese on its face. You may also get this if you’ve got the HTTP referrer header turned off in your browser, and if you do, stop being a paranoid bastard.

On to the second and more obvious change. Because of the sheer amount of data this site uses, I’ve thrown up some small Google ads to offset running costs a little. I don’t expect to actually make any profit from the ads, since they seem to think this site is about pudding. Wonder what gives it that crazy idea.

Avatars!

Published
by
wild
on November 14, 2007
in Website
. 1 Comment

Since I’m an unoriginal bastard, I’ve blatantly ripped off Jaymz and added Gravatar avatars to the blog. So if you add your avatar to Gravatar, then post a comment with the same e-mail address, you should see your avatar.

If you don’t have a Gravatar account, you’ll see my friend, the Weighted Companion Cube.

RIP Weighted Companion Cube.

New KG2 Wallpaper!

Published
by
wild
on November 8, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

Here’s a new wallpaper that has, quite frankly, taken way too long. I nearly lost the will to live a few times along the way, but you know what? It was worth it.

This was originally a high-res scan of some sort. But the more I tried to Photoshop the text off the original image, the more it was becoming aware that the quality was pretty ordinary. So I did what I always do:

Kiddy Grade 2
Click to download

One of the reasons it took so long is I changed my method a bit for this one. I used Illustrator for the lineart, then Photoshop for the colouring. Very time-consuming, but the result speaks for itself. The other thing about this image made me glad I got 2gb of RAM with my Core 2 Duo. It’s a 170Mb PSD file, and Photoshop started to get a little sluggish near the end of the trace. I remembered that Photoshop defaults to limiting itself to half the physical memory before it dives into swap files, so I went and bumped that option up a notch. Needless to say, Photoshop was happy with that:

om nom nom nom
“Om nom nom nom”

sola

Published
by
wild
on November 6, 2007
in Anime and sola
. 1 Comment

You know, it’s funny. I’ve been watching anime for a few years now, but if anyone ever asked me what my favourite series was, I don’t think I would have been able to give a straight answer. See, there’s plenty of series that I’ve enjoyed. Off the top of my head, a few of the favourites would be shows like Cowboy Bebop, Last Exile, Azumanga Daioh and Chrno Crusade. Unfortunately some of these have been ruined by a bunch of phenominal idiots from Texas, but I thoroughly enjoyed the subbed versions nonetheless.

Spring 2007 was an interesting season for anime. In amongst shows like Lucky Star, Gurren Lagann and Claymore, there’s one I almost missed. That is, of course, sola.

This quite literally started off as one of the slowest shows I’ve ever seen, and wasn’t really that interesting in the first three or four episodes, so I initially didn’t watch much of it. The character designs are a little on the generic side too. Some characters even look like they got their face stuck in a car door and squeezed out while they were babies.

But I stuck with it. Apart from having some very nice opening/ending themes, the art is also nothing short of fantastic. And it was released by some fansub groups in 720p H264 MKV’s to boot. It is quite simply the most beautiful series to look at that I’ve seen. The character designs may be a little lacking, but I’ll be damned if Nomad didn’t make up for it — and then some — with the rest of the animation and art.

So I kept watching. And to my complete surprise, the plot takes some big twists a few episodes in… and this is where it went from being an incredibly slow series to one of the best I’ve ever seen. Just about every episode in the second half of the series gave some sort of surprise that kept me on the edge of my seat, waiting for the next episode to come out. I’ll hold the spoilers here, but this anime turned into something I just haven’t seen before.

And here’s another thing. Drama/romance series always seem to have a habit of getting under my skin for the same reason every time. You’ll get about 5 or 6 episodes in, and then you get hit with the ecchi episodes. You know, they all go to the beach, and then you get subjected to half an hour of fan service and awkward situations for the protagonist. Kono Minikuku no Utsukushii Sekai, Shuffle and Yumeria are a few examples I can think of that abuse this type of “filler” episode pretty badly, just to make up the required 26 episodes. Or in the case of some series, I just described the plot synopsis of every single episode. However, sola did it differently. The TV series didn’t stray from the story, so they could fit the same amount of plot into 14 episodes. It was then left up to the OVAs to fill in the fan service and lulz categories.

Despite the odd character designs and slow start, I can easily say I now have a favourite series. It’s probably the only one that I could honestly give a 10 out of 10 to. And if you haven’t seen sola yet: do yourself a favour. It’s not licenced yet, so go grab the 720p MKVs. It’s worth it.

Minami-ke, MAL and updates!

Published
by
wild
on November 4, 2007
in Minami-ke and Wallpapers
. 0 Comments

First off, a trace I’ve been trying to finish on and off for the last week. Finally got it finished today, from the ending credits of Minami-ke. May look a little wierd in 4:3/5:4 aspects, not much I could do about that without cutting Kana and Haruka off.

Minami-ke
Click to download

On to other news. NegativeZero pointed out a neat little site on his blog called My Anime List. It’s a kind of a Facebook-ish AJAX site where you can create a list of the anime you have watched and own. Kinda neat. My profile is here, tho somewhat incomplete.

I’ve updated the Wallpapers page of the site too, so now it’s current. Recent entries include: Manabi Straight, Nagasarete Airantou, Gurren Lagann and Kiddy Grade 2.

I’m back in the anime fansubbing scene too. I’ve joined a group called Subbers Anonymous, doing timing for a show called Shion no Ou. Keep an eye out for the SA releases (I’ll be doing the timing from ep 3 and hopefully onwards from there), and feel free to join us at #SubbersAnonymous on irc.rizon.net.

Linux Hacks: Copy a list of files with cpio

Published
by
wild
on November 2, 2007
in Linux
. 0 Comments

So here’s the problem, I listen to all my music streaming from my linux server with MPD and Pitchfork (which is quite an awesome little AJAX interface for MPD). I’ve got a playlist made with Pitchfork that I want to copy to my iPod. These playlists are saved in /mnt/store01/Playlists, while music is stored in /mnt/store01/Music.

How do I copy the files in the playlist to a new directory so I can just copy that whole directory to my iPod?

After a bit of screwing around with trying to feed output from cat into cp with a pipe, and lots of fruitless Googling, I finally found a way with a neat little Linux tool called ‘cpio’:

safari ~ # cd /mnt/store01/Music
safari Music # cpio -Vdp ../musictemp < ../Playlists/1.m3u
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
............................................................
................
3272929 blocks

And it’s that simple.