Monthly Archives: January 2009

The Apple Matrix Has Me

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Over the past week I have been working on building a DIY green screen. This is going to be used for my senior project, but it can also be used for fun. Today I did my first test and I am really happy with how it turned out. The only problem I had was a burned out bulb on one of my lights, so that is why I have the black shadow in the middle of my face. I was impressed with how well Final Cut Pro keyed out the green. I didn’t even tweak it at all to get the results in the clip below. There isn’t any audio and I was just rambling on anyway, so you wouldn’t want to hear what I had to say. :)


Here is a picture of my setup in our small living space. Luckily the whole thing is made of pvc pipe and can be taken a part for storage.
greenscreen

Finally, I did not come up with the whole idea by myself. There is a great website called Indy Mogul that has all sorts of videos for DIY stuff like this. I used their tutorial and the whole thing came out to about $40. A Professional green screen costs a lot more than that. Here is their video showing how to build one for yourself.

What Others Are Saying

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I always liked how on blogspot your links would show the title of everyones most recent posts. A month ago I tried playing with some of the different plugins with wordpress and never could get it working quite right. Today I decided to give it another go and I think I am happy with the results. Now on the right hand side is a heading with “What Others Are Saying” and it is in ordered by the most recent post. It pulls this in with RSS and seems to have worked for all my links that have an RSS feed. I also added a few more links to blogs of some family members. For anyone that I might have missed that reads my site please let me know and I’ll gladly add a link.

For anyone else using wordpress that wants the plugin it can be downloaded here

Encore 15 & 16

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Here are the next two sets in the Japanese Transformers Encore line. Number 15 is going to be a pack of 4 reissue cassettes for Soundwave and Blaster. In the set you get Lazerbeak, Ravage, Eject, and Rewind. I’m still trying to decide if I want this. I already have Lazerbeak and Ravage from previous reissues, so I don’t really need another. Rewind and Eject would be nice to go with Blaster though. This set will be released in March.
tfccass

Number 16 is going to be Bruticus. Bruticus is a larger robot formed from 5 smaller transformers. The group is called the Combaticons. This is the second merge group that Takara has reissued. The new movie coming out this summer is supposed to have Devastator which was formed from 6 Constructicons, so with the release of this figure it has been speculated that we might also get Devastator. I hope this turns out to be true.
tak10909

Running Again

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Timing couldn’t have been better. Yesterday the replacement case that I had planned for the server arrived in St. George from Newegg. My dad planned on coming up today for some other reasons, so he was able to bring it up with him. I now have everything swapped to the case and we’re up and running again. Hopefully I won’t have any problems with the new power supply. Here is what the case looks like from a newegg pictures. It is a nice and small case that works great with micro atx motherboards.
11-144-162-02