Author:

Inferno

Rehash: Recovering A Lost Wallet

Posted by Inferno – July 15, 2009

I found this article published on TimesOnline about some Psychologists who placed 240 wallets around Edinburgh with pictures of different things in them amazingly recovered nearly half of them.

Here’s the gist:

Put a baby picture in your wallet and your quite likely to get your wallet back (88 per cent of the 40 were returned [9 out of 10]).  Without a picture only (15 per cent were returned [1 out of  7]).

Why this works:

Scientists argue that it would be difficult to genetically code for feeling empathy exclusively towards your own child and much easier to code for feeling empathy towards all children. If you find a baby alone, there is a good chance it belongs to you, making it an effective evolutionary trait, said Dr Wiseman.

There are a lot of other tidbits in there since they also put pictures of dogs, old people and charity receipt slips and such in the wallets, and it explains how they were scattered to make a good test.  Definately hit it up if your interested.

I for one am going to start carrying a baby picture of myself or the wife.

Want To Keep your wallet? Carry a baby picture.

Emergency Texas Trip 2009

Posted by Inferno – July 12, 2009

Some of you may have noticed I haven’t updated in awhile, this was not completely my fault.  Sara’s grandfather past away at the beginning of June (I think it was the 5th, the timeframe is a blur in my mind), so we had to make an emergency trip to Texas.  Two weeks prior we had just bought our first car; a brand new 2009 Toyota Matrix, so we had the means, but we really didn’t think it was going to be as big of a journey as it was.

So we found out at about 2am June 6th, and were on the road about 4pm the same day.  We didn’t have a really big plan, we used Google Maps to set a course, and off we went.  We recorded most of the trip and I’m compiling a DVD of the whole thing, which will be one of the biggest video editing projects I’ve done (not saying much), more on that later.

When we got into Jamestown, ND we discovered that Google was trying to drag us more east than we felt necessary and started charting our course (which was easy) which was to take the 281 HWY all the way down into San Antonio.  Here’s a picture of the voyage, keep in mind those dots (additional destinations) are there to show you the course, and don’t actually mean anything.

This shows our trip down (HWY 281) and our trip up (Interstates).

This shows our trip down (HWY 281) and our trip up (Interstates). (Click on Image to Go to Google Maps)

This image sort of does it justice, but having actually experienced it, it’s pretty insane we even made it.  We did however sustain damage to the vehicle from wildlife.

While driving we ran into (literally and figuratively) a lot of wildlife, mostly sparrows, crows, a turkey on the loose (which really deserves a post on it’s own, I have video and you’ll have to see it), armadillos, fireflies,  and a lot more.

We hit a female, which is the one on the left.

We hit a female, which is the one on the left.

However the damage occurred when we came into direct contact with a Prairie chicken.  It’s a fairly large bird, and they were all over, yet they all knew to move when we got even remotely close.  One of them however happened to run INTO the road and attempted to fly but didn’t make it even an inch off the ground before it got hit with our vehicle going 65-75MPH (forget the speed limit).

Needless to say it died probably instantly, leaving feathers in our grill but also it cracked our front “bumper” and ripped off a big chunk of our mudflap.  It’s probably not going to be cheap to replace either.

We got to see quite a few sights just passing through (just rivers, and such) and I’ll try to get some of the pictures up as well as pictures of the car damage and maybe even some video.

I just wanted to get this up here to explain where I’ve been and I’ll hopefully get to writing a lot more.  I’ve also been throwing some ideas around on posting links to other things I’ve read and commenting on them (providing I feel they’re important and something people would generally miss).  If you’re out there let me know how you like the idea, do people really want my commentary or me reading and deciding what they may be interested in?

P.S.  The reason why the loose turkey is so awesome is because he just darts into the road, runs through fields, ducks under fences gets attacked by some random bird (swoops down upon him several times) and disappears into the horizon all to the soundtrack of “Danger zone” from the radio (through no doing of our own, didn’t notice till the playback).  It might not be funny to all, you might need to be sleep deprived, road weary and have been there.

Swine Flu: Overhyped Bullshit?

Posted by Inferno – May 26, 2009

Swine Flu Diagram

Swine Flu Diagram

The title of this one is so much like a Fox News headline it almost annoys me.  However I thought I’d post my thoughts on the swine flu, as I had ranted (at the  request of a friend) on my thoughts of the current swine flu “epidemic”.

This was written awhile ago, as I think most of the hype has worn off, but I still thought it relevant enough to post on it.  So here it is, mostly unedited except to make it a bit more cohesive in this setting:

I think the swine flu is an overblown threat and the only people that seem to have to fear it are those in third world countries or those without adequate health care services available to them.

Many people forget that yearly in the US 200,000 people tend to get sick and it kills 36,000 people. This is a substantial sum, and so far seems to be a lot more of a health-risk at this point than the swine flu.

However, since it makes good news, and causes people to buy papers or tune into TV programs who mention the outbreak it’s going to remain a hot-button topic until people realize that it’s not something worth freaking out about. For the meantime, my wife will continue to sell face masks like crazy from the pharmacy where she works (Been sold out for weeks). People are asking how many antibiotics they have, and whether they think they’re going to rush out, and whether they’ll dispense them without prescriptions. People are insane.

The fact is maybe this will act as a wake-up call and people will start to rethink just how much we use antibiotics both on ourselves for everyday things and how many drugs we feed livestock.

We feed crazy amounts of drugs to livestock, I’ve heard up to 70% of all antibiotics produced in the US go towards livestock feeds to cause them to get sick less, and grow fatter.  This eventually leads to drug immunities and crazy viruses such as this H1N1 flu.

People are also abusing antibiotics and the bacteria and germs are getting immunity way faster than we can produce more antibiotic drugs. We’re getting to the point where a flu epidemic could wipe out a significant portion of the planet, but in my opinion the swine flu isn’t it. It’s more than likely one of the warning signs people will write about and discuss after 3/4 of the planet dies from some plague a few decades (or longer) from now.

Of course this could possibly change if the virus mutates and becomes incredibly contagious and then congests hospitals etc.  But I’ve seen no evidence of this yet, and provided you have adequate health care as I’ve stated above, you’ll be fine.

For the most part, I really think I hit the nail on the head, but of course I do, it’s my words.  And despite all this time to see how things develop I still think it holds.

What do you guys think?  Am I being reasonable or am I not being cautious enough?

Review: Angry Video Game Nerd

Posted by Inferno – May 19, 2009

ANgry Video Game Nerd Logo

Angry Video Game Nerd Logo

That’s right I’ve decided to tackle some web series videos just for fun, and also to give credit to the good ones.  Truth be told though, I find it hard to write a review for a bad series, so expect only good ones.  I also have plans for reviewing some oldschool movies, as I have renewed interest in them in part because of the fellow I’m going to talk about here.

Alright, so if you aren’t aware of the Angry Video Game Nerd (now referred to as  AVGN) it’s a character created by a James Rolfe who reviews old nostalgic games (good and bad) and tends to get angry and make up curse words.  It might not be for everyone though as not only does the nostalgia have to be there to enjoy the videos, but the excessive swearing by the character can be a bit much.

James Rolfe fighting alongside "Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 B.C 4.0 Beta" in The Wizard & Super Mario Bros 3

James Rolfe fighting alongside "Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 B.C 4.0 Beta" in The Wizard & Super Mario Bros 3.

If you were like me, you were one of the lucky ones who grew up with Atari, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Sega Genesis, and all those other great consoles of yesteryear.  I also remember renting many of the titles that I see the AVGN review, and not only does he call it like how I remember, but it also shocks me how not-well these games hold up to today’s standards.

The special effects, and cameos of many characters such as Spider-Man, Jason Voorhees, or even Super Mecha Death Christ 2000 B.C 4.0 Beta make the episodes quite varied, even if it is just to expand the video length as some games are just too horrible and bland to keep it interesting.  One thing I’d like to see is a side-by-side video of the pre-production and post-production to see how the effects are done.  I assume it’s pretty basic effects in place, but a few other webseries I follow have done this for the fans, and I loved it.

James also does a lot of reviews of old (and recently some newer films, but only when they are sequels to an epic series such as the new Star Trek movie or the newer Star Wars movies).  However these are done under his film production company “Cinemassacre” and are NOT the AVGN character.  Which are definitely worth a look perhaps more-so than the AVGN.

So really, if you’re a fan of gaming or remember playing the old SNES and NES or almost any of the older systems (he has pretty much EVERYTHING) I think you’d really enjoy his videos.   My only real fault I find in James Rolfe’s website a bit hard to navigate for videos, as some have images you click on, others have links to different versions, and some are interweaved in a comment about something else.  It’s a minor nitpick which can easily be resolved by using the rss feed.

You can find James’ Work at:

http://www.cinemassacre.com/

Cinemasssacre’s RSS Feed:

http://www.cinemassacre.com/new/?feed=rss2

Here’s a few random videos for a taste of the AVGN and Cinemassacre reviews:

Lack of Updates

Posted by Inferno – May 14, 2009

I’ve been sort of busy lately so I’d like to apologize for the lack of updates to this site as of late.  All this week I’ve been running on very little sleep so I’m getting massive headaches and I’ve been having some crazy auditory hallucinations lately.

My goal is to post at least once a week starting next week.  I’ve got a lot of stuff sitting in my draft box that I’ve been meaning to edit and post, maybe I’ll do that.

Anyway, thanks to the like five people out there that support me by reading.  I’ll try to not keep you waiting.

My Quest For Good Quality YouTube Video Uploads

Posted by Inferno – April 3, 2009

The Internet's most popular video sharing site.

The Internet's most popular video sharing site.

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of my day trying to find the best settings, format and codec for the best quality Youtube videos.  The good news is I think I found the right recipe, the bad news is Youtube’s quality still sucks.

Over my experiment I probably uploaded the same video  twenty-five times or more, in a range of sizes, the largest being 400MB for a 13 second clip!  Just to see if there was a point of overkill.  So in order to let you know how the testing worked, let me explain the clip.

For testing I used a 13 second clip of my wife feeding a pigeon by hand.  I did this because it’s very small compared to the 10 minute limit set by YouTube so it should be easy to upload multiple times to test quality.  It also shows a range of motion from tilting to the flapping wings in decent outside lighting.  The original format was a DV AVI file for the most quality out of my Sony DCR-HC52.

The first thing I did was upload the clip in it’s original uncompressed format (DV AVI) with a total size of a little less than 400MB.  This being completely insane considering the max filesize for YouTube is 1GB and to upload at this size, the max length would be less than a minute.  Either way I tried it, and the quality wasn’t so great to be honest.  I think mostly because of the tools Google uses isn’t optimized to convert from DV to their MP4 and FLV.

I think did twenty or so conversions to FLV, Divx, Xvid, MPEG 2 & 4, WMV H.264 and many more on the advise of many forums and guides.  I don’t want to bore you all with the details (I’m sure I’ve lost some people already) but the important thing to note is that Google states H264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 are preferred.  Unfortunately they drop the ball by not giving the best settings (bitrate, resolution) to get the best quality videos.

So, what is the best way to encode your videos for youtube?

Use the H264 codec with a bitrate of 2000 (although you can play with this, but 2000 seems to be the sweet spot from what I can tell, more is better, but you probably wont notice).  You can probably get away with less bitrate too, but I want the best bang per MB.   Also set the resolution to the highest native resolution of the source.  For example DV from MiniDV tapes has a max Resolution of 720×480, so I use this.

This was a lot of work for such a simple idea.  The higher quality you give YouTube the better it’ll look.  However the goal I was looking for was where the diminishing returns sets in, and I feel I’ve have found it.  However I’m still unhappy with the quality of the video, and it seems comparing my videos with others that it’s now the fault of YouTube not the source video quality.  This is now setting me on another quest to find a better place to host my web videos.  Which of course is something I’ll touch on after I have an answer.

P.S.  I really wish I had more information to give you guys, especially considering how many hours I spent on this topic.  I hope it’s useful to someone, and it’s definitely a good reminder for me, so I don’t attempt such a thing again.

Odd Hobby: Fake Titles

Posted by Inferno – April 1, 2009

I’ve had this article bouncing around for awhile now and finally thought I should get around to posting it.  I was originally just lazy, and then it occurred to me that what I may be doing could be a form of fraud.  However since I’m not actually doing this for any actual gain and don’t do it for documents that actually MATTER for anything I shouldn’t worry about it.

Some time ago I had a discussion on the UplinkIRC Network with a good friend of mine (Darkk Rage), and I explained one of my very odd hobbies.  Everyone signs up for memberships for Movie rental places, grocery store club cards or even movie theaters for the additional discounts you can receive. When filling out the applications however I tend to add titles to my name that I don’t actually have.  Such as ‘Dr’ “Sir’ “Gen’ ‘Capt’ or a wide variety of all of them combined.

Not only does the card that I receive look cool to the point of being comical (Sir Dr Capt John Smith), but when I need to call in to these places or when I’m at the store and they call me “Mr” I tend to correct them.

“I didn’t go to school for so long to be a Mr” or “I didn’t kneel before the queen to be a Mr” etc.

I got the idea when I was working for a horrible American cellphone company where disgruntled employees would add titles to random caller’s phone oders for no reason but to get a laugh for the next representative and maybe a confused call from the customer.

I got the second part (correcting people) from the fact that if you happened to have a doctor on the line and called them ‘Mr’ they’d freak out and almost start screaming, (which may be a symptom of an inferiority complex), but there was no way for us to tell their titles or not as the applications used didn’t have such a field (probably due to they were coded before such a thing were invented, fuck they were old.).

The important thing to note for this however is to NEVER do this on a tax form, or resume, or anything that it may actually MATTER if you have a title.  Not only would it be unethical, but it’d probably be fraud.

Anyone else do anything similar?  I’d love to hear other things I can do too.

Review: Dead Space (Xbox 360)

Posted by Inferno – March 31, 2009

Dead Space Box Art

Dead Space Box Art

First off I should state that I’m not generally one to play the survival horror genre, although I have played and thoroughly enjoyed many of them such as System Shock 1&2.  I’ve also completed the game twice within short succession in order to write this review.

The general outline is that you are an engineer named Issac (named after Isaac Asimov) who is sent to a mining ship with a small crew to fix their communications systems as the ship went into radio silence and hasn’t responded to any forms of communication.  You then become stranded on this ship, and you notice that there are creatures lurking about (called Necromorphs) that want to kill you, and turn you into one of them.

Space zombies!  Yes, I know almost every space horror game has these now but considering how much polish EA put into Dead Space, it’s really not an issue.  It doesn’t seem like an old idea.  And the different forms that you find all over the ship make it a lot more interesting than fighting the same 3 enemy models over and over.  A big part of this is the fact that you have to attack the limbs.  Use your Plasma Cutter to hack the legs off, so they crawl towards you, then blow their head and arms off with the line cutter.  It’s quite fun, and also creepy because you can fire blindly into their chest and cut their legs off, but they’ll still scramble across the floor trying to kill you.

Although I can’t really say I was scared by this game (although the 2nd playthrough was surprisingly more spooky for some reason) but it did have some elements that made it spooky.  Take for instance the main religion of the game universe Unitology.  There are people in the game that WANT this all to happen, as it’s part of what should happen according to their idea of God’s Divine Plan(TM).  This personally filled me with frustration because these people don’t know what they’re doing sentencing these people to their deaths in the name of a fictional character.  Sort of like the frustration I have in the real world, where all these wars are started over which religion is more peaceful as they try to bring about the end of the world.

The lack of ammo in the harder difficulties definitely made me walk a little slower, and swear a bit more when I get jumped by three or four baddies as I fire wildly into the mass of limbs.  This definitely helped set the mood and made for a better gaming experience overall.  So if you want to get the most out of the story, don’t hesitate to bump up to a higher difficulty level on your first playthrough.

Overall I have to say I’m quite impressed with the game.  It was more than I expected and although I play’d it twice in a row I didn’t find it difficult to do so at all.  I’d advise you to at least give this game a shot, and if your into the survival horror genre you’re going to definately want to play the hell out of this one.

Fixed: RSS Feed

Posted by Inferno – March 28, 2009

It was brought to my attention of a good friend of mine that the RSS feed was broken.  The problem seemed to ahve been caused by a wordpress update that required a change to the .htaccess but it wasn’t writeable.

It’s fixed now, so everyone can enjoy some good syndication.  If you notice any more issues please let me know.

Special thanks to Gzaector, or iamjrich or dododestructor or whatever he wants to use fulltime now.

Burn-E or How Pixar is Awesome

Posted by Inferno – March 16, 2009

Whether you’ve seen Wall-E or not, and whether you enjoyed the movie or not you probably agree that some of the best movies of the last two decades came out of Pixar Animation Studios.

When Pixar was bought out by Disney, I among many others were worried that like so many takeovers, the larger less creative company will absorb the smaller one and thus break up the team and thought process and kill all the skills and talent they had.  However Disney did a great thing, they pretty much let Pixar do it’s own thing like they did before, and it’s treated them well because they’ve come out with some great movies since then.

However, I wanted to state how Pixar was awesome, because even after Wall-E was made and ready to ship out Pixar made a few extras including a short which introduced us to BURN-E.  Whether it was intentional marketing move, or whether some employees were just playing around with the renderfarm I don’t know.  The fact that they actually made additional content just for the release is awesome.  It’s a shame you don’t see that more often, and it’s one way to tell that Pixar is going to be around for quite some time.

Without further delay, here’s the BURN-E short on Youtube.