technonaturalist

[8yo is playing Civilisation Revolution on the PS3, I glimpse a city I think is called Berlin but not sure whether it’s his or computer’s]
me [not thinking]: what race are you playing?
8yo [looking at me like I’m an idiot]: …humans.
{I kick pre-caffeinated brain into some form of gear]
me: what CIVILISATION are you playing?
8yo: Oh. Germans.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

And as I said “done” and took and saved the screenshot, I went and made the knees less prominent. Roughly a month (~4 weeks) rather than one year which is much more betterer.

And now to Blender to retopo, add the tail blade (well kind of a paddle in his case) and the wing membranes, and texture and rig. This might be the first one I do in Blender as I haven’t done any more work on Twilight since finishing the subdivision. I don’t think it will mind too much. I am being optimistic thinking everything will just fall into place nicely and work, but I am really glad I can fall back to Lightwave if things get too maddening.

[7yo pats cat sitting on my lap]

7yo: I’m making Moulty moult on you!
me: Moulty? :)
7yo: Malki! But she is malking on you. [realises what she said] Moulting!

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

After all that experimentation, it was the antivirus after all (one of the first things I turned off to no effect because I’m not sure how the “web intelligence” bit is attached to the main part of the program).

JJ guessed “something” between the http and the transport layers and this makes sense as the “web intelligence” scans incoming file attachments and I think may also be checking websites for malicious scripts (which would probably never get executed because I use NoScript, unless it got injected by a website I use frequently that didn’t have it before).

Makedo

There was a large set at SciTech in the main exhibition on our last trip and 8yo made a wearable R2-D2. It was the first time I’ve seen it in action and I’ve since acquisitioned a few sets of 3 as group presents for friends’ kids.

EcoToys

One of my automatic go-tos at least every Silly Season, if I’m organised enough I’ll occasionally poke in to organise a birthday present as well. Beautiful and quality stuff (a Green Toys tea set that I bought for 7yo a couple of years or so ago got taken outside so they could have tea party with water and then got left outside since is still looking in very good nick, could probably scrub it up and have it looking more or less new) that gets played with constantly because it looks good and doesn’t break when you look at it. Just wish I had more money.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

So turns out our NSA spyware proxy may actually be Skype.

The intermittent http losses had been getting closer and closer together and it eventually got to the point where I lost it twice in a day. I was in the middle of burning Debian CDs (to reinstall the kids laptops, because apparently using the 7.1 cds I have and upgrading is not as good as downloading the 7.2 cds and using them) and quietly simmering about having to do a clean reinstall, when JJ came up with the brilliant idea to kill Skype because apparently Skype uses port 80.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Weeks are getting slower as far as socially accepted “schooling” goes and ramping up with Silly Season.

We did our usual park meet and roleplaying and a quick stint at the library this week but missed out on a chunk of the boring every day stuff such as grocery shopping as 4yo has been very 4 lately and taking him out anywhere is more unpleasant than it needs to be.

I finally got basic modelling in Blender.

All I needed was to find where the subdivision tool was hidden.

Early days Blender and Lightwave comparison:

Layout

I prefer having a menu on my right as I use a Cintiq and find it quicker to access stuff I don’t know keyboard shortcuts for (or that don’t have keyboard shortcuts) if the menu is over to the right. I can move it in preferences in Lightwave.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

She recently found a birthday buddy. I’m just slow and have been busy, hence the late celebration post.

I got told once (not directly, the person doing the telling was telling it on a forum) that personalities are more or less developed by the age of 7 or something to that effect. If this is the case, then my daughter has my nasty streak which is not something I wanted her to inherit, but fortunately she is a lot nicer than I am most of the time.

It started sometime after I upgraded to Mavericks (it was 10.9.something by the time I got around to it, and I really do quite enjoy using it) and before the next update. I would be poking around on the internet and seemingly at random, everything would just stop working.

Everything that wasn’t going over http would work fine (ssh on terminal, im programs, Tor).

I initially assumed there was something wrong with dns so tried using OpenDNS instead of my isp, but that didn’t fix it.