I’m thinking of coming back

WordPress is a lot different from Tumblr.

I really love Tumblr — it’s perfect for short-form, mixed-media blogging, it’s like Twitter on PCP and crack cocaine. The community is great. It’s fun!

But I get urges to write longer posts occasionally. Sometimes I need to flesh out an idea more, and Tumblr just isn’t the audience for that. Usually, anything more than a paragraph or too is tl;dr: too long, didn’t read.

WordPress, however, is perfect for the longer posts, and has much less distractions. Perfect for flashing out. Plus, it’s fun being here after not posting for over a year and a half.

Rockbox Skin :: First Try

I recently acquired a 5th Generation iPod Classic (a.k.a. iPod Video), and when I announced said acquisition a good friend of mine mentioned something about trying something called Rockbox on it. I had no clue what this was, but it was easy enough to find out: it replaces the firmware, the default software/OS/whatever on your iPod with something else.

Rockbox is open source and free, with multiple versions for a good deal of MP3 players, from iPod 5.5 Generation back and a whole slew of others. It took me about fifteen minutes to install Rockbox on my iPod and almost immediately I started playing around with it. There’s games, apps, you can read txt files, on top of the conventional stuff. Pretty nifty for an older MP3 player!

Now, me being me, I decided the the default skins weren’t good enough, and went snooping around for other skins I could possibly use. I found a really nifty Winamp skin for iPod Color, but unfortunately it won’t work for my iPod Video. I was pretty heartbroken upon figuring this out.

But never fear! I thought. This is an open source community, I should be able to find something somewhere.

Turns out, no.

So I ended up having to make one myself, and hope that some beautiful, wonderful soul in the community will help me code it once I’m finished. Currently it’s only an “alpha” version, as I’ve already spotted several tweaks I want to make to it, and I’m looking for some sort of community feedback as well.

What are your thoughts? What should be changed and what is good?

Hmm

I really need to get together however much money it costs to enable custom WP skins. I’m tired of picking from premade themes; I want to design my own (or at least find one that isn’t on the free list). These premade ones are for the most part… well, lame.

Hunt

Tallain85: So there I was, just me and that bear, holding the bucket filled with fish in one hand and a rake in another. The bear growled savagely, dropped on all fours, and advanced.
Tallain85: As a preemptive move I threw the bucket as hard as I could
Tallain85: I missed but the bear got distracted momentarily as the bucket flew overhead
Tallain85: That gave me time to strike with the rake. I hit the bear like a hammer, over and over, until the poor beast finally gave out one last wail and collapsed.
Tallain85: Curious, scared, heart racing and sweat pouring, I crept toward the fallen beast, rake extended, tense, ready to strike again. The bear stopped breathing.
Tallain85: But as I got within arm’s reach the fell beast leaped up and bit right through my arms! It was almost too fast to see but there I was, armless with blood shooting like out of a water gun.
Tallain85: Then it ran away.
Tallain85: Ever since I’ve been hunting the thing with these here mechanical arms.

Got bored one day.

Insane in the membrane

A while ago I wrote about ‘terraforming’ on Earth. I wrote about how in a few generations places that are now deserts could then be grasslands or forests even.

Okay, I realize it’s not really terraforming at all. It’s more like climate change. Which makes is wholly unremarkable. But it’s still almost an adventure to be here in the Mojave Desert as parts of it turn into fields of green and yellow.

I was up there with Sean and another friend, Ian, at that same rocky perch, and not only were the fields more green than brown, but there were meadows, small meadows of bright yellow flowers. California poppies I think. It was beautiful. I got a lot of photos. I’ll have them up here soon.

Nutty.