Friday, December 28, 2007

TV for Next-Gen Multimedia Entertainment

Today's powerhouse interactive videogame consoles are capable of producing unparalelled visuals. That's why I invested into (reduced price) giant plasma TV screen. Now I can practically immerse myself in all those virtual worlds!

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Very Good at manual Labor

At the end of elementary school, each of us got a "recommendation for future career". Mine mentioned - among other things - that I am "not very good at manual labor", probably because I got a nasty scar on my forehead when creating wooden art item using the soldering iron, among other things.

Now, quarter a century later, I proved my teachers wrong. I bought a large pile of wood and screws and assembled my furniture. Ikea furniture. Yes, all that was inside of those boxes. I have blisters but I feel proud of myself. I am Jack's content heart.

p_2007-11-05_14-08-28.jpg



p_2007-12-19_21-43-10.jpg



p_2007-11-24_13-46-04.jpg



p_2007-12-20_00-41-43.jpg

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Thursday, December 13, 2007

Ennio Morricone: 79 Years Old, Still God

This is what I shot yesterday in Vienna:



(He can also do techno.)

This is also a subtle reminder that I moved from Google Video to YouTube (owned by Google, linked to your Google account).

Monday, December 10, 2007

Note To Warner Bros.

When you create expensive website for your expensive movie, be sure to check the spelling on the title page.



(Taken from sweeneytoddmovie.com.)

Monday, December 03, 2007

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Mr. Kalinin Knows His Miners Well

A man from Slovakia seems to be selling acrylic paintings depicting various 8-bit videogaming icons on his website DigitalRetro.org. He seems to be especially fond of Manic Miner. The paintings are for sale for about 300 EUR each.



The one on the right is called "Teleport Error 01".

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Music of the Spheres

Please listen to all songs on her page. Your life will be a better life afterwards.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Not Dead Yet

I am currently rather busy with something that resembles "work" so please forgive me for not blogging very often. Meanwhile, I'd like to again direct your attention to my Shared Stuff which is alive, well and updated daily.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Two Bizarre Linux Experiences

Today, I experienced two most extreme first-time Linux user reactions.

First, I installed Ubuntu on my mother's new computer (several days ago) and arranged high-speed Internet connection for her. She's been using computer for many years, sending e-mails through seznam.cz webmail and even doing some graphics stuff in Corel and Photoshop.

My mother is 67 years old but she used the computer regularly for many years so I was surprised that she has no idea what windows are, she has no idea how quoting works in e-mail responses and she doesn't understand that modem shouldn't be turned off if she wants to surf the Internet. Also, her idea of organizing e-mails is printing out all her e-mails on paper and then searching the papers. Before she had her own working printer, she forwarded all her e-mails to my sister who had to print them out for her. I had no idea about that... :(

So, during the last 3 days, I spent about 12 hours visiting and calling my mother and explaining to her for the n-th time the difference between clicking on desktop icon and clicking on bookmark in Firefox. During all of this I watched her desktop on one of my workspaces (using VNC), calling her whenever I saw her doing something nasty.

And during all of this, I got an IM message today from Kristina, my friend who works in one of film distribution companies. Kristina is about 25 years old and I thought she knows just about enough PC stuff to succesfully use Outlook and Internet Explorer (possibly confusing the two). Anyway, she wrote to me that she needs to install the new laptop for her mother and she doesn't have Windows installation CD. I told her I am using Linux and she should too. After a while, she asked "Which Linux? I found at least 5 of them." I recommended Ubuntu and forgot about the whole incident, maybe feeling a little guilty for confusing her. After several hours, I got an SMS message saying "Linux is super! I am ecstatic! Why didn't I use it sooner? Thanks for the tip."

This seemed like some sort of prank to me but during the course of several following messages, I found out that she downloaded, burned and installed Ubuntu herself. And she thought she is "stupid blonde" because she was not able to write "@" on her Czech keyboard layout. Incidentally, I never knew how to write "@" on Czech keyboard layout until today.

What does this mean? This means that either I didn't know Kristina is L33T h4h0r, or that Ubuntu installer is now really usable for the masses. It would also seem to me that Linux is excellent choice not only for people like me, who are control freaks and like to configure slightest details, but also for people who "just want their computer to work". I know Linux community wanted this to be true for a long, long time, but now it seems it's realy happening...

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Today's Stupid Flash Game

A day in the life of drunk Spider-Man. Play it here!

Thursday, October 04, 2007

^o^ !!!Norton Fighter!!! ^o^

This ad campaign for Norton antivirus almost makes me jealous I don't use Windows... And don't live in Japan... An am not completely crazy...

Sunday, September 30, 2007

We'll Always Have Paris

Three basic things I learned during our recent trip to Paris:

First important point: If you want to travel around Paris, this thing is very useful. If you stay on the outskirts of the city, it's absolutely essential!

Second important point: Forget Eiffel Tower. More precisely: Visit Eiffel Tower but don't climb it as every other pathetic loser. If you don't pay for the mega-expensive restaurant at the top, you can only climb as high as the second "level", approximately in the middle of the tower (i.e. not very high), and feel like a prisoner behind the steel mesh, amongst hundreds of screaming tourists. Instead, go to Montparnasse 56 Tower which is almost exactly the same height as the Eiffel Tower and you can either take lift to 56th floor where you find observation deck, souvenirs and two restaurants, or take short stairs from 56th floor to the roof and see whole Paris, including the Eiffel Tower. It's breathtaking and it's far less crowded:

p_2007-09-28_20-06-50.jpg

This video is taken shortly after the photo above. Stormy night after the dark 200 meters above Paris is amazing experience (although the video is rather shitty):



Third important point: The Louvre is vastly overrated. All the accompanying texts are only in French. Mona Lisa is small and probably a replica (bored guards did nothing when hundreds of visitors photographed her using flashes from 2 meters away, which was supposed to be "strictly forbidden", according to the nearby signs). The three most important paintings in The Louvre are:
  1. St. Franciscus of Assisi (i.e. me!) and paragliding Jesus in laser beam shoot-out.
  2. A zombie (???) with saw in his head.
  3. An early portrait of Jigsaw from the "Saw" movies.


UPDATE: It seems I am completely wrong about the Eiffel Tower and you can take a lift to the very top for 12 Euro...? Whatever. It's many years since I was there and Montparnasse Tower was better...

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Best Info About Gangbangs And Radek Hulán?

Here are the top search queries for blog.fuxoft.cz, according to Google Webmaster Tools.



I am glad my blog is so useful I have even been nominated for "Crystal Magnifying Lens" Internet award. With my excellent SEO knowledge I can now provide even more topical info about gangbangs and Radek Hulán...

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Turisas: Another Kind Of "Battle Metal"

I've never heard about of this band before. If nothing more, their covers sound really catchy:



Saturday, September 22, 2007

Matthew Smith Is One Crazy Hippie. Also, He's A God.

"I was 17 when I wrote Manic Miner"... "I think it's going to get to a stage where one person can't write a whole game"...

Albert The Pimp

Albert The Pimp

(Taken in Prague's Phenix Cafe)

Thursday, September 20, 2007

New Template, New Feed, New Bookmarks...

Today I updated this blog's template. You shouldn't notice any drastic visible differences but there could be some hiccups with this blog's RSS/Atom feed (I hope the URL stayed the same).

Also today, Google announced their Google Shared Stuff social bookmarking system. The "My shared items from Google Reader" feed I used before is now supplanted by Google Shared Stuff. In other words, if you want to see/read my daily Internet discoveries, you should now use this link to either view them in your browser or add them to your RSS reader.

P.S: I discovered that I am unable to "share" the certainly-NSFW website, goatse.cz (URL not clickable for very good reason). There is no error message or anything similar but the "sharing" window appears completely empty and I cannot click on anything to actually share the site. Is this intentional censorship??

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Pork your Pork!

I think I know what I might want to do during my next Tokyo visit. I think, technically, this is not infidelity...?

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Photos Of Cute Small Animals

In its infinite wisdom, the Municipal Transit Authority of Prague requires each and every dog in tram, bus or Metro to be muzzled. The result? Chucky is a ninja!

Ninja!

And Albert doesn't care, as always...

p_2007-09-12_21-28-23.jpg

Full photoset is here.

But that's not all! Today, when riding the bike in Letná park, I found exceedingly adorable kitten!

p_2007-09-13_19-09-39.jpg

Her photoset is here. Remember, each time you masturbate, you kill one of these! (Or not?) Anyway, I was very tempted to take her home but remembered what Kryspin did to Albert and Chucky.

And, of course, the cutest small animal of them all is Jitushka and you are lucky she's not camera shy:

NezadaniUFuxofta-sep07_045.jpg

P.S: I also found this absolutely amazing dog on Flickr...

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Give Him Five

It's time to upgrade your operating system:

Sunday, September 09, 2007

You Wouldn't Steal A Handbag...

Just a friendly reminder that the new "IT Crowd" episodes are now available from your favorite sources...

Chucky Is Lucky

Click the image to see why:

Chucky is lucky

Monday, September 03, 2007

"Signing could not be verified"

This post is here mainly for the benefit of people who encounter the same problem and are looking for a fix in vain...

This post is about Ubuntu Linux and Firefox 1.5.

I decided to completely reinstall Firefox browser in my Ubuntu because it was getting rather sluggish, encumbered by many extensions I installed during the previous months. To this end, I completely removed the "firefox" package, backed up my ".mozilla/firefox" directory and then re-installed the "firefox" package. My plan was to install all the extensions I really need from scratch and use only the bookmarks.html file from the original configuration.

However, I hit a snag while installing Google Browser Sync extension. Firefox told me that "Signing could not be verified" and refused to install it. After more digging (and help from nice people), I discovered that, in Firefox preferences, under "Advanced / Security / Security Devices", I don't have the "Bulitin Root Module" item which should be there, and this is indeed the culprit. Now, this module needs the file "usr/lib/firefox/libnssckbi.so" in order to work. However, this file was not on my disk and, furthermore, was not part of "firefox" package!

After more digging, I discovered that this file belongs to package called "libnss3" which was installed on my machine. I reinstalled this package (the file magically re-appeared), added reference to this file into the "Security Devices" window and Firefox started working correctly.

I have absolutely no idea how could this file be removed. I certainly didn't do anything with /usr/lib/firefox/ files. I hope this fix helps someone who encounters this weird problem...

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Thursday, August 30, 2007

What He Really Meant Was...

True story:

I think it's irresponsible for my driving school instructor to alert me to the interesting fact that there are workers digging gasworks nearby by saying "Hmmm, gas" while we are waiting at the intersection. Just a thought...

The Butt Biting Bug

This is currently the #1 song in Japan. Helpful English subtitles provided...

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

...And Why The Hell Not?

I always liked girls between 20 and 25 years of age (and not just as sexual objects but mainly because they still know how to have fun with their life). I liked them when I was 20, I liked them when I was 30 and I like them now. The only difference is that, as time goes by, these preferences of mine seem creepier and creepier to the girls' parents. But the idea of me being with woman of almost half my age is not a product of my "rebellion against middle age and/or senility". I just prefer and always preferred these girls and my preferences didn't change during the last 20 years. Which might signal some sort of problem, but different kind of problem than most of you think.

humbert.jpg

However, after breaking up with Karolina and living wild for almost a year, I discovered what I subconsciously knew from the beginning (and dreaded a little bit): The feeling of having that one special woman in your life can be more satisfying than the possibility of having different hot/willing/flexible girl in your bed each day/week/month. I had several more or less bizarre ideas of how to make this work as painlessly as possible. For example, hooking up with a mature woman (maybe even with kid[s]) who perfectly knows what she wants from life and who will be grateful for what I can offer her. Another idea I tossed around was to hook up with very young girl who I can watch grow up into mature woman and teach her some stuff I like in a mature women while, at the same time, I'll hopefully grow out of infantility/puberty at last. And this is basically what happened, although in somehow different way than I'd plan it.

I first met Jitushka at the party amongst literally dozens of other people. Of course Jitushka was beautiful and was already flanked by several young gentlemen who either were her best friends or "wanted to be her best friends" or even "wanted to be her best friends without actually having sex with her" (which happens only to really cute girls). This, coupled with the fact that I was currently fed up with sex (yes, it is possible, at least temporarily) and didn't saw see Jitushka as anything else than cute little sex object, led to my ignorance of her, apart from a few good mannered words and three sets of Wii Tennis.

However, Jitushka gave me a very clear indication that she is interested in a little bit of private talk (where by "talk" I mean "talk"). We talked for about 20 minutes and then "talked" for about 5 minutes (where by "talked" I don't mean "talked"). This is when I became rather interested because I prefer to tell everything as it is, without any sidetracking, and I enjoy similar quality in the girl. During the following three days, we exchanged around 100 KB of text using instant messenger, asked each other a lot of questions (more about those later, maybe) and came to the only logical conclusion: Because we are both really twisted in very similar way, we'll try to start an "official relationship". Which is what we did on the fourth day. By the way, this means that I deviated from my usual modus operandi and started a relationship before I saw the object of my desire naked (although only by 20 minutes or so).

By now you might be shocked that I'm writing about these intimate details. However, the truth is, she started it on her blog (in Czech) and made me feel like a wuss who has to catch up with her. Which is the feeling I also enjoy (usually).

So, let me up the ante a little bit and tell you an intimate story from the first day of our relationship (which sounds like something from a sitcom). It's afternoon, we are lying in the bed, calmly talking about various stuff, when my phone rings. It's Ms. Iva, the editor of Cinema magazine, telling me something about my reviews for the next issue. While she's talking, Jitushka starts giggling.

Iva: "You've got a girl there again!?"

Me: "Yes. (Laughing) But I love this one!"

Jitushka: "(Laughing) And I love him!!"

Iva: "Oh my god, you pig. Has she at least graduated?"

Me: "No, but she will in just a year!"


And then we all had a good laugh. I'd say Jitushka was very much "in tune" with my kind of craziness from the beginning.

Of course, there were many people who dissuaded us both from having this kind of relationship, accusing me of being a pedophile and Jitushka of doing it for money. Which is not true. She does it for food.

p_2007-08-21_13-23-53.jpg

And, of course, many of these "good friends" are absolutely certain that this relationship won't last. But they cleverly didn't give any specific timeframe so even if we break up in a month, in a year or in ten years, they can still claim they were right, the bastards.

I almost started searching for specific examples of some older man/younger woman pairs who lived happily ever after. But then it dawned to me that this is a trap. I don't really need to explain or excuse myself to other people for doing what I did. And I write all of this basically just because I want to be always able to remember how exactly it started and that I had no regrets when it started.

Plus, I don't want, under any circumstances, to have less outrageous blog than my loved one...

Friday, August 24, 2007

In Soviet Russia, People Have Too Much Time On Their Hands

Someone from Russia (who has only the faintest knowledge of English) sent me a video recording of a complete play-through of my Tetris 2 game. It's over 4 hours long and he did it without any cheats, which I thought to be impossible (that's why the game insults you when you finish it).



You can download the compressed video file here. It's only 15 MB long but beware: The RAR archive uncompresses to more than 4 GB of AVI!

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

YMCA In Finnish

Something to make you feel much less gay:

Firefox Leads The Way

Recently, I read reports about Firefox gaining significant market share among browsers, "even surging up to 28% share in Europe". Guess what, it's even more surprising with my servers!

Here are the statistics for the last month for my homepage (www.fuxoft.cz): Firefox has 43% share, more than MSIE!!



You can argue that www.fuxoft.cz attracts people who used to hack 8-bit computers, i.e. non-idiots who don't use MSIE.

The same can probably be said about this very blog (blog.fuxoft.cz) where the Firefox share is even higher, over 52%!!!



But how can you explain the statistics for FFFILM? That's my blog about movies (in Czech), whose visitors have nothing to do with Linux or Open Source. And yet, Firefox's share is 43%, again higher than MSIE's!!!



How can this be? The data is provided by Google Analytics and the sample is statistically very sound (hundreds of thousands of impressions).

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Love Is contagious. So Is HIV.

There is one foolproof method how to make a lady fall in love with you. Just give her HIV, like I did.

hiv2.jpg

And you can do the same!

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Albert And Chucky Arrested!

Taken for questioning to Třeboň, hopefully released on Tuesday...

Booked!

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Her name is Jitushka

OK, there is a new lady in my life. And by "having lady in my life", I refer to the state I wasn't in since Karolina left.

She has killer smile, she is almost as crazy as me and the dogs like her.

p_2007-08-15_18-49-23.jpg

She also lives 80 km from Prague and she is much (much) younger than me.

Also, she moves in mysterious ways:



By the way, yes, I thought long and hard about what all this means, and I really don't need your nuggets of wisdom about what could/will go wrong. I am rather happy. Thank you.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Is Mr. Cotter Stark Raving Mad Or Just Some Sort Of Bizarrre Spambot?

From my mailbox:

I'm interested in buying an ad on: http://blog.fuxoft.cz/2007/04/ two-drunk-robots-in- 96kb-hungarian-pc.html for a website that provides help for people who are battling an alcohol or drug addiction. I can pay you $35 for this ad.

Please get back to me soon if you're interested!
Thanks,
Matt Cotter

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

More Than Meets The Eye

I've got to share share this with you. This is how my invitation to Transformers premiere looks like:

Transformers goodies

It contains several more or less usable goodies some of which do a good job of transforming (play the video):



I have no idea how expensive this is and how many of them they made but I;ve got a feeling that if they could have money to put one extra Transformer in the movie (small one)...

P.S: There were some rather nice hi-res renders on the CD.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Panoramio

I first heard about Panoramio.com when their photos began appearing as layer in Google Earth, to my neverending annoyment - because large percentage of famous Prague sights in Panoramio has completely wrong location. People probably just take a picture of Charles' Bridge and then randomly slap it somewhere in the general location of Prague.

Recently, Panoramio also appeared as layer in Google Maps (click on "My Maps" to toggle it on/off). By the way, I think Google does terrible job of explaining how useful and powerful tool these new Google Maps layers are.

I started correcting some Panoramio placements, I created an account there and tried uploading some of my photos there. I was rather pleasantly surprised that their www upload interface is much better than Flickr's or PicasaWeb's. Of course, Panoramio is now owned by Google and I hope PicasaWeb integration will be much tighter in the future (PicasaWeb already allows geotagging your photos). I'd consider switching from Flickr to PicasaWeb right now if it wasn't for their weird payment policy. You see, at Flickr, I pay yearly amount that allows me to upload 2 Gigabytes of photos every month. For approximately same amount of money (each year), PicasaWeb allows me to upload 7 Gigabytes of photographs in total!!! If you want to use the online storage to keep the highest-quality originals of your photos (easily 5 Megabytes per single photo), PicasaWeb's business model is absolutely unacceptable.



But back to Panoramio: I discovered that neither GoogleEarth nor Google Maps display all Panoramio photos. If you go directly to Panoramio, you can see much, much more photographs and I find it extremely informative for example to be able to see how specific parts of Mallorca island look before deciding which part you'll grace with your presence.

You can also embed "Mini-Panoramio" right inside your web page, as seen above.

P.S: As pointed out by my esteemed readers, Flickr no longer has any limits on uploaded photos. That makes the difference between Flickr and PicasaWeb even more glaring. Unfortunately, the "mapping" portion of Flickr is far behind Panoramio or PicasaWeb, the Yahoo Maps being inferior to Google Maps both in functionality and available map data.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

The Truth About Catholic Church

I never really knew very much about religion. That's why I'm glad somebody made this video.



And I guess this one is somehow related:

Friday, July 13, 2007

Sweet Lo-Fi Music From YUO

Download some free (legal) minimalistic electronica. There's also a music video.

The band is called "Fuck Yuo I Am A Robot".

Monday, July 09, 2007

Visiting Satan With Mark Twain

Another great WTF cartoon you should show your kids...

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Get To Know Your Terrain Elevation

You can find the following trick useful if you are using Google Earth to plan your bicycle trips and you want to have a good idea how steep your journey will be.

Using standard Google Earth projection, this is not very clear (click for large version):



However, you can go to "Tools / Options / 3D View", find a box called "Elevation Exaggeration" and enter maximum possible value here (currently 3.0), instead of default 1.0. The effect is that elevation is now exaggerated to 300% of the original and you can rather clearly see how difficult the journey will be (again, click for large version of the same part of the globe):



P.S: If you have really good brakes, your bicycle can stop on the spot while your body continues moving forward. Hilarity ensues!

Friday, July 06, 2007

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

SuperJail

No words are necessary...

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Home Alone

Today, my dogs went to to the country for two weeks (with Karolina's sister and her dogs). That means I will be home completely alone for the first time since god know when. It already feels a little weird.

And I certainly hope the boys will come back OK and that strange slogan at the bottom is just a coincidence...

Going on vacation

Friday, June 22, 2007

I Remember When These Bands Were Cool

When talking with younger people, it occured to me that most of them never heard about the lesser known bands I grew up with and loved some 15-20 years ago.

I don't want to preach and explain to you how much more interesting these people were (are!) in comparison with Britney Spears and how much more fun they had with their own images. I just present three of them over here and - if you are interested - you can find more about them on Wikipedia, YouTube, The Pirate Bay etc., etc...

First, there is Yello (and their "Oh Yeah"). These two guys probably invented techno and serious syntesizer/sampler programming.



Then, we have Army of Lovers. You probably heard "Crucified" because it's sometimes played even today, but they had many more hits and - in their case - you really have to see their music videos.



And, finally (for today), here are The Sparks and their "When Do I Get To Sing 'My Way'?". Of these three, they are the most versatile. The carreer of these two brothers spans several decades and several wildly different musical styles. They influenced the Pet Shop Boys and they wrote a song for Hong Kong action director Tsui Hark (who can't even speak English, let alone sing!), called I'm Tsui Hark!

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Happy 5th Birthday, Albert!

Video from today's celebration:



Albert's birthday cake

"Mom, Please, I Want To Finish This"

This is an audio recording of some "poor" kid arguing with his parents about playing World of Warcraft.



It would be rather easy to just write "LOL KID PWN3D!" and get on with life. But this is almost not funny.

I was hardcore computer nerd. When I was in high school, I got up at 5am before school to play computer games, spent hours with friends copying pirated games etc., etc... However, I never experienced anything even remotely resembling this.

I don't know how old the kid is but this is definitely a problem his parents created by ignoring his activities for too long. It already had to be pretty bad before it got this critical.

I presume I will eventually have kids and they will eventually take part in some sort of online entertainment. If they act like this for ONE SECOND, they are disconnected and grounded! And I will play their games instead...

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Taking A Vacation?

From June 31 to July 14, my dogs will be on a vacation in the country. I thought about taking this opportunity to also take a short vacation, preferably as "Last Minute" offer from travel agency. However, travel agencies seem to suck (unreliability, many "hidden prices") and - most important of all - the vacation for a single person is usually as expensive as two person vacation because there are no single-person rooms available! Also, I have some "non-standard" requirements:

I'd like to spend a few days (5-8, not more) during the timeframe mentioned above, somewhere in southern Europe on the beach, preferably in Capitalist Europe - Italy, Greece, Spain, France etc...



I want a room (however small) just for myself plus access to refrigerator. I can be part of some larger group of tourists but I want my privacy when sleeping.

I don't give rat's ass about local architecture / famous poets / local culture (as long as they don't rape men of my age very often).

I don't want any special "organized activities", I just want to stroll around the beach, take a swim, take some photos, rent a bike, just relax.

I don't want any "pre-paid" food. I'd accept breakfast but I'd be happiest if I just had an access to refrigerator and bought food in restaurants / markets. That means I'd prefer some sort of area with restaurants / markets, not some isolated fishing village.

I can get there by plane or bus, it doesn't matter. Actually, I'd prefer spending 12 hours on bus and saving some money. At least I'd have time to finish that Nintendo DS games...

Do you know about something specific that meets my needs and doesn't cost over approx. $300 including lodging and travel? Advices in the vein of "Just look at Last Minute offers at xyz.cz" don't help me very much, as I am already doing that.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Buy A Cute Syphilis For Your Friends

Or Ebola, Black Death, HIV, Rabies, Malaria or anything else. They are all here and they are cute.

P.S: If you are Czech, you can order locally!

Monday, June 11, 2007

Japanese Tetris

Do I have to say it again? Japanese people really know how to take things to the next level...

Sunday, May 27, 2007

HDR Tonemapping GUI For Linux

As far as I know, bizarrely named QTPFSGUI is the first Linux GUI application to tonemap High Dynamic Range images.

Without attempting to be too technical and without pretending that I am an expert at this stuff: You already could create HDR images from several versions of the same photo (with different exposures) in Cinepaint. But to convert HDR image to JPG or anything else that can be displayed on monitor (and looks trippy), you need to perform "tonemapping" which, until now - had to be painstakingly done using command line tools and Gimp.

hdr

QTPFSGUI makes tweaking all the parameters much more fun. Just have a look at my first experiment. Oh dear, it seems I have a lot to learn...

Friday, May 25, 2007

Sushi's Point Of View

Someone got an idea to put a videocamera on the conveyor belt at Tokyo sushi bar. This brings back memories and tells you something about the Japanese people. Notice no one gets angry and the camera does not get stolen...

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The Yes Man

Salvador Dali on "What's My Line" game show. (Real, not any kind of fake / joke.) The audience laughs because they see him and know who he is.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Demon Of The Night

A documentary about the brave efforts of Albert and Chucky the last night.

Monday, May 07, 2007

Game Over: The End Of A Legend

True story...

You've Got Virus!

During clicking through porn ads, I discovered truly helpful website at www.drivecleaner.com, which instantly alerted me to the fact that I have many dangerous files in my PC, mostly files I never ever knew existed in Linux. See for yourself (screenshot) or click here to experience it firsthand, if you are brave (and not complete idiot).



P.S: Thanks to good samaritans at DriveCleaner.com, I also discovered my PC has two more drives than I thought until now!

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Yes, Google Maps Are Useful

And how! I started creating this map of interesting / useful stuff I discovered in Tokyo. I plan to expand it in the future. Note that this was done without any external tools and without uploading anything - directly in Google Maps web interface! Also note that when someone searches for "sushi" or "roller coaster" near Tokyo (and clicks on "See user-created contents"), he now automatically finds my placemarks in this map.

Also, yesterday I created a Google Map for someone just to explain where in Prague we should meet to walk the dogs and how to get there. One placemark and one line. It took a few seconds and I deleted it afterwards. But it's much easier than explaining it using words.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

East vs. West

Tough political decision: Would you rather vote for this man (independent candidate for Tokyo governor, unedited)...



...or this person (slightly edited)?

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Flash Game From The Other Side

What if Super Mario Bros. was designed by Hunter S. Thompson? Or what if Shigeru Miyamoto took different drugs 25 years ago? Or what if...

To hell with it, just click here and use arrows and spacebar.

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Two Drunk Robots In 96KB (!) Hungarian PC Game

The world needs much more games like Sumotori Dreams...



P.S: To access the "hidden mode", at the start menu, try throwing the cube between two rightmost pillars to destroy one of the specific "walls" in the right corner of the ring.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Ciccipippi

One video is worth 666 words. And the words fail me. (This is NOT a joke or parody. The words say "Take him in your hand, he squirts for fun".)

Once Upon A Time

I enjoy good storytelling. Storytelling originally attracted me to the original D&D games but then I found that they are mostly played as an exercise in table searching and dice calculations. If I'll ever play role playing games, I'll certainly want to use some sort of "bare bone" system like Risus or Window.

There is also very interesting storytelling card game, called Once Upon A Time, which I played several years ago and purchased during the recent trip to Japan (there is cool small "Yellow Submarine" boardgame shop in Shinjuku).

The idea is that you get several cards with story elements and one card with story ending and you have to tell a fairy tale, incorporating all the story elements (i.e. getting rid of all the cards) and wrapping it up using the words on the "ending" card. Other players can use some simple rules to "interrupt" your story and change it to conform to their cards (i.e. getting rid of their cards). For example, if you play the "Witch" card and say "The witch lived in the Dark forest", the player with "Forest" card in his hand can jump in and continue the story. It's a little more complicated but not much. As with the original D&D, the game is only fun if you play it to create interesting story, not if you play it to win at all costs.

There is also an expansion called "Dark Tales" which brings some nice tragic elements into the mix, so that you can create cool stories like the following (click to see the large version):

Once Upon A Time

Monday, April 23, 2007

Quarter Of A Century Already?!?

Oh my God.

It's now 25 years since ZX Spectrum, the best (certainly the most accessible) home computer ever, was released.



I remember when I got mine (after I've already played with it for countless hours at my friends'). I was getting up at 5AM, before school, just to play a few rounds of Jet Set Willy. I remember learning the machine code and reading through the paper print-out of Spectrum's ROM before going to sleep.

I am amazed I still have the basic hex opcodes burned deep inside my skull. I think the screen contents was loaded from tape like this: DD 21 00 40 11 00 1B 3E FF 37 C3 56 05. That should be "LD IX, $4000; LD DE,$1B00; LD A,$FF; SCF; JP $0556".



The Spectrum (and its clones) was around for many, many years and this allowed the programmers to squeeze out every last drop of its potential. This will never happen again. Flight simulator. Word processing. Shaded vector realtime graphic. Five-channel sound with volume envelopes and modulation using one-bit software operated D/A convertor. Full-screen software scrolling with masked sprites at 25 FPS. All that in 40 kilobytes of RAM with 3.5 MHz processor...



(This is me in 1987, digitized on the screen of ZX Spectrum. In realtime. At 0.2 FPS.)

Japan x 700

I uploaded my photos from Japan (over 700 of them). Some of them are still missing the tags and some will be replaced by slightly touched-up versions later, but this is basically it.

p_2007-04-15_16-05-43.jpg

This is me holding the bag of volcano-boiled "black eggs". Eating one of them is supposed to extend your life by 7 years. This means that if I die before 2028, the Japanese are fucking liars.

Also, the answer to your questions "What about her?" can be found in the last photo of the set. There is nothing more to tell.