IZation Labs

ReElect The Dead, a personal project of my cousin and myself with no direct connections to IZation Labs, is an upcoming political satirical zombie film from Brian Lynch and Lace Williamson. The film stars President Obama and George Bush as a one two punch against a small town spiraling out of control. Filming for the indie project took place towards the end of Summer 2009, and editing is now being done. The final release will be sometime at the beginning of this Summer.

Here’s the link for anyone interested. I’m always updating it with new screenshots or sneak peaks. It just sums up to a good laugh.

-Lace

This is all completely true. This is really what it is like inside my mind.

I was exiting the library today, having just finished printing out all the necessary materials for my English class portfolio, when I snuck the typical heavy glance at the security sensors that everyone has to pass through near the main doors. True, they could be metal detectors, but then I think I know better. They are the same things you see in Wal-Mart, Meijer, Kroger, the campus bookstore, and any other place that often deals with small expensive items being taken illegally.

As I’m walking back in the general direction of the dorm, I posed a mental question to myself. What would you have done if the alarm had gone off?

“Well,” I thought back to myself, “I would just keep walking. I didn’t take anything, so I have no reason to stop.”

But think, my self exclaimed, hopefully not out loud, it does happen sometimes. If you just keep walking and don’t even look confused, someone may think you DID take something! What if you were at a store, and a security person came after you, insisting that you must have taken something to set off the alarm?!

“Then I would calmly explain that I took nothing and they had nothing to worry about, then continue on my way.”

But he would insist you go back into the store and let him check through your belongings!

“Gah. You are so persistent. Little punk. Alright. Fine. If that was the case, I would turn to the man and say this. ‘Listen. You seem like a nice enough fellow who I understand is only doing his job.’ I would point at the tower-like sensors and say ‘Do you have the slightest idea how those work? It’s not just magic, you know. Inside is a small copper coil that transmits a radio frequency at 125 KHz. When someone walks by with a stolen item, say, a sixty dollar video game, the small chip inside the box, called an RFID tag, uses an internal coil that picks up and actually powers the chip. Isn’t that amazing!?”

He would stare at you. Like you are a freak.
…because you are a freak.

“Shutup, I’m not done. ‘Now, that little tag modulates the 125KHz signal to send data to those biiiiig sensors-’”

You sound condescending.

“Shutup, I’m not done. ‘And the big sensors get a signal that either says 0 or 1, or in this case ‘stolen’ or ‘not stolen’.”

And he would look at you and think, Wow, this guy knows a lot about our security system.

“Yep! And then I would say, ‘Seriously now, think about it. The fact that I know so much about this generic little security system of yours means that I could easily find a way around it! I could build a device that kills the tag the same way the cashiers deactivate the tags when you checkout with the item, and then just walk out with it! Or, heck, I could just hold the item high over my head as I walk out, then it’s not even near the sensor towers, they only have a range of like 10 inches any way! What I’m saying is, if I wanted to steal something, I would be long gone before you would ever even KNOW ABOUT IT!’ I would have this big smug grin and he would understand my point, and away I would walk.”

Really?

“Sure! …………………wait.”

On a slightly random note, I have recently developed a fascination with Chain Mail. No, not the email kind. There’s nothing very interesting there. Making old-school chain mail on the other hand, now THAT can be addictive. Here are some photos from the learning experience that is weaving European 4 in 1 chain mail.

Now that I know I enjoy it, I’ll be making my own rings instead of purchasing them from a seller on eBay. 1100 stainless steel 16 gauge rings cost me nearly 20 dollars. 200 feet of stainless steel 16 gauge wire can cost me as little as 6 dollars or less depending on where I purchase it. That comes out to around over 4000 rings for nearly a quarter of the price. Expect more pictures in the future.

Cheers!

Lace

That’s right, you heard me. Today, to use the words most favored by my College-Now class, “The Macbook’s bust.”

Dead. Came home from a nine hour work day, and the system is frozen, the little spinning umbrella staring insistently at me, as if to say, “Just two more seconds, I promise I’ll start working again soon!” I let it sit for awhile, eventually become frustrated, and then hard reboot (hold the power button for 5 seconds).

First sign of trouble:

“Uh-oh. What’s that sound? Oh crap. No, I know that sound.” *smacks forehead* “No! NO! Come on!”

What was it I was hearing? It was the hard disk drive. Making the same sounds as a floppy disk drive out of the 80’s and 90’s. (I’m dating myself with that comment, but still.) A few loud crackle/scratch/grind sounds followed by the sound of a short, thin piece of metal ‘pinging’ once or twice.

“Well,” I think, “at least the screen is blue, like it’s going to boot. Wait. Oh no..”

Second sign of trouble:

This is it. This is all the Mac had to say? Not even a cryptic error message? I can just IMAGINE the confusion that would ensue if a typical, non techy Mac user (such as one portrayed by the…ahem, person in the Mac commercials) came across this image, blinking incessantly on screen where they expected their beautiful background and dock to be.

So I rebooted, knowing already that I was most horribly, utterly, (again, to use a common College-Now phrase,) hosed.

Third sign of trouble:

Upon reboot…
Oh well now we’re talking! This is much better! So informative and explanatory!

So the system is kaput, and I’m not sure what my next move is. I figure that I have two options, however.

One: I fix it myself. Who says Macs are inaccessible? I remove a (good few) screws and pop out the hard drive, then give data recovery a shot on my own, replacing the dead one with a bigger, hopefully more hearty MBPro compatible one. The con, however, is that it will void my warranty, which would be a shame, as the fans already need replacing because I’ve run them on full all the time due to the heat generated by rendering in Blender.

Two: I send it in to a (cr)Apple repair center. They fix it under warranty and two weeks later I get my system back, with no idea if the data would have been recoverable, or the security of the data that was on the hard drive, or really any information or guarantee that it won’t happen again. Great. At least I only lost about 2 weeks worth of data, the rest was backed up. Unfortunately, that two weeks included ALL the work on WNBG, as well as a bunch of daily models. :/

Opinions?

–Lace

For my LITR class, our final assignment is rightly referred to as The Paper of Many Parts. The paper focuses on a poem of our own choosing, and I chose ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg. For those of you who have seen the horribly inaccurate 1995 classic, ‘Hackers’, you have already be introduced to the poem. At one point towards the beginning of the movie, the protagonist and his high school teacher have a short conversation, in which the protagonist used a line from ‘Howl’ as his in class assignment. The line reads as follows:

Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

This is by far my favorite line of poetry that I have ever come across. So, upon finding out that one of the six ‘parts’ of the assignment requires us to come up with a creative visual work to be included with our paper, I couldn’t help but turn to Blender for all my imaging needs.

This sequence depicts, quite literally, a starry dynamo in the machinery of the night. The star field was created using Blender’s built in stars functionality, and the object’s vertices were made into ’stars’ by turning on the halo setting in the render pipeline.

–Lace

…no post! Sorry. This is what happens when school gets more difficult. I promise to make more of an effort from now on.

So for now, check out hackaday.com and this little comic. I recently purchased a new drawing tablet for my computer. Here’s some output from it. Click the image for full size! I need to change some things on the site, so keep an eye out for a face lift in the near future, too.

This has nothing to do with anything technology related, if you don’t count the fact that I did the sketching on paper but the editing using the Gimp. If you need a photoshop substitute and you like open source software, or if you want to get away from Apple’s overpriced software, then Gimp may be for you.

And don’t you dare think you can’t handle it. Mr. B is using it. No offense, B-san. I praise you for taking on new technology and ideas so openly, and encourage everyone else to spend their lives doing the exact same!

The Pandora continues to blossom! Head over to the OpenPandora website to check out some new photo realistic renders of the console, as well as some recent blog posts! I’m really torn between buying the Pandora and funding the purchase of an HD camera. Blender compositing is calling my name…

Sorry for the low frequency of posts! Things have just been a little hectic lately! Mr. B has been speaking of classrooms without walls quite a lot recently, and I realized that that is exactly what IZation Labs is. IZation Labs has no actual physical location. The only true constant of this site is the web address itself! It is made up of individuals all over the place, and no physical connection is needed! Kind of neat when you think about it!

Lace