For the ones who love to observe this strange happening born in Ireland and borrowed by the U.S. guys – here it is: our planet as a stupid looking pumpkin with a silly plug in his head orbited by a small – erm… basketball? Whatever. Have a good time while celebrating!

Please note: this template will only be available for a couple of days – like the Christmas Special.

Damn.. I’ve forgotten to mention some of the original artists of the base images in these screenshots – sorry for that! The original templates and the template information on the website of course do have the copyleft information included.

Debian Weezy is installed and Calf and Ardour are compiled – the studio seems online again. As long as I use Ardour the dark blueish theme with the industrial grey faders was biting my eyes. So I decided to mod the original dark Ardour UI templateb a bit, the result can be downloaded here.

You have to determine where Ardour is installed, usually in /usr or /usr/local.

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf ardour_dark_ui.tar.gz

or

sudo tar -C /usr -xzf ardour_dark_ui.tar.gz

Just want to let the world know about the unbelievable great support of the ImageMagick devs/supporters/community. I had a mind-breaking problem with a requested style [1, 2] for the eschaton template I needed a solution for. And I think just reading my support request takes enough time one could better masturbate, have a beer or do something more satisfying than trying to get in this big pile of shit.

But the guys – especially Anthony – stayed on line and replied partially within two hours – so I think it’s time for promoting my respect and my thankfulness.

Finally a little warning for the minors: don’t try this at home with your commercial dealer/provider.

Version 2.4.1:
* Fixes in greek language file - many thanks to vagrale13!

To demonstrate the new features of the render engine in xplanetFX I created two new templates relying on the version 2.4.0 (but working in older versions, too – just without the new candy stuff). The first one is “Art” which generates a “wooden” sphere that is composed over the original earth and the other one is a xplanetFX branded template referencing to the start screen of the xplanetFX GUI. This one generates a “realistic” mirror of the earth with clouds underneath the globe.

The main new feature in the rendering engine is the ability of templates to hook in the render process and to execute custom functions with a limited set of commands inside a sandbox. So after every step xplanetFX has done it asks if the template wants to do some rendering stuff, too. This will be the base for a lot of cool effects and more realistic lighting stuff for example.

Although the template processes are run in a sandboxed environment with just a few commands like xplanet, convert aso I recommend to avoid using templates you stumble upon out there in the wild that contain a “process” file. Templates aren’t even allowed to copy, move or delete stuff but better safe than sorry ,)

Here are two other tests I used in the development that aren’t available as templates: clouds floating over a perforated earth and subtle to harsh color manipulations separated by a dynamically created mask (the original earth swirled around a bit).

Version 2.4.0:
* New feature: templates can hook in the rendering process to execute graphical
  processings in a sandboxed environment with reduced binary access
* New feature: xplanetFX --geometry auto
* New feature: xplanetFX --templates (gives a list of all installed templates)
* New feature: xplanetFX --debug
* XFCE >= 4.6 uses xfconf backend
* Environment variable determination transfered in encapsuled function calls
* Debug tries to determine the installed distribution
* Debug throws information about the installed ImageMagick version
* Fixes in greek language file - many thanks to vagrale13!
* ASCII Art in --help .)

It’s here in the boomshop (de) since friday and was test-installed on saturday. First of all the specs:

• Revoltec Case with be quiet insulation
• Asus P8Z68-V USB3 Mainboard
• Intel i7 Processor
• 4GB Corsair DDRIII 1600 RAM
• Gainward GT430 DDR3 1024MB Graphics (NVidia)
• Intel 40GB SSD (Operating System)
• Intel 120GB SSD (Recordings)
• WD 1TB SATA (Swap Space)

So thanks to all the members of the bands who sponsored this machine to do some recordings here in the studio, namely

• JAMMIN*INC
• Loudog
• Miroslave

And thanks to them, too, that all of them got roped into releasing everything under a CreativeCommons-license (which is a basic requirement to get the boomshop as a recording studio since spring 2011).

Read the whole story »

Just as a reference to my actual conversation with Yours-Truly (de) in the depths of this blog ,) Technically far from perfect so perhaps there are some updates in the future when the optical flaws bug me to harsh. And perhaps there are some other styles in the future – Vossi (or here) always wanted to see tons of astro-garbage gyrating around our planet – this theme seems to be the perfect container for that ^^

Version 0.8.41:
* Changes in the italian language file - thanks to Fabio "Regulus" Boccaletti!
* Minor changes in the english language file - thanks to DasFox

…while talking to me these days – please bear with me, I quit smoking a couple of days ago.