I Made It I (A Zune Mod)

Poor grammar of the title aside, after picking up a refurbished mocha-colored Microsoft-made media player (known as "Zune") from Woot!, I am pretty satisfied with owning a fully functional yet unnecessary piece of commodity: Although my cell phone does pretty much all of what it does, having a dedicated player not draining your cell phone battery is nice.

Since it is colored in mocha, it is now lovingly named "Turdis", a music dork reference to a line in one of Radiohead's songs, and the apparent color of a certain type of organic matter. It plays most of my songs (My library is 60+ GB), it never crashes (hahaha), and it showcases album art proudly.

After the update today, it gained a very nice and graphic (i.e. flat) interface with big fonts, and a formidable section dedicated to podcasts, which means "Portable O-something Device Casts".

I was fine with the mocha color for a while, and it was a delight once in a while to see a subtle green glow around the border, when the device is shone in the bright rays of dawn. That effect is known as "double-shot".

However, that's all the moments when the player actually look good.

Unlike the iPod, this Zune is deeply discounted. And unlike the iPod, it does not have a shiny surface - being flat and matt is a nice aesthetic, too. Since it costs less than a hundred, it does not hurt to experiment and modify. So last weekend I decided to spend a morning modifying it.

I posted the process on Instructables if anyone are interested.

I am pretty satisfied with the result. I now have a player of my own, and it is not even available in Zune Originals. It is nice that we have alternatives that do not look way too pristine to be modified or touched, so that I can ruin it any way I want.

Temptation of Saint Anthony

So the story goes: One night, Anthony the Great was faced with great temptations. Lucifier, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Martyrs, the Magicians, the Pagan Gods, Science, Lust and Death and the Monsters came out to stray him from his belief that isolation is the truest form of worship. And of course, our persistent protagonist survived all temptations and came out to be the greatest.

And somehow the story inspired and is translated into a technological commodity such as a Trillian skin. You are now the protagonist and have to survive from all these temptations, as angels and devils are in constant conflict on your very Contact List. Slay the devil with the sword in 90's-style violence. And which friend to trust and not trust? (Ok, that's a long stretch.) Wait, and if Science is one of the temptations, should you just ditch your computer all together and become Amish?

Nevertheless, here it is, the skin, appropriate to the atmosphere of Halloween: a pagan holiday that is in constant (now non-existent in the modern world) conflict with All Hallow's Eve.

Here are the steps to install this piece of holy parable/blasphemy on your Trillian desktop:

1. Download skin from http://www.arkidect.com/files/Temptation-Build1.zip
2. Extract to Trillian\skins folder, and it should form "Trillian\skins\Temptation of Saint Anthony" by itself without you creating a folder.
3. Go to Trillian Astra Preferences -> Skins -> Custom Windows
4. Select "Temptation of Saint Anthony" from the list. Very tempting, huh?
5. Click "Apply Skin" at the bottom.

Important Note: This skin works for Trillian Astra only. To get the functions you normally get from the menus, you can right-click on the contact list window, or right click on the Trillian system tray icon.

Now, here's the hint, grab the sword and slay the demon!

Happy Halloween!!

A Cavallo

It is essential for an artist to get out of his own realm and look for something that will excite him. Taking a break from all the tech talks, here are some of things I am helping out with recently in real life.

I always have a passion for creating an actual object in reality. Back in the days in Hong Kong, I had hardly any access to tools to create my own objects. The only choices are paper and Lego. RISD was heaven to me because I could access all these wonderful tools for creation that I had never seen before: table saws, metal molten casts, and all sorts of carving tools.

After graduation, my access to such machines were gone. My current job as the designer of Trillian is good and challenging, but I hardly have to leave my computer. There wasn't a lot of places for me to work on projects unless I rent my own shop (expensive) or go to an artist colony like 3rd Ward (far).

But, anyway, let's get into the gist of what I had been helping out in free time:

This is "A Cavallo", an art piece designed by Quill Hyde for Burning Man 2007 and beyond. I had been a lot happier since I was working on this project. The exercises involved in the welding, grinding and transportation of steel, the friendly and vibrant work crew (We meet often!), the smooth planning and management by Quill, and of course, the fresh air outside an air-conditioned office, are all refreshing.

The 'machine' is a very well-designed carousel, including a 2nd-level catwalk allowing the control of 6 rhythmic fire torches, a live music stage with custom sculpted speakers, and 6 steel horses circling up and down gracefully. The horses have an interesting origami folded look, that balances nicely between geometry and organic forms. They all have a different character, as portrayed by their surface finishes and a symbol on their heads.

The art piece was prominently shown in Burning Man, as we cruised around the desert every day and night with our wild music and carnival-esque faire. It was well-documented by a lot of participants in the festival, and it was also featured on New York Magazine. But this is not the end! We are trying to find more ways to show the carousel outside Burning Man. A ride in Halloween Parade would be cool, but some city ordinances prevented it from happening...

If you live around New York City and are interested in these wild horses, feel free to stop by our fundraiser in Red Hook next Saturday (Oct 13) night! We are giving out a quarter-sized steel horse in the raffle.

For more information, visit http://www.acavallo.org/!

Kibbles 'n Bits

I whipped up this 'logo' in an hour or two for my friend Ryan in the early early morning. It was a fun exercise and I think the result is great (commercially acceptable and great), and it includes all the cliches you can expect from me for my level of skillz: flat-style Illustrator shapes, nice shadows with transparencies and hue-based color changes, round and nicely-fine-tuned cartoons, and an overuse of stars on top "i"s.

It is also very "2000's indie", in the way that you got: handwriting fonts written by real hand not a computer, Web 2.0-style rounded fonts, ribbons, shape resembling a classic emblem but drawn like a cartoon, and lots of irony featuring animals running around happily in a environmental-friendly cage. Oh, humanity! (Originally I want animals running around with syringes to increase the sense of subtle irony.) My stand towards humans owning pets is ambivalent. I guess animals do want to be our friends, but I guess they think we are dreaming.

Anyway, I should do more time attack exercises like this and I'm glad I took the challenge Ryan gave me. So... now let's start earning some money!

Here in Disney Time

Hello all, thanks for your continuing support of this site! From time to time I received messages from new readers through the new Trillian Astra messenger. :)

Sorry I have not been updating the blog lately. I was in Hong Kong for two weeks to stay with family for Chinese New Year... (though that is not an excuse anymore now that I had sorted out most of the disasters (DMV horros) since I got back to work, I just needed to move my ass.) Highlights include visits to relatives, body check, dental cleanup, a great night with best friends, and a visit to... Hong Kong Disneyland - Hong Kong people's very own theme park with fireworks blasting every night. We stayed for two days so we got to see the fireworks twice.

The song "Disney Time" (MP3) by Jarvis Cocker sounded sarcastic when I first heard it in a Brooklyn Industries store, but after I went to Disneyland it turned out to be quite an honest song. Going to Disneyland is 'an awkward insight to be reminded about', and I was skeptical at first as well. But then, since my home city got its own Disneyland, why not pay a visit?

Perhaps it really contained something you don't want to be reminded about. Unless you are a hardcore Disney fan, which is much harder to find than a Star Wars fan or Japanese Anime geek, you will find a sense of resistance towards Disney stuff in the Generation-Y population. I am not sure why, but to me at least when I was a teenager, I was more indulged in saving the world with my robots or Final Fantasy Ultima Weapon. Or something 'serious'. Disney in the late 90's did suck, with its anime all trying to be hip and cool (e.g. the Pikachu rip-off known as Stitch), and Pixar producing the better crop but with characters not as memorable as the Disney princesses.

The games in Disneyland were fun and there were virtually no lines of waiting at all. All the crew spoke Chinese so it was quite intimate. The musicals ran hourly and brilliantly performed. And the best was the fireworks. Fireworks was, perhaps of its sound, blood-pumping by nature, and Disney knew it very well. Combined with lots of strings in the background music, classic scenes from the movie, and high-spirited quotes from the characters, I got a great tear-jerking experience. Yeah, it's gaudy and cheesy, but you know what, it worked. All those 'dreams' and experiences flashed back in my mind, my adolescent soul, 'deeply tortured' by reality, was rejuvenated with motivation and spirits once again.

There was something very positive about the animated movies from America between the 80's and 90's, such as American Tail or Beauty & the Beast, that is lost in the animated movies these days. There was a crap load of animated movies last fall season, I watched plenty of them on the plane, and none of them were particularly interesting. Some were like a fun roller-coaster ride, some were 3-d showoffs, and some were plain and without substances. People seemed to be more uptight these days embracing positive values, but much more paranoid about the negative things that may do harm to their illusion of their positive world; and the animated movies showed just that. It does not feel honest to people to be upright positive these days, or when it comes to positivity it always is mis-represented by overdosed laughters from characters with A.D.D.

So next time you decide to go to Disneyland, forget how badly they treat their workers, how environmentally unfriendly they are, or how your kids should be happy since you spent so much money flying there and staying at the resort, and how all fantasy elements are just man-made animatronics and made-up folklores... but simply embrace their modest side: It is ok to be gaudy about a dream.

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