My Moleskine inspired takas at the TAKATAK ATTACK!

"Take a trip down memory lane: Takatak Attack Kids who grew up watching “Batibot” have seen the art of Taka, or paper-mache figures made by craftsmen in Paete, Laguna. While a Taka can be any figure or form, the most popular mold is that of the horse. Check out Takatak Project’s first exhibit, “Takatak Attack”, where brightly colored Taka horses take center stage. The roster includes over 50 artists, and pieces are for sale so you can take home a Taka after." (from YAHOO She)

For this event, I created sets of takas inspired from my Moleskine Art. "Wake Up" and "Catch of the Night" will be at the exhibit starting July 21, 2012 and will run until August 4, 2012.

Baghajit and Ondine at the ROBOTARS CUSTOM SHOW #2

ROBOTARS CUSTOM SHOW #2

July 21, 2012 at the Vinyl on Vinyl, Malugay St. Makati

My two customs, Baghajit and Ondine will be joining 40+ others on this special event! See you guys there!

The beauty of widgetry...

This is a follow-up to my earlier blog concerning desktop enhancement: Rocketdocking.... This time, I'll be disussing about widgets. This is the first entry that I will be writing first in Multiply (Perelandran Frontier), and cross-post it to Blogger (Perelandran Chronicles). Sometimes, importing blogs from Blogger ends up with a messed up format in Multiply.

While exploring the features of Rocketdock, I came to understand that it has limitations in integrating widget functions in its dock interface. If you were able to read my previous blog, you would have seen how barren my desktop looks like. It begs to be cluttered and endowed with functionality! So I have to look for another program to populate my desktop real estate property with bustling tennants known as widgets. What the hell are widgets in the first place?

Widget/s are not the midget-like people in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or the name of a character in the Marvel Universe. Here is a little background as to the source of the word widget: (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Some say that the word "widget" is derived from the combination of "window" and "gadget". This is unlikely. The earliest known occurrence of the word "widget" is in Beggar on Horseback (1924), a comedy play written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. The hero of this play is a struggling composer who must choose between creating music that stimulates his soul (but earns no money) or earning a living by accepting a soul-deadening job in a factory that makes "widgets". The text of the play intentionally refrains from revealing what "widgets" are; clearly, they represent any purely mercantile commodity that has no artistic or spiritual value.

Widgets in the world of desktop enhancements are small independently running programs with graphical interfaces that are physically inspired (depending on their function). They are run on the desktop and can have virtually any function (be it from telling the time, date and weather, receiving RSS feeds, or direct interaction with a web function). They are managed and executed through a management program or engine. Other names used interchangeably with it are desklets or applets, depending on the engine you are using. I like to use the word widget although I know it is the official term used in Yahoo! Widgets, and Dashboard in MacOS X. The upcoming Windows Vista will call them 'gadgets'. Google Desktop calls them as panels. The list of names may endless and is limited only by the number of engines available out there.

I will be focusing on the widget engine called AveDesk, which is small and most importantly free. I downloaded the program and installed it on my system. It comes prepackaged with widgets such as PidlShortcut which when properly configured gives you access to your folders or applications. I opened 2 instances of PidlShortcut and defined each one to point directly to My Computer and Recycle Bin. What's amazing with these is that you can configure them to show some information about the folder, such as its name, contents, filesize and number of files among others. Through searching, I downloaded the AveScripter and Systats, which are widgets that has their own interface and programming features to define their functionality. If you want to skip the programming part, there are websites offering pre-defined widgets (made by the users themselves) for AveDesk using AveScripter or Systats. DockEx.com provides an extensive library of downloadable widgets (called docklets or desklets).

I wanted the basic widgets on my desktop, so I instructed AveDesk to run the following: a clock, a calendar, a weather bar (informs me not only of the present weather, but also forecasts), 3 RSS feed readers (constantly receives RSS feed from user-defined sources), and the shortcuts I talked about earlier. With AveDesk running, this is how my desktop now looks like:

Pretty isn't it? And it can run together with RocketDock. You can easily drag these widgets wherever you would want them on the desktop or simply lock them in place. The widgets can look pretty stunning especially with their transparency and shadow effects over the desktop, and some like the shortcuts to My Computer and Recycle Bin can be configure to be animated when my mouse pointer hovers over them. I know there are many more widgets out there that offers more novel functions such as a calculator, games, and online picture viewers, but for my present needs, these would be enough.

Why did I choose AveDesk when there are other widget applications out there? I did try Yahoo! Widgets (This was originally called Konfabulator, the mother of all widget applications, which some say was copied by Dashboard in MacOS X. It may not be true that that Mac started the widget revolution.) and it offers a huge library of widgets in their website. It looks very appealing too but one thing I immediately noticed is how it made my computer slow. I noticed that it was eating so much of my onboard memory and I only had 3 widgets running. It took 20-40MB of of memory to run 3 widgets and it was clearly affecting computer performance as I was working on other applications. This was not acceptable. AveDesk only uses 5MB, with all 7 running widgets. Uninstall Yahoo! Widgets... sorry.

Widgets are far from from its namesake and may indeed be of great value in streamlining our computing experience besides just being novelty.

Rocketdocking...

I always enjoy the Christmas holidays. Not only because of the usual cheer it brings, but mainly because it gives me time to temporarily retreat from the demands of work (Now, this is not really true...) and regather. Time to throw out the clutter (old memos, handouts, photocopies...), reorganize and plan for the coming year. Of course, since my teaching/creative work and entertainment relies heavily on computing technology (gigabytes of data!), my PC's were not left for general cleaning.

My computer(s), a desktop named 'Litzy', serves as the general family computer, and since it houses my backup hard disk 'Consus', it also serves as my download computer (I use EMule as my peer-to-peer file sharing application). So, it was first on my purging list. My laptop, 'QNote' which is my workstation where most of my teaching (handouts, lesson plans, notes, research documents, pdf's, presentations) and creative output files (logo designs, graphic design work) are produced is next in line. After deleting so many files in my laptop, I could almost say that my laptop was much lighter when I carried it!

Anyway, files were reorganized and what's next to do? Customization! Also, since I was using the same programs over and over, I wanted to streamline my work process. I wanted to make my computer desktop more functional and fancier. While surfing Plime.com, I was inspired by an article featuring some desktop enhancement tools, such as Rocketdock and Avedesk. I will be discussing the latter in succeeding blogs.

RocketDock, developed by Punk Software is a smoothly animated, alpha-blended application launcher that is similar to the MacDock feature in MacOS X. For Mac users, they say it is a clone of the MacOs X feature for the Windows platform, which normally utilizes the Taskbar with the StartMenu feature. RocketDock is among the many docking programs available out there (with MobyDock, ObjectDock, RK Launcher, and Y'z Dock). but some of you Windows users may wonder, why use docking programs at all, when you already have the Taskbar? The docking programs provide fast customizable access to your mostly used applications (just a click away!) through icons within a 'dock' which is conveniently tucked to a side of your desktop, thus saving precious desktop real estate property. If there's one thing I don't like on a desktop, it is a very ugly cluttered one. Although not as powerful as its counterparts (in terms of added functionality), the relatively new RocketDock requires little memory to run in the background. Now, this is an imortant issue for me, since I use memory-hogging applications in my creative work. Also, and an equally important reason, it is free!

Here is how my original desktop looked like, neat and clean, with shortcuts to the program nestled within folders in the Start menu:

Note that I have already customized my desktop using a theme emulating Windows Vista. I am currently using the Windows Media Center Edition, laptop screen utilizing 1280x768 resolution. After installing RocketDock, I immediately customized it to my needs, easily adding icons to the 'dock' by simply dragging shortcuts of programs that I usually use unto the 'dock'. RocketDock can take advantage of 256x256 resolution icons (both in .ico or .png format), and since my present icons of the programs I defined into RocketDock are small, they look a lot blurry when they 'grow' as the mouse hovers over. This is easily solved by redefining it with newer icons with better resolution through a menu in the program (Here I'm changing the link to My Computer with my own logo icon):

RocketDock already comes pre-installed with some 25x256 .png icons but I prefer the icons provided by these fellow deviants: jrdn88, monolistic, and many more in deviantART. Everything's all set, and now my desktop looks and works better. I set RocketDock for auto-hide. It only ate 8,880K of memory, so it's virtually negligible:

Here's a little video comparing the traditional Windows Taskbar to the RocketDock. It is claimed that the new Windows Vista will possess a new docking feature with more functionality, evolving the traditional Taskbar. For the meantime, while waiting for the release of the new Vista (if you indeed plan to upgrade), we would have to enjoy programs such as RocketDock to enhance our computing experience.

Coming soon on my blogs about desktop enhancement: widgets on my desk... Avedesk...

CSS is one Creepy Stupefying Stuff...

I finally was able to sort out the layout of the Perelandran Frontier, my multiply site, and now it looks prettily how much I wanted it to look like. Simple and neat. And it took hours of modifying the Outburst template, and for me to do that, I had to immerse myself in CSS which is creepy stupefying stuff! Thanks to blogs at Multiply Customized Themes and Modify your Multiply profile, I was able to grasp the intricacies of CSS as it applies to multiply customization, but mostly I had to rely on my own research. I had to undersand the codes, syntax and standards of CSS, and read through the highly technical guides in W3Schools, search through google, using phrases as "changing text with pictures...", "removing borders from profile..." and "css for dummies..." and many more! I had more than 8 windows open at the same time, browsing through all of these, jumping back and forth, making sure I'm getting it right. I had to sneak in from behind various sites I used as models and sniff out the html codes (right click, view source) and the css reference file. I had to print out long pages of html and css code, highlight tags (id's and classes) and label parts (because some template authors just don't care to put /*----reference point----)/ in their css files. It is one cracked sappy substance more potent than hash. I gained a cool sensational skill, which will be very useful to my sidejob. But it is all worthwhile, and now I can proceed with writing in my blogs, without being bothered about how my multiply looks like and stop being a crazy single stud. Now stop smiling, you crusty silly studmuffin, you crabbie stupid sister!

I'll be posting in future blogs details of how I went about customizing the Outburst template in Multiply