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Month: July 2013

Making the Chrono Trigger Music Box

If there’s one thing I love, it’s gift giving. What I love even more is trying to come up with very creative gifts. It’s something I’ve done time and time again. There was one gift in particular that I was rather proud of: a music box featuring Chrono and Marle from the video game Chrono Trigger.

I’ve had a couple of people curious as to how I made it, so maybe it’s time I finally write about it.

Updates On Projects

Just some notes about some things I’ve done recently, including finally getting my damn resume back online. I posted about this on my projects site already, but figured I’d make mention of it on my personal site as well.

First, my resume. It’s been a while since I’ve done a full retweaking of it. I finally took the time to split it into sections that would be relevant to specific areas of work. My technical work is now separate from my web work. You can still view everything I’ve done in one long list. I also moved my resume to my projects site so that I may link it directly to specific work I’ve done.

There’s still more I’d like to do with it, but this is a start. For example, I’d like to get some endorsements from the people I’ve helped posted to the site. Some more detailed descriptions would be nice too. The toughest part will be writing blog posts that go into detail of how I did everything I did.

I also got around to posting more work I’ve done recently. It’s mainly web site stuff. I’ll also be posting projects that I worked on and that were never completed, released to the public, or went nowhere.

I moved the site’s backend from WordPress to Kirby. After running into so much trouble with performance issues in WordPress, I wanted to give a flat-file based CMS a try. After testing a few, I came to love Kirby. What blew me away was the ease of its templating system, not to mention its flexibility as well. You can read my sort of thoughts on this.

That’s about where I am on that. Still looking for work, so it’s about time I put a little more effort to get the projects site updated.

Giving This Livestream Thing A Go

After bothering my brother on his gaming livestreams, I had the itch to give it a go myself.

I’ve actually had the itch to get into media in some form or fashion for a long time. I never did get that off the ground like I wanted. Technology has changed a lot in the several years I wanted to do this. Things have also gotten a LOT cheaper.

I already own a cheapy web cam, so that’s covered. Unfortunately, the lighting in my room sucks and this web cam is worthless without it. Thankfully, I just had to pick up a cheap LED lamp ($4.50 to be exact) from IKEA. Now the world can see me! (Well, the lighting in the background needs work now. Also some shadowing issues to work out too.)

[Image: Screen Shot 2013-07-05 at 12.35.43 PM.PNG]

so excited… weee….

I own a “professional” microphone too. Okay. It’s just a USB microphone from the game Rock Band. But it works great as a desktop microphone! But it’d be silly for me to hold it, so I need to prop it somehow. I’m sure as hell not going to buy an expensive microphone stand. But you know what works just as well? A cheap ass lamp.

Get old adjustable lamp. Cut off shade and cable. Boom. Adjustable Mic Stand.

My um… studio?

Now I need to be able to show gameplay or whatever while plastering my ugly mug. Let’s make some fancy graphics!

[Image: Screen Shot 2013-07-05 at 10.02.15 PM.PNG]

Alright… not exactly fancy, but they’re graphics. So… whatever.

One of my friends have already mentioned wanting to jump in on the fun, so let’s get them in!

[Image: Screen Shot 2013-07-05 at 10.14.31 PM.PNG]

Well, I mean, they’ll show up when I’m not playing around with the idea.

It’ll also be cool to start a Hangout and have my buddies show up whenever as I’m playing. But since I don’t own an audio mixer, it’s an audio routing nightmare. How am I’m going to pull that off? It took me a while, but I think a mix of Soundflower (actually, a special version of Soundflower), Line In, and the Aggregated Devices feature in OS X should take care of that?

Think I may have figured out my audio routing issues without the need for a mixer. Will have to test at some point.

I think this will work.

So now it’s all a matter of testing it all out. I figured I’d do a playthrough of Final Fantasy VII because I honestly can’t remember if that game is as good as people make it out to be. (VI and IX are my favs.)

I still haven’t decided how to stream things out. I was thinking Ustream since it gives me options for those with limited bandwidth (like me). They also have better mobile apps than Justin.tv / Twitch.tv. The only problem I’ve seen is that Ustream seems to squish the output from my camera switching app, CamTwist. I would like to do Google+ Hangouts Live so I could save it to my YouTube channel, but if I want my friends to join me, I’d need two Google accounts: the one linked to my YouTube channel and then a special one my friends would have to join. That would be more work for them. So, this issue is the main holdup for now.

Doing this is just for fun. It’ll be a fun learning experience too as I play around with that works and what doesn’t work. Once I have it all figured out, I can then possibly write detailed instructions. Fun times ahead!