Adding to 'Fun Stuff'

- Buying a raffle ticket just to lessen everyone elses chance of winning.

- One of my favorite differences between Ubuntu [Linux] and Windows [Microsoft]:

Dainty, Fisher-Price, politically-correct green, floozie:

:

'RECYCLE BIN'

Short, quick, to-the-point, republican, sleek:

'TRASH'

- A screen with a 1*1 resolution is a light bulb. It could also be 1 bit. Your take. Anyway; They run two open-source Base-OperatingSystems: Series and Paralell.

- Frozen, canned grapefriut juce tastes exactly like frozen, canned orange juice, but more acidic. It is usually just as healthy or healthier than orange juice, “and is only unpopular because it isn’t very well circulated.” (Yogi Bera.)

- “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded” [Yogi Bera]

- Earth First: we’ll log the other planets later. [Inside Joke.]

Why is this song stuck in my head!??

Okay. My laptop cable is back, so I am sitting at the computer and cleaning it up to its previous state when I find my self humming ‘Heaven’ by Los Lonely Boyz. (You know: WO-o-oOo-ōōō! How- -far is he-eaven) and I can’t stop. So then after the comp. is all nice and optomized, I start playing some super-hard mindless game called jumper. So after I annoy my pants off by constantly dying in the same spot, (stuck on level 3 screen 4 )  I realise I can visualise the game I was playing for another hour or so. (FYI, I was only playing for like 15 min. I’m not THAT intense. ) Dratteh.  Now I am humming a song that I don’t even know while visualising a crummy platformer and writing this all at the same time. |c:<

Ok I was so sick of having songs stuck in my head. I looked it up,  but the only term I could think of to use on google was ‘music hook’. Surprise Surprise. Wikipedia actually has an article with that name. Hmm… That’s interesting, but it just tells us how the songwriters make it get stuck in our heads, not why. Turns out they just repeat it over and over again sort of like a catchphrase or a chorus. How mundane. Ok: Let’s try googling ’song stuck in my head’. That gives us the link to the wikipedia article ‘Earworm’. I wonder why ‘music hook’ didn’t link to it.

Rotfl: It says that ‘Earworms’ can be treated by taking medicine for obsessive compulsive disorder. I don’t think I need it outta my head THAT bad. The links on that article look interesting too. Particularily the ‘tetris effect’ one.

After skimming both of those articles, I am begginning to doubt the accuracy of wikipedia.

With more research I have managed to pull together these facts:

• Earworms are very slightly related to obsessive compulsive disorder.
• Listening to the whole song through will make it go away if you can’t just ignore it.
• Poll results say that the most earworms occur in the ‘other’ catagory of music, meaning that any song can get stuck in anyones head . Maybe I should stop listening to ‘other’ music. (;
• Women musicians are hit the hardest by earworms
• Tetris effects can happen on any game that is repetitive.
• The tetris effect happens very fast if you play the game a lot.
• Playing games that give you the tetris effect will stimulate only your most efficient gray matter. ( Kind of a deduction from several articles. Don’t quote me. )
• I am very bored right now for writing this.

Oh, yeah. The screenies for the vectorization tutorial should be up by tomorrow.

Oh drat.

The instant I realised that my pictures hadn’t uploaded correctly on the vectorization instructions, something happened to my laptop’s cable. Lately it has been acting up, so I have to put it in a weird position if I want it to give any juice to the computer. A spark came out of the cable, and after that, everything went black… For the computer, that is. So now I can’t use my computer (ran out of charge) until a new charging cable gets here. Those images will have to wait also. |c:<

How to vectorize yourself

Okay. So the reason you are here, probably, is because you keep seeing all of these annoying little avatars of real people, but they are all ‘cartoonificated’ or whatever you want to call it. (Try worldontheweb.com) . They look really hard to make, but really, they are made by tracing over a real photo with a Vector Graphics program. Or at least I think so. It might be raster based.
Ok whatever. The end result is the same. Here’s how to make your own with inkscape. (see link above) We will be using an *evil* chimpanzee with futuristic glasses and a paintball gun as an example. Before you start, however, I must assume that you have the following:

- A photo of you that’s scanned into the computer and ready for editing. (Yes, we WILL be using a chimpanzee for the guide, but most likely you don’t look very much like it. )

- Inkscape. See the link above. Don’t worry. It’s free.

- Some basic knowledge on using Inkscape. The built in .svg tutorials are extremely helpful, since they are hands-on and don’t give you a gigantic amount of boring reading to do before you get started on anything. Specifically, these:

Inkscape – Basic

Inkscape – Advanced

Inkscape – Tips and Tricks

- Maybe some extra knowledge about the GIMP image editor. (Like how to do stuff with layers etc. ) But only if you want to edit stuff on to yourself like we do with this tutorial. won’t be going into very much depth on how I do this stuff.

So here is the instructable on how to vectorize yourself in 3 long, nondescript steps. All of the methods for doing these things are in the built in inkscape tutorials and this gimp tutorial.

1. Prepare your image on the GIMP. What I am doing here is just selecting it [img] and then cropping it to the selection [img] Now what I am doing is inverting my selection [img] and erasing everything.

Now here is the fun part. (c: Let’s give him some futuristic sunglasses and a pistol. [img] so we prepare the images in the same way that I prepared the other image. [img] When we paste them onto the monkey, however, things don’t exactly line up!( when you are pasting things on, be sure to make a new layer for every single accesory with the Ctrl + L form in gimp ) [img] we can change that by mannually tweaking them with the transform tool and we will get this: [img] It doesn’t have to be perfect, since we wil be tracing over this later.

Now you just save the image and exit.

2. Trace the image on Inkscape.
Open your image inside of inkscape (not gimp). Use the beizer tool to trace the general shapes of all of the objects . Color them in with the palate toolbar and the select tool. Layers can be annoying if you don’t use them correctly, so you hafta be sure to make the big objects first
[img]

3. Add effects
Now that you have a general trace of your monkey, you can start adding details and effects to your objects, like blur or gradients. Also, try and keep from adding lines to your image, unless you have no other way of defining a shape. Of course, sometimes lines look good. You will have to decide. Another useful trick that I found is that if you create a dynamic link of an object and convert it from an object to a path and color it black, then use the tweak tools ‘grow’ or ’shrink’ feature on it, it looks like it was drawn with a fountain pen.

My completed monkey: [img]

Enthdegree becomes a protagonistic YouTube addict

(Or, “Enthdegree links to some of his favorite videos on YouTube”)

Haha. Aside from being great music, look at the second-rightmost person. He looks so passionate gazing up to the sky with his arm slightly bent.

Another ‘passionate’ video. The great part is that the only person who knows the meaning to the lyrics is him. He is very serious about singing the song and knows how to leave the room *in style* (;

Concise and to the point. Very informative guide about cats.  I wish all instructables were like this one. (see below)

Gud Grief, what a mess! And what a waist of Diet Coke. Honestly, I should tell your parents about this rambunctious behavior. ))c:<

Oh, I could do that if I wanted to, I just don’t have the time.  Srysly, that person is insane. His/Her guide is nondescript. Very much UNLIKE the ones here at nerdhow.

Haha: Mac blasts Windows on all of the right stuff, but for all the wrong reasons. All of the Mac vs. PC ads are funny, but they don’t talk about any of the downsides to macs.  (But hey, give them a break. These are TV advertisements. )

I saw a comment on this video once that read something like “I tried it. It didn’t work.”

Last and definitely least: Charlie The Unicorn. Possibly the lamest video ever.  It must’ve slipped through the cracks on the *LAMENESS* filter I use.

Oh yeah, I forgot! The grand finale: James Brown singing Mans World with Pavarotti

Update on the USB guide

Looks like the new version of ubuntu doesn’t work with the old USB guide. Be sure to use this old version (8.04, not 8.04.1 ) , then update to the new version after it starts working. \c: Sorry for any inconveniuence

How to backup your data in Ubuntu if it won't boot

If Ubuntu won’t boot, you are probably on the verge of hystaria with the fact that all of your important data is in jeapordy. So I’m not going to waste any time with a long, boring description.

1. Calm down. If you can boot to another Operating System do so now. (Assuming it’s not what you are using right now. ) If you are reading this right now, you are probably on a working computer that boots (: . What you need to do first is make a LiveCD with the latest Ubuntu *Desktop Edition* Disk image. It’s :wow: huge, so you might want to find some kind of torrent file to download with Utorrent (Windows only) or just download it all in one blow, the old-school way.

2.  Setup your computers BIOS to boot to CDs. Most computers have this option. After you did that, boot to the liveCD you made in the first step.

3. You might have to change the session type to ‘Failsafe Gnome’ by clicking on options then selecting ‘change session’ to get anything useful to come up. Once you are booted and on your Live Session Desktop, open a terminal

4. Type

sudo mkdir /mnt/recovery

5. Type

sudo fdisk -l

That gives you a list of partitons. Locate the one you think your Ubuntu files are on. Should look something like this:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x48654865

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1       15210   122174293+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2           15211       16242     8289540   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3   *       16243       24321    64894567+  83  Linux

but maybe longer and different numbers and different partition names etc. You get the idea. It’s probably the one with the star by it. The star indicates a boot flag, which tells the computer that it can boot to it. Remember that partition. For me it’s /dev/hda3. Refered to as *string* When you see *string*, replace it with the partition name. ( Mine is /dev/hda3. )

6.  Type

sudo mount *string*  /mnt/recovery

Note that there is a space between the partition name and the /mnt/recovery part.

7. Now type

gksudo nautilus /mnt/recovery

An explorer pops up. You are now at the top folder of your broken Ubuntu. Plug in your drive and back up everything that you need to.

If the files you see aren’t the right ones, try a different partition by starting over on the guide. Make sure to use a different partition name from sudo fdisk than you did previously, and also, on the ’sudo mkdir /mnt/recovery’ change ‘recovery’ to something else, like ‘recovery_001′ or something.

If the entire guide in general doesn’t work for you, go and post something on the ubuntuforums (if you haven’t already) . That’s the big data head for all-things-ubuntu. There you will find much nicer people ( ) that will be willing to help you out. Be sure to post up info about your computer and what the boot log says is the problem.

I hope this helps you! (c:

'oc:' instructable scrapped

There just doesn’t seem to be much demand for random avatars of futuristic smoking cycloptic sunglassed monkeys armed with guns around here.

So instead I’m going to show you how to make looping gif avatars of games(Can you say annoying? (c: ) like these:

(Click on one to see it)

Helpful 'real life' computer links

Eye strain

‘Excersise’ while on a computer

Develop abs of steel while sitting down

(Okay, maybe not that last one )

FAQ search

<stereotypical advert> Have you ever heard of querycat.com? It’s a search engine website. Like google or yahoo or something. But this one is different than all of the others. As opposed to just searching the web, this one searches through faqs and other stuff for questions. (You might think about ask.com, but this one is just a web search. It doesn’t give you some article they wrote about the subject.) </stereotypical advert>

Something a little bit like it is the internet faq archive