Preview - Heretic Pixies Halloween Editions

With Halloween coming so soon after the launch of the first Heretic Pixies resin figures we couldn't resist putting out 5 Halloween themed figures. These figures will shortly be available from our store http://paleheretic.bigcartel.com .

The figures come in two variations - Skullz and Pum'kinz. These photos give an idea of the Skullz figures. We are currently experiementing with accessories for them and are looking at hand stitched felt hats and black cast resin demon masks, but this will be confirmed later.



The Pum'kinz are still mid paint, but this photo will give you an idea of what to expect.

Heretic Pixies - The first seven ...

I've had the idea of producing custom toys in the back of my head for a couple of years. The Heretic pixies seemed like the perfect set of characters to try and I'm pleased to say we've done it!

The figures themselves are made from my original sculpts and are cast in Easyflow 60 resin. Each pixie is individually painted - they're all different, all unique and all numbered. The platform that you can see in the image above is the first of a number of variants that we'll be producing over the coming months. Take a look at the Pale Heretic online store here to see more of the pixies ... http://paleheretic.bigcartel.com.

We also undertake commissions so if you're like a pixie, personalised for you then please get in touch.

Why Twitter maybe isn't the right choice for tech support

This post stems from my stupid typing error caused by trying to do 3 things at once. I admit that I made the mistake. What I'm lamenting is that 4 days later, I can't actually find a way to resolve the problem.

So what happened? I got my Jolicloud closed beta ID. Woot! I'm very pleased to have received it and I rushed to register my account and get the download going. This is where the error occured. In typing in my email address I manager to add an extra 'i' so that I ended up with a .co.uik domain and not the .co.uk I actually own. The upshot is, that I can't get the verification email so I can't complete registering my account and can't download the software.

I do maintain that a well designed website would have been checking for legitimate domains and would have used double entry to ensure it correctly captured the email address ... but still, it was my typo.

So my first thought was 'DOH'. My second thought was 'I'll email support and they'll rescue me'. There's the problem. Jolicloud don't have an email address for their support, only a twitter address. That's the problem. Twitter is not the best place to discuss account detail, or invite codes, and despite the fact that I'm following jolisupport on twitter, since they aren't following me back I can't send them a direct (and therefore secure) message ... so I raked over their site and found the general contact email address usually reserved for press queries (judging from the topic pull-down) which worked as well as I feared: 4 days and no reply.

The invitation email says "We provide (almost) live support via our Twitter support channel: http://twitter.com/jolisupport." So I decided to try an @jolisupport asking if there's a secure way to handle account support, but no answer yet.

Lesson? Don't use an unsecure or public support solution unless you provide a secure solution for account related stuff, and, write your forms with validation built in, especially if you rely on it for identity verification, oh ... the obvious one ... when you're filling in a form with important information, check it *before* you submit it!

Here's hoping *someone* from the Jolicloud team gets back to me, as I'm hoping to review it and finally see some competition for Ubuntu 9.04.

Moo.com review

Moo.com is one of a number of on-demand printers that provide some useful services through a web-based interface.

So far, I've had two sets of business cards and two sets of mini-cards from Moo and I'm very impressed with the quality and finish of the printwork, the price, the packaging and how easy the process of making the cards was.

Moo.com provides a web-based solution for setting up your cards. For mine, I chose 30-odd images from one of my flickr albums and used these as the fronts of my cards, setting up the backs with Moos tools. All very easy, and the results look great! At £10 for 100 mini-cards I recommend trying it out!

The problem with car design and the motor industry is.....

.... that the product they are selling doesn't really fit the intended use.

This post comes from a conversation a colleague and I had on the drive out to see a client.

My basic theory is this: the majority of cars that are sold today, are being sold on a range of features that aren't really compatible with safe and environmentally friendly use on urban roads.

The first part of this was sparked off by my asking 'why don't all cars sold today have a GPS linked to the engine management, so that in urban areas the speedlimits can be automatically enforced?'. This seems to me like a fairly obvious way of reducing the speed of the traffic for the price of a (guessing) £150-250 component.

My colleague pointed out that this would be a very un-popular move and probably terminal for the government that attempted to bring it in.

This prompted the discussion about cars and how they are marketed. Speed and power are very significant factors in this even still. It has been refreshing to see fuel economy finally getting the headline slot in the adverts for some cars, but it is still a minority that are discussing this.

I think the issue goes beyond the marketing however, to the way that as a product cars are designed. It seems to me that cars are being built as though for racing and then sold for use on the roads. Many cars are over-powered for the intended use, designed to deliver top-speeds far in excess of the legal speed limits and matching acceleration. Cars aren't it seems designed to operate as efficiently as possible at 30mph - the speed that most cars (used in cities or urban area) spend most of their lives driving at. To the point where in some of the cars that I've driven they are hard to keep down to the speedlimit and need to be contantly reigned in.

Hence the GPS linked speed limiting. If we continue developing cars as they currently are, designed for speed and acceleration, maybe we should be using some of the readily available technology to ensure that this power is used in an appropriate setting - the motorways, not on the urban roads.

Let them take something with them ...

When you attend a trade show, exhibition, conference it goes without saying that all the companies exhibiting their products or services will have to have a wide range of give-away items for their prospective customers to take away with them. These items serve two purposes - to remind the person who took them of the company or product and to facilitate collateral marketing where someone else sees the item and adsorbs the message from it.

So, the thing that suprises me continually with the web-in-general, is that comparatively few websites follow this metaphore through to their online activities. Provding downloadable or subscription driven content from your website is an easy way for your customers to continue their exposure to your brand after the point where they have leftyour website - and allows for the collateral marketing to take place.

Producing PDF versions of your printed materials, desktop wallpaper e-Zines and even desktop toys or games can provide a range of items that appeal to a broad cross section of your audience and allow them to pull your brand messages.

The range of desktop wallpapers available from the Pale Heretic website continually draws a significant amount of web traffic and continues to remind our audience of our brand and our website address even after they have left the site.

Windows Vista on EeePC - Done and working ... mostly.

OK. Given may (predictably) rapid dissolusion with XP on my EeePC - I love the way the OS is just so easy, hate the way that it's fat and uncontrollable (in my experience), I thought I'd just try Vista and see if it was actually possible and try and establish what does or doesn't work ... on my way to switching back to Linux.

I installed Windows Vista Business from a retail DVD ROM, via a USB DVD RAM Drive that has proven itself to be very useful.

The install itself takes about 2.5 hours and seems to go dead at a couple of points for period of up to about 20 minutes while the disk spins, but neither drive light comes on or the progress percentage increments. Stick with it. It will get there eventually.

Install to the 16GB partitioin and you'll end up with about 7 GB of OS installation on there.

Native screen rez is supported as are the hot keys etc. I needed to use the XP drivers for the LAN and ACPI hardware - go to device manager, choose the undignosed hardware and install the drivers by hand. This was sucessful and I was able to get the LAN and power sorted out quite quickly. I'll come to the WIFI in a moment.

A quick note about speed - not really any slower than XP. Overall the boot speed is about the same which given the fact that you end up installing onto a theoretically slower partition is quite impressive, and time to login-prompt is pretty well equal. After that, vista logs in faster but goes through starting all the services so you are looking at more-or-less similar time before you can actually get the start menu to respond or start an application.

OK. Wifi. Doesn't work. I've tried any native drivers (there don't seem to be any and the hardware isn't identified) an the XP drivers will install - if you diable the Wifi with the function key combination - but don't actually work or find any networks. I did some superficial research into this and there are other reports of people with similar experiences, and the only posted solutions are along the lines of 'use the XP drivers'.

Since the EeePC is a netbook, in my opinion it's mobility and therefore things like wireless are key to its usability. Without it, not so useful.

So all in all, impressed with the fact that Vista installs at all, pity that the lack of one driver is going to make it unusable and therefore rapidly replaced and quite suprised that speed wasn't a reason for uninstalling - this is an EeePC 900 don't forget ... thats a 900MHz celeron so processor power was always in short supply.

Uninstall != inv(install)

EeePC. Running Windows XP and need an easy solution for burning CDs. I have a USB DVD RAM drive so go to install CD Burner XP (which I have used happily many times before) and dicover that this oarticular piece of software relies on the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5.

No great problem - lets install that too.

It's as the install completes that the low disk warning pops up. Installing the .Net Framework takes a staggering 55oMB of disk space and on a 4GB partition, that's more-or-less unworkable.

So the plan is to uninstall it and try Deep Burner.

Uninstalling the .NET Framework only gives you back about 50MB of disk space. So where did the rest of it go? No idea. All I know is that 'uninstall' is not the inverse of 'install'.

Combing through the Windows folder has freed up another 100MB, but I'm now faced with a windows install operating with less than 250MB of free space in a 4GB partition.

I'm loathed to say it, but it may be time to rethink this whole MS Windows experience thing. To complete the trial I should investigate putting Windows Vista on here ... I wonder is that even possible?

By the way - Deep Burner installs just fine without needing the .Net framework.

EeePC + Window XP SP3 .... Going back to MS

This is an annoying post to be writing in some senses. I love the open source ideal. I love the speed and robustness of Linux. I love the automated application installation, the safety, the security, the choice of distributions and window systems.

So why does putting Windows XP in this netbook seem so very, very easy?

It's the interface and the support. Dammit. I'd much rather be using Gnome, but the hardware isn't quite supported, doesn't integrate quite as well. With Windows XP, I downloaded about 12 dirver packs from the Asus website, installed XP SP 2, ran the installers for the packs and I have everything working. And I mean everything. The hot keys. The audio and webcam, wireless and lan, touchpad in cluding 2 finger scrolling and a fast set of graphics drivers.

Boot times? No more than a few seconds slower.

Now, I'm fairly sure of a couple of things here. This installation will, like all windows installations, seem to slow down over time as the cruft builds up. But right at this moment this is about as easy an installation as I've done on this - and I've installed something like a dozen different Linux distributions on here over the 10 months I've had it.

I'll keep you posted, but I'm now going to push my luck and install some developer tools on here.

Oh .... and the thing I like best that I never got working under linux? I have a desktop set to 1280x768, and the display pans as I move the mouse at the edge of the screen to show the area of the display that is off the edge of the physical display. I find this much more use than having 4 desktops (as with Gnome or KDE) since I can run an application that needs a lot of display-realestate and be able to work, rather than being left with too little document space once all the tool palettes are on-screen.

This is all about user experience, and I hate to say it, but XP is coming out rather well....

Vincent Callebaut - Floating Cities

I saw this appear on MSN (here) and thought both the idea and the execution of the design was amazing. I finally got round to finding the architect behind this and wanted to share a link to his website (here) and the floating cities project (here).

Now, all I need is a big ocean plot in Second Life ...

OpenSuse 11.1 on EeePC 900 - How-to and mini-review

Prompted by Mandriva nuking its wifi configuration,I decided it was time to try out the new OpenSuse and see how easy it was to install and configure on my Asus EeePC 900.

The install itself was very easy. Easier than with 10.3 or 11.0. The only remotely complexe part of it was setting up custom partitioning (I used the while of the 4GB SSD as one partition mounted at /, and mounted the whole 16GB SSD as /home, didn't create a swap partition and formatted them both as EXT2).

Running OpenSuSe 11.1 is very easy - everything just works. I'll post more about the tweaks that I make as I go. There's only one issue that I have at the moment and that is finding a working repository for Wine Doors (a utility to manage package installations for Wine, the MS Windows compatibility library for Linux) and for some reason ... I can't find one ....

Pale Heretic wins Skullcandy wallpaper competition

I'm very pleased to report that we have been selected as this months winning entry in the Skullcandy desktop wallpaper design competition. You can see the winners here.

An extended range of sizes and an alternative version can be found on our website www.paleheretic.co.uk.

On a personal note, I love both the product and the brand from Skullcandy, so I'm particularly pleased to have won this. Thanks guys!

Facebook does a Chrome

Is there something inherent in running large user bases that stops you thinking about users as individuals?

I'd hope not, but on the strength of recent events - Facebook most recently, Google Chrome a few months ago I'm not so sure.

In case you didn't notice at the time, Google published Chrome, thie new browser with a license agreement that gave them the right to reproduce anything that was created using their browser. That could potentially include a wide range of things from you email, to you images uploaded to Facebook(!?) to you bank details. Google quite rapidly responded that this of course was a mistake and that the license was just a stock item that should have been changed, which they duly did. The thing I did hear at the time was that they Google had previously tried to use the same agreement with their online word processor. The thing that I didn't hear was any reason why they would have such a clause in their license agreement.

To read of Facebook trying to take a similar approach, and doing so without consultation or warning gives great rise for concern and leads me (and a sizeable chunk of the blogsphere) to start asking some serious questions. The ones that spring immediately to my mind are:

1. How did an organisation that has at least some knowledge of managing large web based populations manage to decide that this change in terms and conditions was best managed by avoiding consultation and transparency?

2. Did they not expect a backlash when people found out?

3. Was this a way of measuring how big that backlash may be? (Hence the rapid u-turn)

4. I wonder how many people actually cancelled their Facebook accounts while the changed terms were in place and how the IP ownership of their photos and posts stands now?

I'm sure that the debate over this will rage for some time, but as many others have probably already done, I'd like to provide a little free consultancy on managing communities: be transparent and consultative in all elements that will directly effect the experience and rights of the community, and beyond that, let you community take a role in shaping you on-going service development. They'll feel positive about the shared ownership and development, and be more invested because of it.

Mandriva Linux and my Asus EeePC 900 - A follow-up review

Having now run my EeePC 900 with Mandriva Linux for something like 4 months, I thought it was time to do a follow-up review and let you know how it was going as a long term choice.

And to get right down to the headline: nothing to report.

That's it, right there. It just works, to the level that its essentially transparent as an OS and so far the limit of my required administration has been to type in my password to install any updates.

Perfect.

My EeePC is a daily companion the provides email, web, graphic design (photoshop under wine, gimp, blender and inkscape), web development (dreamweaver and flash under wine) and remote desktop. So it isn't getting off lightly just because its a netbook.

Unlike with my experiences of Ubuntu and OpenSuse, in another few months and I am confident that I'll still have nothing to report.

Low prim, high fidelity architecture for Second Life - The Heretic Pixies store

This is the first in a series of posts about the design and contruction of our new Heretic Pixies store.

For most people starting out with a building in Second Life, prim limits (the number of building blocks you can permanently place on a piece of land) are probably one of the most limiting factors. With an unlimited number of prims it would be easy to create an attrctive building, but when you may only have 30 or so, your options are fairly limited. Contents is always a factor in this - you want to have enough prims left to be able to put something inside your building.

At Pale Heretic we use a process that allows us to produce high fidelity buildings by pre-rendering things like complex shadows into the textures themselves. One of our products is a single room that has less than 30 prims, but the interior conveys a sense of light and space you wouldn't normally find in a small environemnt (the box measures 10m x 20m). You can see another example of this that we are constructing at the moment - our new Heretic Pixies store.

The Heretic Pixies store is constructed from 16 prims (for the floor, ceiling and walls) and measures 20m x 15m. It's going to be our store for a new character based range of products and we want to make it look as plush as possible on a low prim budget. The first part of this is making the interior itself look as good as possible and to do that we are using baked interior textures. Doing this allows us to both get realistic graduated lighting and shadows on the interior walls, but also allows us to put murals on the walls and for them to look like they are on the wall, rather than floating in front of it.

To do this we build a replica prim-for-prim in an opensource 3D application called Blender (www.blender.org). We then pick the faces that we wish to bake textures for and they are individually textured. The textures we use for these surfaces are sourced from photographs. The key is to avoid obvious tiling of textures. Seeing a regular repeated pattern in a wall or floor will break the illusion of reality. For example, the concrete texture for the walls in the Heretic Pixies store is created from a number of unique photos, layered and mixed to create a 2048 x 1024 texture that can be used to span the longest single wall with out any repeats. Onto this we add logos and other graphic elements, then bake out the textures, so that the local lighting and shadows are precomputed into the textures and we do this so that we get a good match with the lighting that we add in Second Life.



Generally, we will create a single 1024 x 1024 pixel texture for each 10m x 10m face. This increases your texture upload costs because you need a unique texture for every face (16 for the interior of the store) but then, that's still less than one US dollar. Using high resolution textures like this, while having some impact on older graphics cards, does allow the use of text and graphics directly into the wall texture without the need for additional prims and textures for signage.

The design and build for the Heretic Pixies store has so-far taken about 5 hours, since we already had the images and photographs that were used to create the textures. Over the next few days we'll be adding more to the store interior and exterior. If you would like to take a look, you can get there from http://slurl.com/secondlife/Dangun/176/77/143/ or by searching for 'Heretic Pixies'.

Can your MMO really be an RPG?

I've recently rediscovered Oblivion on my Xbox 360.

Over the past few years I've spent some time playing a number of MMOs, and the experience varies somewhat between one and the next but consistently, they don't contain much roleplay.

This doesn't seem initially to be a critical aspect but it does hilight fundamental difference: MMOs seem to take a role more akin to team sports / social environment for the people that I know who play them ... kind of like an online pub, with orc slaying / raid dungeons thrown in. People play as themselves, disassociated from the characters that they play and with the advent of VOIP communications chatting as they do so.

This is no bad thing, the ability to socialise freely in an online environment, but it does show the marked difference between the MMO experience and the traditional RPG experince, where suspension of disbelief is maintained, and the players immersion in the story seems to be greater.

My open question about this: is it can you actually have an MMORPG that includes immersive roleplay, or is it the very nature of people that they bring their lives with them into the game and dilute the narrative?

Second Life ... the things we need to fix next

I'm an advocate of Second Life for a number of reasons: it's adaptability to a range of uses, the completeness of it's model and workable DRM, the friendliness and creativity of its population, and the richness of its experience.

Having said that, there are a couple of things about it that are becoming (in my opinion) a serious issue.

The first is the mature content. Now, I know everything has its place, but Second Life doesn't have enforced zoning to manage the spread of locations that include mature content or a content filtering solution implemented in the client viewer to allow you to filter what you see ... much life the safe search filtering you find in the image search tools on Google.

Second Life needs to learn some of the lessons that the internet as a whole, and the search engines especially learned a while back - people will keep on putting sex on the web, but you need to offer some workable tools that allow users to choose what they see before it arrives.

The next thing on my wishlist is some search integration outside the SL client - I'd like to see the content from within SL presented on a search tool that can be accessed directly from the SL website, and more than that, I'd like to see it done in a way that Google can index. My aim with this is that,for example, whenI search for 'IBM Training' on Google, included in the returned results are the locations of IBMs SL training facilities, and not because they took the time to add the SLURLs on their website, but because the small-ads associated with the locations are accurately indexed by the search engines.

My last wish? Proper web-page-on-a-prim. I want to effectively see the output of the browser rendered onto the surface of an object and that includes all the mime types my browser supports (flash, pdf,video etc). The one media / web page limit per parcel is too limiting. There is a huge volume of traditional web content and tools that would work very well if they could be displayed on an in-world object and have the functionality preserved ... scrollbars too.

But what I would like to maintain is that SL is very much a viable platform for us to take VWs forward - we all know it isn't perfect, but taken as a whole it is a viable, robust, well tooled and documented solution that has the buy-in of it's steadily expanding population.

Limited Editions For All

I'm old enough to remeber numbered, limited edition vinyl EPs and boxed-sets of singles. These things had a huge value in a niche way, because the were exactly that: limited editions. They were usually lavishly packaged compared to the regular edition, included extra tracks often unreleased anywhere else and other items such as postcards.

Things are changing as internet technology and online personalisation reaches out into the consumer products market. For a long time now, you've been able to purchase your iPod direct from Apple and have a message laser etched into the back of the case. More recently Timberland have added a feature to their website where you can customise your boots as you order them, including an embroidered monogram. Moon Pig are now offering to custom print greetings cards with the message of your choice. Bob Books will print and bind a hardback book of your choice from images you upload via their website.

It strikes me that this is then end of the limited edition as we know it - or possibly a proliferation of the range of limited editions.

Either the mass accessibility of personalisation with consumer products will reduce the interest in 'designed' limited editions *OR* the easy access to the new design tools for this new generation of personalised products will lead to an increase in the number of amateur designers using these new tools to produce their own limited runs of pre-personalised products. I'm watching closely to for which way it goes, but I hope the latter, not the former.

WoW, Celebrity Sponsorship and being the ipod of the MMO world

I've moaned about WoW and it's stifling effect on the MMO genre. It strikes me that we are seeing the new ipod of the mmo world here. How many of the competitors for either product run TV advertising (let alone use celebrity endorsement when doing so - WoW and Ozzy Osbourne being the most recent).

The simple fact is that with this scale of product, with this level of marketing behind it, with this size of established user-base, how can the next big thing get its message through and survive in the face of the inevitable WoW2, in the same way that I doubt there will be a serious contender for the ipod for quite some time (or until Apple messes up)?