Sunday, December 11, 2011 12:46 AM
"iManga Reader is an unbeatable bargain. Where else will you find almost seven thousand titles available for your reading pleasure on both the iPhone and iPad? How about for less than the cost of a Starbucks latte? If you're a fan, this is a must-have, barre none."
-- Luke Patrick of The iPhone App Review
Read the full review of the new and improved iManga Reader on The iPhone App Review
Sunday, November 20, 2011 07:03 PM
I have lots of things to talk about, I've been busy this last month!
I got my new computer put together (specs here), and it is awesome. Newegg didn't process my order for some reason the first time around, so I had to wait an extra week and reorder. I decided to splurge and add another 8gb of RAM (for just $50!), now I'm rolling with 16gb of RAM on this machine, and it feels just great. I'm still totally blown away at how far tech has come, and how low prices have become, since I built my last PC in 2005. I remember the ballin' ASUS motherboard I put in my first PC supported a maximum of 4gb of RAM, and now my new PC does that in just one stick! I love it!
Needless to say, my new command center is way legit. I've uploaded some pictures of it to my Photobucket, check it out!
Since I have such a manly computer right now, I figured I might as well capitalize on that, and play some games with all their bells and whistles cranked up to maximum. Unfortunately for me, I've forgotten what my Steam password is. What's worse, I don't know what the answer is to my secret question! Oh well. So I created a new Steam account, and now I only have one game.
At the behest of a few of my friends, I decided to purchase a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum, and then proceeded to play the crap out of that game. Arkham Asylum is a fantastic game, and I loved every second of it. There's just something magical about lurking in the shadows, picking off the Joker's henchmen one by one, and watching in glee as they start to freak out as their numbers dwindle. Definitely good times.
Once I have some more disposable income, I plan on buying a copy of Skyrim, as well as a copy of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I'm looking forward to playing Amesia, apparently it is supposed to make me crap my pants in absolute terror, which definitely sounds like my idea of a good time on a Thursday afternoon.
Also at some point I need to pick up a Wii Motion Plus Wiimote, and a copy of Skyward Sword.
According to IGN, it is the greatest Zelda game of all time, which is definitely a big claim, but I hope it's true. I love Ocarina of Time, and if this game surpasses it, it's a total win-win for me. Also one to one motion control sword fighting sounds just wonderful.
On the anime front, I've seen/am watching a lot of new things, and in the spirit of brevity, I'll just give you the highlights a la bullet point.
I've been doing lots of neat programming things too. The great majority of my time has been dedicated to revamping my existing iOS apps, and working on some new ones as well. I won't say anything about the super cool top secret new apps I'm working on right now, since they're still in a pre-release state, but suffice it to say they're going to rock your world.
A major accomplishment for Studio Bebop, that I can talk about, is what has recently happened with the iManga Reader series. Over the last two days, Apple has approved a major update to the free version, and finally approved the pro version for sale again!
I'm very excited about these releases, not only because they're my primary bread winners right now, but also because I really am proud of the improvements and additions I've made. Along with a bunch of miscellaneous bug-fixes and performance tweaks, I've revamped a lot of the UI code to be a lot more 'iOS like', and have added full support for sharing your favorite manga series via Facebook or Twitter. (The recently added native Twitter API for iOS 5 is gloriously simple by the way, and I'm in love with it.)
The feature I'm most proud of though, is the addition of automatic reading statistic tracking for a user using MyAnimeList. For those of you who don't know, MyAnimeList is a website that allows people to keep a detailed log of all the anime and manga that they have watched or read, as well as the stuff they're watching or reading at the moment. It's kinda like if Facebook swallowed Wikipedia, and crapped out a database driven spreadsheet. It's surprisingly fun once you get into it, you can see my profile here.
So in the latest release of the iManga Reader, a user can now just enter their MyAnimeList username and password in the app settings, and the app will automatically track what they're reading and update their MyAnimeList for them every time they start a new series, or finish reading a chapter!
Glorious iManga updates aside, I've also added a new project to the code page. In short, it's a Python application that allows you to automate creating user accounts for any phpBB forum. It also has full support for CAPTCHA cracking via Decaptcher.com.
Thursday, October 27, 2011 04:39 AM
It's been a good day.
I started working on updating/revamping the iManga Reader, using the new Xcode 4 and iOS 5 SDK, and had a great time doing it. There's a bit of a learning curve going from Xcode 3 to Xcode 4, but so far I'm very impressed. It has a very unique UI for an IDE, it looks and feels a lot like iTunes and Komodo Edit had a baby. Also, it's definitely geared a lot more towards iOS development, and has in-app Git tracking support. I'm pretty smitten to be honest with you.
I came across a very useful tool for OSX today. It's called SpeedLimit, and what it does is allows you to simulate different network speeds on your machine for a given port and/or host name. Which is great if you're trying to get a feel for how your iOS app will function when a user is on a slow network connection. Check it out.
While we're on the subject of super useful resources to aid in iOS development, I also found a great website called Glyphish that has lots of free images you can use for all of your UITabBarButtonItem icon needs.
Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, almost all of my old computer hardware is toast and I need a new rig. Well I ordered the parts for a new one today, and it should all be here this weekend! For anyone interested, here are the specs:
I'll post pictures of the new command center once everything gets here and built.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011 06:25 AM
Howdy folks, I'm back.
It's been a long time since I last posted on Teh-1337 (just a bit over two years to be exact), but I'm back and making blog posts once again! For those unaware, I've spent the last two years serving as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) in the Colorado Denver South Mission. It's been a wild and crazy two years full of adventures and awesome stories. I'm still sorting through all of the pictures and videos I took, two years is a long time after all, but I'm planning on doing a multi-part writeup on the adventures of my mission that should be pretty awesome.
Some of you may or may not have noticed, but things look just a little bit different on Teh-1337 than they did before. The reason for this is because I cooked up an awesome new blog engine! (The source code of which you can check out over on my Github.) The new engine is pretty spiffy, and I'm pretty proud of it. It's all still in Python, I was planning on doing it in Ruby with some awesome Sinatra h4x, but that wasn't working out right on my host. One of the spiffy new features of this blog engine is that it actually uses databases now, talk about sophisticated amirite?
So many things have changed over the last two years, it's awesome! So awesome in fact, that I feel the need to make a list.
Honestly there isn't too much else for me to talk about right now. Things have been pretty quiet since I got back. I've been spending my time getting back into living a normal life, figuring out what hardware I can salvage from my old rigs, slowly getting back into the swing of things with Studio Bebop, visiting with family, and catching up on all the anime, TV shows, and movies I've missed these last two years.
More legit blog posts will come soon, I promise!
Sunday, July 12, 2009 01:33 AM
This was probably the most intense four minutes and thirty seven seconds of my life.
Sunday, June 28, 2009 08:50 AM
Oh my, it's been over a month since last I made a post. I had every intention of making a post pretty soon after my return from A-Kon, but alas inspiration thrust me headlong into my latest project. As such, I've found myself spending the majority of my time over the last month working on it, or unwinding from the mental stress said project has brought with it. Well enough of that for the moment, right now it's time to talk about A-Kon!
Simon, Brazilianownage, and I drove out Friday morning and rendezvoused with Wing in Dallas as the afternoon began. After checking in to our hotel and depositing our things off, we set out to explore the con/retrieve badges/etc. Earlier that week Wing had convinced me to throw together a Scout cosplay, from Team Fortress 2, to go along with his Demoman costume. So after a brief once over of the con, I returned to the room to change into my costume, and then met up with him for a TF2 photoshoot.
The photoshoot was lots of fun, and there were some pretty good costumes. Someone cosplaying an Engineer had actually built a little motorized sentry that would move around, which was very cool. The amount of work I put into my costume wasn't nearly as much as the majority of the people who showed up, but I was still pretty proud of how well it turned out. For those interested in seeing the pictures from the TF2 shoot, you can find a whole mess of them on Manda's Flickr. (Wing and I be lookin' so fine.)
After the TF2 shoot wrapped up, it was nearly time for the AMV contest, so I met up with Simon and Brazilianownage, and we scored some fantastic seats about twenty minutes before the contest began. Unfortunately, Moeblobber and Halfaspider were unable to be there as they were driving up later that night with Abe after he got off of work. This was a real bummer for them as they both had videos showing during the contest alongside my own. Keeping with the tradition of mediocre AMV contests at Texas conventions, A-Kon's Fans' Exhibition was pretty bad. There were a couple videos that were alright, but in my totally unbiased opinion, the Falcon-dan's entries were easily a cut above the majority of the videos shown.
The winners for the Fans' Exhibition weren't announced until that Sunday, but for the sake of keeping with the subject, I'll discuss them now. My entry (Metal Drill Solid) won best Action/Horror, and I got a sick trophy, some Star Wars figures, and one really upset weeaboo out of it. Unfortunately, Halfaspider's entry (If I Can Make This Move lost to some Ichigo x Rukia Bleach AMV, and Moeblobber's entry (Unlucky Star) lost to some showtunes Haruhi AMV with a ton of LOLTEXT DX in it, which is total BS.
AMVs made using showtunes garner far too much popularity and respect than they deserve. Anyone who has ever made an AMV can tell you that making an AMV to a showtune is tantamount to filling in a page from a coloring book, and then trying to pass it off as a handcrafted masterpiece. Using a showtune as your song eliminates all need to put any thought or work into the scenes you choose, how you arrange them, or what effects you use on them. A showtune has a coreography already pre-defined for it, and 99% of the time people using showtunes in their AMV will just pick whatever scenes line up verbatem with the lyrics of the song, maybe slap some witty text on top of it all, and then hit export. It takes no skill, and retarded weeaboos eat it up. But enough ranting, back to super fun convention happenings!
Around 9:30 Friday night, I decided it was time to unleash the fury of Emillio Costume upon the unsuspecting Dallas public. Oh. My. Gosh. people loved that costume, it was like having some sort of self-esteem h4x, everybody liked it. I couldn't get into the skywalk from our hotel because security wouldn't let me walk around in the mall area wearing a mask, so I had to take the street to get to the convention center, and people would actually stop their cars, roll down their windows, and shout at me telling me how awesome my costume was. Some guy on the street actually suggested I go to the Lizard Lounge that night, because they were having some sort of glow party, and I would win the contest. I made sooooo many friends out of drunk and/or high people, I believe I'm actually in somebody's wedding photos :D. I could go on and on, telling you of all the various people who stopped me for photos and whatnot, but that would be awfully narcissistic of myself, so I'll just say that if you ever want to have everyone around you think you're awesome, wrap yourself in EL wire.
After about an hour of walking around decked out as Emillio, I started getting a mondo headache and was starting to feel the effects of dehydration, so I decided it was time to strip off my costume, and spend the rest of the night cooling off with the Falcon-dan. Not much else happened after that, we wandered about the con enjoying ourselves, and eventually decided to get something to eat around 4:30. After a nice breakfast at IHOP, we returned to the hotel weary and ready for some sleep, only to find ourselves stuck in an elevator going up and down with no immediate way of getting off! Oh yes, so close to getting some sleep, and we had the misfortune of spending the next half-hour stuck in an elevator with some very stupid weeaboos. How stupid you ask? Well about ten minutes into being stuck, one of them decided to start kicking the doors saying that things couldn't possibly become more broken. Eventually though we did manage to escape the clutches of that infernal contraption, no thanks to the worthless hotel staff there, and after some intimidation of the night-staff and demands for cake, we made our way back to our room for some sleep.
Saturday passed quietly enough, we attended the Master's Exhibition AMV contest, and were thuroughly disappointed by what passes for "masterworks" these days. Other than that, we spent the day just enjoying the convention and eachother's company. Abe and I poked our heads into a panel on "how to get into the gaming industry" later that evening, Abe being curious as he had just recently gotten a job working at Certain Affinity. The panel actually turned out to be ran by a bunch of game testers, not developers, and after about ten minutes of quiet snickering, we left. Around nine PM that night, we returned to the hotel room to relax a bit, and somehow ended up taking a two hour nap. Thankfully A-Kon's event lineup was pretty nonexistent, so we didn't miss anything any of us cared about. Deciding that we were once again in need of sustenance, we set out in search of food, and eventually found ourselves at Taco Cabana. I had some of the best quesadillas I've ever tasted, and then we made our way back to our hotel. I contemplated whether or not to put on my Emillio costume again, not really feeling up to the task of getting it all put on, and instead settled for wearing my hat and tie along with what I already had on.
After getting all wired up, we set out again to roam the con and see what fun there was to be had. Just as the night before, my hat and tie were well received. We decided to check out the rave, which was actually pretty fun, but unfortunately it ended after only a couple songs. Eventually, we found ourselves on the top floor of the convention center, whereupon we spotted some comfy looking chairs set around a table. Further investigation on the part of Moeblobber yielded a box of art supplies, and what followed was a three hour Falcon-dan drawfest! It all started with the proposition that whomever could draw their waifu the best, would get their pick of the other's. A silly contest that IMHO, I absolutely destroyed with my drawing of Rei Ayanami, excluding Abe and his ridiculous skills of course. At some point, this pompus hoe and her possy of con trash made their way over to our corner, at which point she began to tell us about how she was "kind of a nerd, I guess", and how she gets mad art sales overseas or something. She was kind enough to grace us with a drawing of some cameltoe-rific elf-lady, which we promptly made some facial hair adjustments to. By the time the drawfest was over, we had quite the armada of sexy anime fanart to pick from, such as: Osaka, Tomoyo, the better Yoko, Rin Tohsaka, Konata, and Emillioko. We've decided we're gonna start renting a booth in artist alley from now on.
That Sunday was a quiet one, we checked out of the hotel, bought some fanart, hit up the award ceremonies for the AMV contests, and then set out for home. A-Kon, like last year, was a blast, and I can't wait to go to my next con. For those interested, you can see the pictures I took here, and all of the drawfest pictures are available here.
I think I'll wrap up things here for now, I need to get some sleep. I'll continue recounting the events of this last month in a later post.
Monday, May 25, 2009 2:41 PM
A-Kon is this weekend, and with the help of my mom and her superior seamstress skills, my Emillio costume is now complete! I took a bunch of shots of the completed product, tossed out all the ones that sucked, and uploaded the remainder to my Photobucket account. (This picture happens to be my personal favorite.) I've also uploaded a series of progress shots that I took over the course of construction for those who are interested.
This is the second costume I've worked on that employs the use of EL Wire, and it's been quite a learning experience. The original idea I had in my head was to construct an entire suit out of the wire, but after some research, I discovered that EL Wire is both too expensive and too delicate to do anything like that. So it was back to the drawing board so to speak, and after a couple brainstorming sessions with my mom, we came up with the current design. Aside from the physical constraints and monetary impracticalities of using EL Wire as a clothing, I also learned the (rather painful) lesson to always insulate the tips of any EL Wire strands that may come in contact with human skin.
I had just finished lacing up my shoes, which includes tucking one end of EL Wire into the inside of my shoe, and decided to check and see if everything was still working properly. However as soon as I powered up my DC inverter, I was met with a rather nasty shock to my foot. Oh how grateful I am that I thought ahead to include two different safety measures for just such an occasion. Namely, an emergency kill switch on the battery pack, and attaching the inverter to a tool belt. Thanks to my planning ahead, I was able to avoid having to fumble around my backside to try and disconnect the battery cage from the inverter. Instead, I only had to give my belt buckle a quick squeeze and let gravity handle the task of breaking the connection between the EL Wire and the inverter. Oh science, what can't you do?
I had mentioned toward the end of one of my earlier posts, that I've been rewatching Cowboy Bebop with my mom. Well we finished last Sunday, and my little experiment to see if my mom could handle anime went far better than I had expected. Cowboy Bebop is such an incredibly god tier show that it's pretty ridiculous, and each time I rewatch it it never fails to evoke an emotional response from me on more than one occasion. This time around, "Waltz For Venus" (Episode 8) hit me pretty hard, along with Faye and Ed's departure at the end of "Hard Luck Woman" (Episode 24). And to top it all off, when Real Folk Blues started playing during Episode 25 it felt like someone just punched me in the gut, hard.
Now I was very concerned that while I was sitting their trying not to let loose twin waterfalls of manly despair, that the full force of the situations at hand would be lost on my mother. So you can just imagine how relieved I was to see my mom actually crying at every part where it was appropriate. Heck, she spent a few minutes crying on our back porch while letting our dog out after watching the very end of the show. Needless to say, she passed my powerlevel training test with flying colors. Now I'm trying to decide what to show her next. I'm thinking that it will probably be Ghost In The Shell, but I'm also considering Noir since she has a thing for lady assassins.
Well business for me has taken a pretty steep hit recently. Laziness, counter-spammers knocking my best client off his main affiliate networks, one client deciding to try and skip out on the remaining $800 of my fee, and a sharp drop in legitimate demand for bots has put me in a bit of a financial rut at the moment. However, that doesn't mean I haven't been coding! While business may be sucking terribly right now, I've cranked out two spiffy new programs!
First is a 4chan image dumping script that automates the processo of posting a large number of images to a single image board. The program is named Operation Jupiter Jazz, and download links along with some more information about the nitty gritty of the program can be found on the Code Page.
The other application I've finished developing, is technically five. I've written image scraping programs for five different anime related image hosting sites, and have bundled them all into a single application by the name of Operation Image Faerie. The websites that are currently supported under the latest revision of OIF are: Danbooru, E-ShuuShuu, Konachan, Moe Imouto, and Sankaku Complex. I may or may not add support for additional websites in the future, it all really depends on whether or not the site has enough pictures I care about, and if I have enough dango icons to support adding another site.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 07:13 AM
I'll post later, too busy working on my Emillio cosplay for A-Kon.
Monday, May 11, 2009 12:52 AM
Oh Man, it's been more than a month since my last real blog post. Work has kept me pretty busy these last few weeks, I've been developing my greatest (and definitely most complicated) bot ever, which has left me mentally exhausted whenever I got some free time, but I'll get to that later. For now, let us discuss Anime Matsuri.
So Anime Matsuri was absolutely awesome. A. Wyatt Man, Abe, Moeblobber, and I gathered the Thursday night before at Abe's house, and then set out at the crack of noon the following morning. As with any con, there were a miriad of hijinks, new memes, and manly poses that ensued, the heaviest of which being our acquisition of Obelisk-chan from the parking lot we used that weekend.
I got super lazy the week before the AMV contest submission deadline, so I did not participate in Matsuri's AMV contest, but I did attend it. I was very disappointed in the quality control of the submissions allowed into the contest, some had subs for crying out loud! Nevertheless, it was a pretty enjoyable show. The video crew that was supposed to handle the contest never showed, so the contest started an hour late, but the awesome MC hosting the event kept us entertained plenty. Plus, Popular didn't win anything this time, so all in all it was a great success.
I was unable to stay for the entire AMV contest unfortunately, as I had to leave in order to get ready for the cosplay walk-on contest that Blu roped me into earlier that afternoon. This was my first time participating in anything like that, so I was ten kinds of nervous, but it was still lots of fun. I got to meet a couple neat people, and even got to utilize my Edgy-strengthened nerves of steel by sitting next to some LOL SO RANDOM XD yaoi fangirl faggots for an hour. You were supposed to strike three poses for your walk-on, but as Dr Stiles really only has one, I sort of improvised, and totally won everything.
Having acquired The Con Cube, we got Abe to bring his guitar to Matsuri and belt out some sick licks while looking for pianos to fix on Friday night. During the course our jam session, many a weeaboo asked to try their hand at Abe's guitar, and all failed miserably.
We took it upon ourselves to troll Anime Matsuri whenever possible, and oh lawd did we carry out some incredible trolls. From spreading the word about Tou-san, to bending Rocket Man and Crispy Frito to our will during the improv show, our trollercoaster could not be stopped! Unfortunately the ravages of time have caused my memories of our more intricate escapades to grow faint, so I will have to wrap up my recounting of Anime Matsuri here. To whom it may concern, all pictures relative to Anime Matsuri are posted here.
We had a pretty awesome LAN party at Thugz Mansion a couple weeks ago. Abe, Moeblobber, Brazilianownage, and I all gathered together for a night of gaming, copyright infringement, and E Card! We also watched my super awesome modified DVD ISO version the new Gurren Lagann movie.
Since Abe is the only who lives in Thugz Mansion, we were able to experience what it would be like if the Falcon-dan lived in a house together, and we all grew rather attached to the idea. Thus, plans for the creation of the Dai Falcon Fortress of Solitude were conceived, and will be made manifest upon the completion of my mission in two years.
Abe's friend Chuck from The Black Mesa Movie came down to Austin last weekend, and so I was able to meet him. A classy gent who works for ID software, Chuck was a pretty cool guy who drank nuclear ice tea, and didn't afraid of anything. We were all going to go shooting last Saturday, but I chose to abstain since I had zero hours of sleep. So I instead met up with them later that evening, and we went to Houston's and had delicious $30 steaks, followed by a round of (free for me :D) ice cream at Zero's. Abe and Chuck also finished recording a song that weekend by the name of Hours of Eternity, which some have claimed to be the greatest song ever composed.
The last week or so, I've been attempting to imbue my mom with a powerlevel by watching Cowboy Bebop with her. So far things have been progressing smoothly, she likes the show, and is finally understanding that there is more to anime than just SHIPOODEN and DBZ. I'm not sure whether or not we'll watch anything more after finishing Bebop, I'm considering showing her either Noir or Ghost in the Shell. I must tread carefully however, she must never know of moe nor the existence of Elfen Lied.
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