Microsoft's PDC conference is happening right now and already a boatload of announcements have been made about upcoming technologies, platforms and overall cool shit coming from Microsoft.

WAAAAAY too many to mention here so check out the official site at http://www.microsoftpdc.com

Well.. I already mentioned I was getting it.

Hello RYU!!! The box is surprisingly errr… different from a normal Revoltech figure box. Small and more simplistic.

It seems like they deliberately made his parts non symmetrical for that err.. realistic look?

Posability is typical for a Revoltech figure, but I still hate the darn clicking noises!

Pulling this off was harder than expected, you'd think they would have made this THE pose to pull off? And.. what the heck is that? a spit ball? Use the SSF2X image lar!

The included stand is SHORT! I keep wondering if I accidentally dropped a piece of the stand somewhere.

Can't even lift off the ground!

Of course, certain poses don't need the stand lar.

So THAT'S what they mean by not to scale.

can't even lift off the ground with the default stand.

Better aerial chance after stealing Mikuru's stand. And the Figma legs looking weird as usual from this angle.

A nice touch on how they made the sleeve pivotable so that you can position the arms a bit better without the sleeves getting in the way. Now if only they did that with the pants as well.

And that should be that then.. no more figures to get for now. Oh crap…. why is this here?

If you don’t move a car for months, would the dust accumulated on it actually be detectable by it’s weight?

So there I was lugging WZ around in Ikano when I saw this thing in the RC Planet shop on the top floor.

At first I thought it was an inverter, which essentially is a device which takes a DC power source (ie, you car battery) and convert it to AC power (ie. the wall socket in your house) for more info read my previous post. But then I thought no one would simply label something as a generator if it was converting power, and I found this spec sheet stuck on the cabinet.

It's essentially an inverter… that comes with a battery. In layman's terms, this is a wall socket which you can carry around! The rated power output is (in case you haven't clicked on the link yet) 140Watts CONTINOUSLY I wonder what the peak rate is then.

The power capacity is 210Watthour, base on what little I know of power calculation I think the rough formula for seeing how long the thing can last for you is to take the wattage of your device say.. a laptop charger that has a rated MAXIMUM output of 12V x 3A = 36 Watts and then use that to divide the maximum power capacity so in this case it's 210Wh / 36W = ~5.8 hours. So, if your notebook charger was constantly drawing the peak power rating, you'll get about 5.8 hours from this thing. But I don't think notebook adapters go near their maximum power rating, then again it's not like I have any equipment for measurement.

It IS an interesting piece of gear to carry around, especially if you had something you wanted to power in the middle of no where. Just be mindful of the power rating for the equipment you are running. Traditional tube TVs are a no no, cause the degauss cycle they go through when you turn them on draws a lot of power. Ditto for hair dryers, and probably power tools. At 140Watts you can forget about powering your XBox 360 or PS3 in a campsite. Or for that matter your monster rig of a desktop computer. :P

Now I just have to convince myself and someone else that I NEED to get this…

So I was asked to shoot some rings.

Looks elegant when you're holding it, but up close… you can see the tool marks and all. The guy's ring is… normal.. undecorated.

I'm shooting this on top of the box container, so note the dust on the black cushion. The bride's ring is of course the one that has a stone on it.

I couldn't exactly think of any particular way of arranging it, so I just ended up with this.

While trying to get a depth of field that would contain everything the shutter speed was up to 30 seconds. I spent 5 minutes blowing out all the dust that got attracted to the sensor after that.

The shot on top is cropped and not the full pic, but this was pretty much the closest I could get to the stone. I guess with a lightbox I could take pics like this with a nice.. white uniform background. Hmmm.. interesting.

So after fiddling with JQuery for a while, I REALLY REALLY LIKE IT A LOT!!! I like how the whole library is built around the basis of the programmer basically saying "I like to find a bunch of tags which fall under these parameters and do something with it"

And that's pretty much what you do in a majority of clientside Javascript scenarios, either you'll be using Javascript to make some effects to alert the user to something (ie, change color, change size) or you'll just be using it to make your page look spiffier!

And basically that's what I have done in order to test out JQuery, I wrote a simple script and attached it onto my blog, now when the page finishes loading. The script will, using JQuery

• Run through all A tags with a HREF that contains the words "/binary/WindowsLiveWriter" these are basically links to the full sized versions of images on my blog.
• Replace the default behavior of clicking on those links so that clicking on them doesn't open a new window but instead.
• Loads the full size image into a hidden image tag, then display it in place on the actual page itself so the user doesn't have to go through another window to see the full image.
• And of course when the user clicks on the full image or anywhere in the void they get returned to the normal page.

And now of course.. for a sample.

Could I have done this without JQuery? ABSOLUTELY! Would it have been fun to do without JQuery? No. Would I have even considered doing it without JQuery? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!

JQuery is definitely a library worth your time to check out and I wish I found out about it earlier!

Silverlight 2.0 has left Beta and is RELEASED!!! Get your development tools over at the official site!

One thing of note that I must mention is that Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP1 is now a SUPPORTED development environment! So you can now develop for Silverlight with the FREE tool!

Although I must say it's gonna hurt a lot since the XAML designer in Visual Studio is definetly not as powerful as Blend itself. Unless they've made some changes to it! I wouldn't know yet, still downloading and installing the new dev bits as I type this in.

Also.. hope the Silverlight Streaming Service gets upgraded soon too.

My colleague pointed me at a Javascript library called JQuery today, he was tellling me that it was a neat library to do client side animations. I was a bit skeptical at first cause I didn't like how some of the libraries worked.

But after running through some tests just now I'm impressed, it's nice, simple and clean. Very straightforward to use and doesn't seem like it'll get in the way of our other scripting methods, including the ASP.Net Ajax Extensions. But I guess to be sure I'll need to go through it a bit more.

I guess it doesn't hurt that Microsoft feels it's pretty good too!

Hmmm.. ok… have to try out something one of these days.

The following is an experiment of using High Speed Sync'ed flash on small objects.

About a week ago I finally found another possible candidate for a pocket multitool, a replacement in case anything happens to my Squirt.

The Victorinox Manager, not quite the Mini Champ which I was actually looking for. But it's not too shaby. The size is right.

And it's the Squirt's equal in thickness as well.

Of course the fact that it has a plastic shell and doesn't have a big pair of pliers means the Victorinox Manager feels much lighter than the Squirt.

Obviously they both come with a blade, almost the same length, just different errr… broadness. Let's hope I don't end up cutting myself with this one.

And of course they both come with the essential Phillips screwdriver.

Though on the Squirt it's more of a filed down normal screw driver instead of an actual cross. The Manager's Phillips screwdriver is an actual small cross.

And of course the main difference that might be the deal breaker when it comes to what to carry.

The Squirt houses a pair of pliers small yet adequate for light patch jobs when you need to twist something hard. Where as the Manager has the more commonly used scissors instead, ideal for precision cutting when a blade is unable to perform.

Being a Swiss Army Knife, the Manager has some errr… non tool like things.

Like a pair of tweezers, and a pen… which came DRY and UNUSABLE! must be because it was exposed in the display case for god knows how long! :(

One of the things that I realized is that.

I now have both a small and normal sized version tools for both Leatherman and Victorinox tools!

So.. after all that. I noticed that the shadowing is an interesting effect, albeit hard to control since I have only one flash… hmmm.. maybe I should build a lightbox next?

Went to a little conference organized by Sony for Alpha owners today. They had a cosy little setup, first of all since they were allowing the general public to come and try out the equipment they had a little showroom for the various pieces of technology and gear that go into an Alpha camera. Including this little guy.

An cutaway view of an A700 camera, didn't exactly get the best angle for this thing today, will try again tomorrow.

Then of course they had to allow people to try out their cameras, so they needed subjects.. like

Bikes!

And where there are bikes…

There be posing models!

Sony did a great job of setting up a proper shooting stage, there were ample lights and they were nice and bright that I didn't even need to use a Flash at ISO100, so I could take nice clear shots with my 50mm Macro lens.

Normally I would have made a Deep Zoom album containing my other shots so you can check out the minute details of the pics. But… Silverlight 2.0 is going to RTM soon, and I don't want to risk having to recreate all the Deep Zoom images if there are any breaking changes.

So that'll have to wait.

During one of my trips to China I bought this little souvenir.

It looks just like a small rock, but of course Marauderz doesn't just buy any small rock. There's of course a trick to this rock, in order to exaggerate the effect you just shine a light DIRECTLY on the surface.

And it leaves a glowing mark.

Yes… this is one of those glow in the dark rocks, I bought it cause I never saw something that reacted to light with such a violent reaction before. Heck all my usual glow in the dark toys could never glow in normal daylight. But this thing was almost glowing with light once you gave it a boost.

And in total darkness…

Like a small glowy ball.

When I setup the system for my mother to play videos for WZ a part of me always knew that one day WZ would be fiddling around with it himself.

Just didn't expect it to be so soon!