Category: Uncategorized

Today I was putting together an online poll for some friends, to figure out when we can have our next virtual game night. I was using Doodle, a web site that has a quick and easy (and free!) way to create polls. But the site didn’t work, because it told me I was blocking ads. I turned off my ad blocker so I could finish my poll, and the software I use to block tracking scripts (Ghostery) went haywire. Check out the purple column on the right:

68 trackers! This single web page is using that many different scripts and sites to track me and deliver ads. Holy smokes.

For those people who think they’re “anonymous” on the internet, or wonder how Amazon and Facebook can suddenly display an ad for something they were looking at on a completely different site, here you go. And this is just for a simple little poll…

Okay, I’ve been doodling with my new tablet for a bit, and it’s clear I’m not much of an artist.

That’s supposed to be a barn but looks like a doghouse. Then again, it was about three minutes of effort and really just an exercise to get used to how the stylus works, and how to make varying line thicknesses and use of colors.

After goofing around a bit more, I decided to “paint” an actual photo. Here’s the source material, a shot of Lake McDonald from a recent trip to Glacier:

And here’s the sketch:

Breathtaking, I know. But in about an hour of scribbling stuff like this, I’m already feeling more familiar with the tools and how to use the stylus. Give it another week or so, and I’ll be Monet.

As I continue on my (long) journey to become a better photographer, I thought it might be interesting to work with a digital art tablet. Many people seem to think using a stylus is far easier than using a mouse when it comes to image editing and manipulation. Moreover, as I continue working on Hexteria, I feel like it might be fun to make some digital art (illustration kind of stuff) and a tablet is definitely superior for that sort of thing.

So, I bought one. It just arrived, and I’m having some fun messing with it.

There are a bunch of programmable buttons on the device, and of course for years I’ve already been all sorts of keyboard shortcuts to let me quickly change tools and modes. One hand holds the pen, the other taps some keys, and the magic happens. So far it’s been pretty slick.

One part of the process was calibrating the tablet to work with my three-monitor system. Technically the tablet is a fourth monitor– I can drag any windows over to it, and then manipulate them with the stylus. In order to “scale” the stylus’ drawing area to only the tablet, so it doesn’t bleed over to my other screens, I had to do a bit of linear algebra to compute a transformation matrix for the screen coordinates. Wow, that took me back. I remember absolutely loving linear algebra, although admittedly I had to brush up a bit to figure this one out.

In any case, it’s the start of yet another hobby. I’m curious to see how artistic I can be…

It’s been a while since I shared some security camera footage of critters roaming around the house. Almost daily we see deer and mice; occasionally we’ll catch a bear wandering across the lawn. But last night we had two new ones.

First there was a skunk walking around by our front door. (Click to watch the night-vision video)

About an hour later, someone’s dog dropped by.

While I’m not at all surprised that animals wander around here, we’re a good quarter-mile from the nearest house, and even then it’s a trek through a forest with heavy underbrush. For a dog to get up here is pretty odd. He walked all around the house, showing up on every one of our cameras. I hope he made it home this morning…

We were in town today for some shopping, and I saw this awesome license plate in the parking lot:

It reminded me of a joke I used to think was absolutely hilarious:

… So this snail goes to an auto detailing shop and asks if he can have a giant letter “S” painted on the side of his car. The owner asks why. “Because,” replies the snail, “I want people to see me driving past and exclaim ‘Wow, look at that S car go!'”

Groan.

Today I received the first batch of printed parts for Hexteria. It was exciting to open the box and see all the little baggies with tiles and reference cards…

I laid out the board for a two-player game, just to see what the tiles looked like together, and how big it was. Not too bad.

There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m at the point now where I can box up a few copies of this “alpha” version of the game and send it to people who have agreed to playtest it. I’m looking forward to some feedback…

“Why,” mused Pepper, “do the sunsets always seem more spectacular when it’s cold?”

Why indeed. Tonight’s was glorious, so I stepped outside, barefoot in the 20-degree twilight, to snap a picture. Worth it.

Many times as we’re driving around, I notice a really cool scene out the car window. More often than not, I didn’t bring my “good” camera– my sweet Canon DSLR– and have to decide whether it’s worth a shot on my phone. (To be fair, sometimes Thom snaps “candid shots” out his car window with his ancient iPhone, and those pictures tend to be pretty nice.) Although it’s difficult to get a decent shot at 70mph, every now and then I get lucky.

An example of a cool car-window shot is last week’s low-hanging clouds. I dredged up a few others from recent excursions.

I love how the sunlight is dappled across this hilltop in Idaho:

Or the moody clouds hanging over the mountains near Missoula:

How about these late afternoon clouds, shot from the highway overlooking Flathead Lake:

Or this fiery sunset from exactly the same spot, a few months earlier:

I guess I need to keep watching the scenery as we’re zooming along the highway, and I should probably bring my good camera more often…

Lately, as fall firmly takes hold in the Flathead Valley, we’ve seen all sorts of interesting cloud formations. There’s low-lying fog almost every day– sometimes over the water, and other times just in fields and lowlands. I assume it has something to do with the ground being warm and the air being cool. Here’s a shot of the Mission Mountains in the distance, with all kinds of low clouds looking like white smoke coming up from the ground:

After a lot of thought and planning, we pulled the trigger on a solar system. We’ve had various power outages over the past year, as well as sky-high electric bills, so we thought it would be cool to generate some of our own power. We worked with a local company to design a system of solar panels that will provide more electricity than we need in the summer (for which the utility company will pay us). Those sixteen-hour days are sure nice, so even though we’re up in almost-Canada, we can take advantage of all that sunlight. Winter won’t be quite as good, but we’ll be able to generate a portion of our power, even on the cloudy days.

The crew– actually just a guy named Mike– started the installation today. It’s not much to look at right now, though: just some mount points on the roof where the panels will be placed.

Of course this is the week when the first snowfall hit, and that’ll probably slow down the process a bit. The panels are sitting in a warehouse in Billings, with an unknown ETA. Hopefully they’ll show up soon, and within a few weeks we’ll be a little more “green”.