Thursday, January 20, 2005

Mastering VIZ Render for Autodesk ADT

I just got my copy of Mastering VIZ Render for Autodesk ADT Users and all I can say is that it's a great tool for VIZ Render users! The cool part of the book is the color pages - they have Awesome images there!

If you're a VIZ Render user, make sure you get your copy!

Thursday, January 13, 2005

The Aliens are arriving!

That's most likely what the "Titanians" will be saying this evening. Huygens will descend into Titan completing the first part of the Cassini mission. Tomorrow morning, 7am Pacific we'll have the first broadcast of the data live on Nasa TV. Here's their schedule.
Go Nasa!

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Battlestar Galactica week

This Friday the Sci-Fi channel starts the new Battlestar Galactica series. And better than that, from Wednesday Jan 12, to Friday Jan 14 they'll be showing the original series along with the Pilot movie of the new series.

Don't forget to setup your VCR's and Tivos - this will be a great Sci-Fi week.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

Building a PVR

After a long time thinking about it and after failing last summer I decided to build myself a PVR. It's not a TIVO replacement as I originally intended it to be, but since my new computer is pretty fast and I have a flat screen, I thought I would give it a try.

To build it, all I needed were these:

I tried several softwares before I made a decision on Beyond TV. I tried Sage TV, MediaPortal and GB-PVR.

Sage is better than Beyond TV in features, but it has a small problem when displaying LiveTV. It assumes I always want to record TV when watching it, so if all I want to do is watch TV I'm filling my HD at the same time. Beyond TV does the same, but writes it to a temporary buffer and wipes it out when done.

MediaPortal worked fine but was super slow. It would take 5 seconds to display Live video. Then it wouldn't switch tv channels, remaining stuck on whatever channel it was.

GB-PVR was able to record TV, but when I tried to play what it recorded, the application would hang.

I'm still going to keep on researching these apps in the time I have available for their trials, but I'm definitelly steering away from the free ones since they're not keeping up on speed or stability.

From now on there's no missing TV shows - all I need to do is tell the softwares which shows I like and it records all new episodes, etc. I can watch them on my flat screen, or I can burn them on DVD to watch on TV.

I'm finally free from TV Schedules and Commercial breaks!

Friday, January 07, 2005

Vaporware 2004 list

A MUST read! Highly recommended. You'll laugh quite a lot:
Wired News: Vaporware Phantom Haunts Us All

Thursday, January 06, 2005

Welcome to the world, Julia!

Alexandre and Ana's daughter Julia was born on Jan 4 at 8:10am in Sao Paulo, weighting 3.2kg and measuring 49cm. Both Julia and Ana are healthy and doing very well.

Here is a picture of Julia:

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Deck Building with AutoCAD

Last December I helped my friend Dave build his deck. We only got as far as the frame goes, but we both believe it was a lot for only 2 guys with no previous experience on building decks. The process went very smooth simply because we used AutoCAD.

Dave had a very nice AutoCAD plan of the deck and we measured every single piece of wood we had to cut. Knowing every piece's length, we then marked all the places where the boards would meet each other and we just nailed them one after another. It may seem easy for the savvy deck builder, but were newbies and we were handling 25' long planks with all the joints at 45 degree angles. To add to the confusion, Dave only knows how to measure things in Feet and Inches! It takes me a while to think in feet and inches.

Anyway, it was a very fun project, and a very good workout too. Here are the time lapse pictures.

I'll try to post step by step DWFs later.

Monday, January 03, 2005

Vray Problem solved

Our Product support guy contacted the VRay folks and got the solution:

Customers need to download the latest version of VRAY @ http://www.vrayrender.com/slogin/

This is for MAX 6, 7 and VIZ 2005.

Working...

Back to work... Saw a funny problem @ CGArchitect - users cannot launch VIZ anymore after 2005. The problem started with VRay, and I think they maybe doing something funny in the TCP/IP sockets that makes mental ray not work... Very weird.

Also, I got 5 more moderator points @ Slashdot! Woohoo!

Back to the grind.

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Filled my profile

The profile is ready to go!

2005 is here!!!

Yohoo!!! 2005 is here, soaking wet and freezing, but it's here.

I'm back to work tomorrow after two weeks of rest. That shall be good - I'm getting tired to stay inside because of all this rain. Let's hope the rain stops soon, so we can go out again.

Here are my 2005 wishes: http://www.origamy.com.br/xmas2005

Started Blogging

This is the beginning of a Blog... Hello! Is anybody there? :o)