Something Unreal

Since my camcorder’s HDD is finally giving up (after about 5 years), I took the opportunity to open it up and take a look inside it – and, of course, I took a bunch of photos as I went along. I did not delve deep inside it because I intend to keep using it after replacing the HDD, and I didn’t trust myself to remember how to put it all back together, but hey, I thought some people might think that it looks cool.

I didn’t make a video, because it was such close-up photography that I had to use a macro lens most of the time, and lighting was such an issue that I had to have my camera’s aperture fully-open. This means that the depth of field was extremely shallow, which would’ve been extremely annoying in a video (95% out-of-focus), and, to top it off, the lens doesn’t even have any image stabilisation, so it would’ve been motion-blurred, too. A YouTube video would’ve been cool, but for now, please enjoy the photos!

24 more photos are below the page break!
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445nm blue laser @ ~1.5W, scanned at 26 kpps. Original illustration by 平安京エイリアン (Heian-kei Alien).

The black image of Hibiki Ganaha on the wood is also burned by the blue laser (at a slow speed). Original illlustration is by 開栓注意 (kaisenn)

[Watch in HD]

I decided to upgrade the sucky blue laser in my laser projector, and now it can be used as a “burning printer” of sorts.

The old laser was 405nm (almost ultraviolet), 100mW. The new laser is 445nm (bright blue) with a G-2 lens and a maximum output power of 2000mW, but I’m not able to run it at full power yet due to cooling issues. So instead of using 5 volts at 1.5 amps, I’m currently using 3.5 volts (due to my own laziness) at 1.1 amps. Any higher and the driver board’s heat sink gets much too hot to touch (the heat sink is only rated for 0.5 amps, anyway).

[Watch in HD]

I hand-traced this graphic as part of a laser show which I made for an event on 11th October 2011 called “WOTA London” (episode 12).

Another use for a laser projector! Burning the WOTA London mascot character into an old piece of photographic paper by getting my laser projector to scan it really slowly. Unfortunately, I accidentally made it also draw the blanking lines (where the laser should jump from one area to another while turned off), so there are random straight lines scattered about the image, but oh well.

[Watch in HD]

I hand-traced this graphic as part of a laser show which I made for an event on the 11th of October called “WOTA London” (episode 12). Unfortunately, I pushed myself a little too hard, making a 15-minute show, my longest ever, in 1 week (previously, I took a week to make a 3-minute show). Since I was actually still finishing designing the laser show while packing for and travelling to the event, I forgot to take my camcorder with me. However, I may record it playing at home and upload the video of it some time (although getting permission from several music artists may prove hard).

Here’s the photo of the end result (it really does look this blurry, for some reason).

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to travel to the Netherlands to attend Abunai, a convention to do with anime, manga and other Japanese stuff. The con lasted 3 days (Friday to Sunday), and we had to camp at a nearby place and travel between there and the convention site each day, using bikes we’d rented from the camp site.

So… for now, photos! Click any photo to see the full-size version. Here are a few which I took…

…and here are a lot more which a friend of mine took (including a few of mine, since he wanted to fill up his PhotoBucket account):

…is the conclusion which I came to when having a strange chat about power cuts, with my friend “Sota-sama”, on MSN tonight. So I drew this with my graphics tablet in the MSN convo. (2 days ago, I got my tablet working better than it ever has done before. This lame attempt really doesn’t show it off well, though.)

(Click to see it at original size)

Here’s a coloured version at 4x the original’s size, but it looks worse IMO (due to the colour).

<BoringLengthyDescription> I had a momentary power “cut” (weakening, so my comp didn’t crash), and my friend said it might be a sign from Yuyuko (he’s said this before, it’s a kind of meme we’ve developed – usually followed by “be careful”). Then, a while later, a storm arrived where he lives, and the lightning was messing with his power. Through a strange chain of messages we decided that Yuyuko was eating the power, and the lightning was just a natural progression from there on.

Later on, we nearly decided that she was also fond of WLAN signals, but that was just getting silly. </BoringLengthyDescription>

Here are just a few of the scary points (I’m sure you can make up more):

- Her hands.

- Her hat (what exactly is going on?? Especially on coloured version).

- Her eyes. o_o

- The reverse-view of her head which looks like a lampshade.

The related part of the original MSN convo follows… (Please, if you value your free time, just move along…)

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Calming down from the ‘technicalness’ of my last entry, I’m proud to announce that there’s a new sticker on the front of my computer. (Click for full-size view)

And Miku is installed on my computer, so it’s not lying! =D It updates my rather old-style “Intel inside” sticker, since it’s in the fancy new style of Intel’s stickers:

The actual “Miku Hatsune inside” image was made by Narugami (from NicoNico). The page where they uploaded this image (which I’ve used here) is here. (…Is it just me, or did that last sentence sound weird?) I printed it on an address label, by the way. And I’m going to have to do it again when my new computer’s up and running. :P

Well, it’s been on my site for years, but I’m going to post it on my blog, since this is a nicer-looking place than the rest of my cheap site. =P

This is a little web page I made where you can sort of customize a little “anime-style” face. You change the eyes, eyebrows and mouth. And you don’t need Flash.

Well, there’s a little example. It’s pretty basic, but I think it’s more interesting on the actual page (which the image links to). If you want to save the image of the face, you’ll need to press Print-Screen and paste it into Paint.

Note that it doesn’t work on Internet Explorer 6, because the browser doesn’t bother to pay attention to the fact that the images are transparent. <_< It does work with IE 7, all versions of Firefox, and even the PSP’s web browser! (As long as Javascript’s enabled – although it is very slow with the PSP).