Clete’s Blog

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, go to the USA Game Lounge. You can create your own avatar on the website (they are scalable vector graphics, so they look sharp). Sadly, they do not offer very good solutions for downloading your character (check below for a picture). The largest size that they offer is around 200 pixels tall (and it has a lot of white space in it). Well, I wanted mine larger. So, being the experimenter I am, I decided that I would try to enlarge the Flash SWF and take a screenshot and crop my character out. Turns out that it’s actually easier than that.

In order to obtain a picture of your character with a completely white background, follow these instructions:

1) Login to your account.

2) Click Edit Profile

3) Right-Click anywhere on the page and click on “View Page Source”

4) Press Ctrl+F (find) and type in “75.jpg”

5) Click Next (you want the second instance of 75.jpg)

Select the entire link from the text in the line of 75.jpg. It should look like this:

…/weemee/height/75.jpg

5) Now, change the link up a little bit. Note that 75 is the height of the image that you want. I found that, if you raise the number above 1075, it maxes out and will spit out blank pictures. So, try 750 or 1075:

…/weemee/height/1075.jpg

6) Go to the link! You now have a larger picture of your WeeMee. Photoshop away. The only downside to this is that you will not receive a picture with your character’s facial expression. The character is always smiling.

Yes, I know some people could not care less about this post, but I don’t think anyone else has tried this trick before, so I wanted it to get posted out there. The characters are cool looking, though.

Firefox 3 has been released to alpha. The sources have been available for a while, but work has now begun on it. This preview is supposed to be for testing and development purposes only.
Firefox will be using the Cairo layer, which adds support for 2D rendering. (Think: XGL & Compiz-Quinnstorm/Beril) I can’t wait to see what will become of it.

The only thing I’m hoping for is that they will switch over to using QT. I hate GTK themes.

Check it out!

I don’t know if I’m just late in hearing this, but it appears that 16GB flash drives have come on the market. Surprisingly, Corsair’s 16GB flash drive only costs $299! Compare that to a 1GB SD card for $60! Sounds like a fairly good deal to me. Who wants to buy me one?

The other item that I would like to note is Intel’s “Core 2 Duo Extreme QX6700 Kentsfield Processor.” This processor is the first that Intel has produced that has 4 cores in it. This thing will be amazing for compiling programs, playing games, music, and burning those Blu-Ray discs at the same time. =) The only problem with having more than one core right now is that most games will not take advantage of the extra cores. Even if the process’s affinity is set to run on all 4 cores, it still won’t use them to their maximum potential. Anyways, this processor is 4×2.66GHz and has 2 x 4MB L2 Cache. Nice. And yes, it is a true 4-core processor. It doesn’t use Hyper Threading. AMD’s quad core line will debut some time in 2007. I’d like to get a 64-bit quad core CPU if they ever come out.
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By the way, I have lost the link, but Intel is planning to go well beyond just 4 cores. Stay tuned. I’ll try to find the article later.

Recently, a friend sent me a link to what appears to be a real life lightsaber. It shoots out a pretty violet beam. It appears to be quite simply, a tweaked blu-ray laser-type kind of thing. It looks pretty cool. Check it out!