But, but, but I think I’ve found a solution Enter NaNoRenO. This is like NaNoWriMo, but instead of writing a novel in a month, you have to make a visual novel video game in a month. From scratch. (There is also a similar event for finishing previously started games, but I don’t think I would be able to finish my original game in a month, it’s much more complex than a visual novel.)

A visual novel is reasonably straightforward to make, and I managed to come up with an idea for a game that I can hopefully finish in March. I wrote a design document (not sharing it just yet ) and calculated the amount of assets that need to be made, and I think it’s doable… though not easy. (Yes, I could just make a super short visual novel with stock art, but where would the fun be in that?)

I’ve already started working on Amesirun (working title) and there’s a bunch of stuff I managed to finish in the past 3 days. I made the core programming (quite simple, though it is a nonlinear game), wrote the first scene (quite long), and mostly finished two backgrounds.

The whole game is inspired by some concept artwork I did for Emerald Spires (my main game) several months ago, a drawing of a character I really liked, but the whole thing did not fit with the more realistic approach of Emerald Spires. So I cropped the character, who will be used as the main – and only! – character once I finish drawing the different emotions.

Amesirun will be set in the same universe as Emerald Spires, FYI. You can think of it as a teaser

Speaking of teasers, I have two images for you, a background and a (the) character. The game is set in “conceptual space”, so they are quite odd and not what you’d expect from visual novels. But I wanted to get away from realism, which led me to become completely stuck with the character art on my main game. It’s such a relief to be able to draw random outlandish things.

I made the images with ArtRage with some postprocessing using other software. They use some public domain line art from expired patents, and NASA astrophotography for the color overlay. The rest is hand-drawn.

Enjoy:

I also made a new category “Lolarious” for random hilarity… usually photos snapped with my cell phone (so the quality is not particularly high) or desktop screenshots. I have much more waiting to be uploaded, but first I want to put “prezzey.net” on them, because those kinds of images are stolen all the time. I’m OK with people reposting my work – that’s what my CC license is for -, but not without attribution.

Most are in English and Hungarian, some are in German. Prices are kindasorta negotiable and I also accept trade-ins if you have something cool (books, used games, cheap DVDs of arthouse movies, etc. you get the idea).

There will be more coming on Thursday IY”H, and the missing prices will also be updated. (I just don’t have those books here with me right now so that I could accurately set their prices.)

Prices include tax but do not include shipping.

I prefer to ship to Hungary and Austria, but I can ship anywhere. If you live anywhere else it’s probably not worth it (especially since the prices are adjusted to the Hungarian market), unless you absolutely need that vintage Hungarian copy of The Chrysalids…

The new double issue of Expanded Horizons is out, if you see any technical issues, let me know! I’ve only read 7 stories out of the 8 so far (before the launch; I also helped out with proofreading) but there were some real gems in there. Miss Lonelyhearts has to be the best zombie story I’ve ever read and I normally don’t even like zombie stories! It also reminded me of Fallout 3 in a good way (if you’ve played it, you’ll see what I mean). And Silver Veins is autism-related. Really, I could list half of the new stories as ‘do yourself a favor, read this now’.

We decided against having downloadables at launch, because every month there are a few minor after-launch changes  (authors find typos, formatting issues etc.) and it’s just inconvenient to reexport and reupload everything every time someone finds an extra comma. So we’ll probably upload the PDF and ODT files next week, and until then you can read the stories on the web… oh and if you find any typos, let us know

So, go off and read, I think this is a really strong issue. And if you have something to submit, send it in – I think at the moment EH is especially looking for essays, poetry and art. (yes, it is a paid venue.)

When I last promoted the magazine, some people asked me whether the following “count” as underrepresented groups in speculative fiction – I asked our editor and the answer is yes to all, so keep those submissions coming:

* Women authors
* People from Hungary
* People from the Balkans
* Jewish people
* Otherkin
* Occultists / Neopagans in general / Wiccans in particular

Note that this is not a “checklist”, so if you send something about Croatian Jewish otherkin that misrepresents these groups and is not well-written in general, it won’t stand more of a chance…  or any chance, really. (Also note that I’m not the editor. I don’t even see most of the slush pile, I just format and upload the content and wrestle Wordpress into submission.)

So here is Experimental Archaeology, a story set in the Eren universe (my fictional universe), published in Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine. It’s a small online mag, but it has a great theme going on, so if you like labyrinths, it’s probably worth checking out.

It’s not connected to the Emerald Spires main storyline (gawrsh, I should post about that too) and if you read it, you’ll probably understand why… it would not be physically feasible. But at least it’s set in the same universe and offers you something to read until the game comes out! Unfortunately coding and writing both take up my free time and I don’t have much of that right now… if you cheer me on, the game will be completed faster!

Why Linux

When I bought an X60T, I thought I wouldn’t bother with Linux, everything was nicely preloaded with Windows XP and I saw no particular need to install Linux and suffer with the tablet features. However, I soon found that many of the drivers were really unstable and most of the extra features were really annoying. (Do you really want your screen to rotate based on motion sensor data?! I know I don’t!)

A few months later, I experienced a series of hardware malfunctions (strangely, beginning with the fingerprint reader). Among a bunch of other things, my hard drive also needed to be replaced.  I turned in the laptop for a warranty replacement… and waiting some more… and more… now since I used this computer for work, I found this annoying to say the least. I called the service center and it turned out the new hard disk had arrived, but they hadn’t preloaded it with the OS yet because the new version had to be shipped from the UK [?!]. I told them “just leave it blank, I’ll put Linux on it”. I don’t think they believed me, but I had my X60T back the next day and with nothing on the hard drive. Yay!

So, Debian Linux it was.

I originally intended to write a really long howto which amassed information from several other howtos and my own experimentation, but I was short on time, and the notes I made were sparse to say the least. So this post will only include small bits and pieces of unsorted information. I still use Debian on this tablet, so you can ask me about my current configuration…

Setup

Make sure the hardware actually functions. This is not trivial. I was told by the service center that they had lots of problems with this tablet, it was produced in small quantities, etc. When I set out to install Linux, there was a testing CD available from Lenovo… in theory. In practice the disk image was completely broken. If they fixed it since then, great. If not, just get any rescue boot CD and run the usual tests.

The laptop can boot via LAN, you have to set the BIOS to “Diagnostic mode” to get to the PXE interface (I did not find it at first). But I opted to install through USB using a memory stick so I did not actually test this. After you booted from the stick, net install is very easy, basically plug and play if your LAN uses DHCP.

Video card works out of the box, but make sure it uses the correct driver (i810). See /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Sound card also works right away. Don’t forget to install appropriate mp3 etc. codecs and the Gnome ALSA mixer.

Tablet stylus

If memory serves right, I used this howto adapted to Debian to set up the pressure sensitive stylus. I do have the same lines in my xorg.conf.

Pressure sensitivity worked right away. IIRC, in GIMP you need to enable it  manually.

ArtRage 2.5 is a great little piece of software for drawing on your tablet PC, the Windows version runs under Wine. (Pressure sensitivity works in Wine out of the box if you’ve done the above.) There is a free demo available, but I bought the full version for $20 after trying. Note that it has an MSI installer.

Xournal is a journal program for Linux, also recommended for your tablet.

I don’t use handwriting recognition so sorry, no info on that.

Screen rotation

Add the following line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf under Driver “i810″:
Option “RandRRotation”

Make sure xbase-clients and libxrandr2 are installed. I use Gnome, but I couldn’t get gnome-randr-applet to work, so you don’t need to install that. Also, none of the screen rotate scripts I found online worked for me (using the methods delineated there), so you’ll have to make your own, but it’s easy once you know the following:

These commands rotate the screen AND the cursor to vertical position:
xrandr –output LVDS –rotate right
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 1

These commands rotate to horizontal position:
xrandr –output LVDS –rotate normal
xsetwacom set stylus rotate 0

(Note that despite the “left, right”, etc. these are not relative rotations, ie. if you repeatedly –rotate right, nothing will change instead of the screen rotating around all the way.)

I do not recommend using other rotations. You should be very careful with –rotate left, because that way if you put the laptop in your lap in slate mode, the ventilation ducts are covered and your machine can overheat. I made this mistake under Windows and I was careful to set up Linux so that it doesn’t even try rotating that way. It doesn’t cause any serious problems – when it happened to me, the laptop simply shut down upon detecting excessive temperature after a while – but it definitely doesn’t improve your computer’s health.

A very easy solution is to make two executables out of these, put them in /usr/local/bin (or wherever you desire as long as it’s in your path) and link them on the Gnome toolbar as a ‘horizontal’ and a ‘vertical’ button. You can also combine the two scripts so that the resultant script detects the current rotation and always rotates to the other position. And you can map it to your favorite keypress or the ‘rotate’ button.

The motion sensor can also be used to detect rotation and rotate the screen accordingly, I don’t like that feature so I haven’t set it up for myself. Just make sure it never rotates to the ‘left’ position (see above).

There is also a possibility to rotate the screen when you close the lid. It is detected as a keypress, so you just need to detect the keypress and make your script execute upon that. I haven’t set it up yet and I probably won’t because I prefer the manual rotate. I think it’s also possible to detect stylus ejection??

CPU speedstepping and/or throttling

I haven’t tried CPU throttling, and I don’t think you should, either, unless you are feeling adventurous and/or have some money to burn I think Windows does some throttling in addition to speedstepping, but the settings aren’t public. Experiment at your own risk.

As for speedstepping – the default settings by cpufreqd are that it should always run at max speed, which is bad because that’s really overkill. Be sure to enable “ondemand” everywhere and uncomment its lines in cpufreqd.conf!! Yeah, I know, my bad… but it took me an hour to notice they were still commented. Also, I think there is a typo in the howto, what you add to /etc/modules should be “cpufreq_ondemand” instead of “cpufreqd_ondemand”. For some obscure reason, cpufreqd.conf didn’t work for me with percentages (which is the default so I’m puzzled)… so you might wish to change those to actual speeds and also say echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq.

[note: I think the link to the howto is broken. I wrote this paragraph two years ago or so.]

Hard disk shock protection

I had a lot of trouble getting hdapsd to work, unfortunately I did not make detailed notes, so all I have is this:

You’ll need hdapsd and you’ll also need to compile thinkpad-source. To test if the laptop detects movement, install and run hdaps-gl (it’s in hdaps-utils). To check if it really suspends the HDD, simply run dmesg.

Finally my brother came upon a solution, I’ll have to ask him if he still remembers it if anyone else has the same problem.

Trust me, you need the shock protection. I’ve seen howtos where it was treated like an unnecessary feature. That’s NOT true, the HDD is vulnerable, and if you boot under XP (Vista, whatever), you can see that the HDD is very often suspended by the protection system. Because you’ll use this laptop in slate mode a lot, it will run for prolonged times at odd orientations, you’ll often turn it around to turn the lid to slate mode, etc. My first HDD died in months even when I used Windows with the factory settings, so there is a lot of wear and tear… (now that it’s working under Debian, I haven’t had any problems in years B”H).

Missing

A lot, I will try to add more as I chance upon it (if that happens…), feel free to ask questions… I think the only thing I did not set up on it myself was hdapsd (I admit I gave up in utter exasperation after three days… then it took about the same amount of time for my brother to get it to work but he actually succeeded).

If you are a grad student, you probably have Here is a very easy solution that beats putting your average pdf reader on screen and suffering around with the scrollbars! (Scrollbars on an unfamiliar laptop can annoy the heck out of even the most patient presenter. Trust me on that.)

I talked about making complicated zooming presentations with Impress!ve in the previous entry, but this versatile little piece of open-source software can be used for this purpose too, and you don’t need to do anything taxing.

Just install Impress!ve (it should run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I only tried the first two) and run it on the article pdf! Absolutely no configuration necessary, though you might want to launch it with the -e parameter if zoomed-in pages are low resolution (depending on your video card and drivers).

That’s it! You immediately have the article on your screen and converted into a nice presentation. Useful commands:

* Left/right arrow to move forward/backward

* Tab to create an overview (choose between pages)

* Enter to create a spotlight (really spiffy! You don’t need that laser pointer)

* Z to zoom in on the page (it zooms where the cursor is placed)

Have fun!

However, I was faced with an obstacle. None of the major zooming presentation editors like Prezi (no relation to me despite the name! Though I worked together with one of their founders on a research project, Hungary is a small place…) or Ahead offer easy printing. Maybe there’s one which does, but I was in a hurry and didn’t find anything. Also, my laptop only has Linux, so Windows and (especially) Mac solutions like Keynote were also out.

I came up with a solution that worked quite well for my purposes, though it probably wouldn’t work for you if you expect full Prezi-like functionality like the rotating virtual camera, etc., and it only offers three levels of zoom, so I don’t claim it’s perfect. But since several people have been asking about it, here is the howto beyond the cut! Note that it assumes that you can make a regular presentation, and you have some computer proficiency. (If you have specific questions, comment away and I’ll do my best to answer!)

1. Make a slide background that is easily tiled

Since I needed to talk about four areas of interest in my presentation, I drew a petal-like shape and flipped it horizontally and vertically until I ended up with a “flower” composed of four separate slides fitting together. I filled the background with a uniform color.

2. Create your slides with OpenOffice Impress

Alternately, you can use any editor which outputs a PDF file with slides on separate pages. (LaTeX Beamer, etc.) Maybe you can even use Powerpoint – I confess have no idea whether Powerpoint can export to PDF (if you buy me a copy I can check, but it would be quite pointless to buy me a copy just for that, since I prefer Impress).

3. Download and set up Impress!ve (includes editing the source)

Impress!ve (formerly known as KeyJnote) is a  ~150kb Python script created by Martin J. Fiedler, we will be using this script to create the presentation. Its website explains how to download it and get it to run. I had some minor trouble with it – I ran into a bug where files exported from OpenOffice (but not from LaTeX) would crash it upon drawing the slide titles, I solved it simply by removing the reference to slide titles from the source code. Since the error message told me exactly which line was the culprit, it took just a few seconds to fix it. (If anyone is interested, I can try to replicate the bug, but it’s not too relevant here and strangely it only occurred on my laptop and nowhere else. I just mention it here for historical accuracy )

Now you will need to edit the source code (impressive.py). Don’t run away! It will not hurt!

…Seriously. You just need a text editor, any text editor will do, because the settings you will have to change are right at the top of the file. Open impressive.py. Right under the title and license information, there are a bunch of variables prefaced by this comment: # You may change the following lines to modify the default settings

Let OverviewBorder = 0 and OverviewLogoBorder = 0. (Maybe it is possible to change these settings using a command line parameter, but I didn’t find it in the documentation and just changing the Python script seemed easier.) Save, quit.

4. Configure your presentation

Configuration is very straightforward, but first you need to understand how the two zoom levels are set up. What we just did above means that the Impress!ve overview page (which is a feature that the script offers, it shows thumbnail images of each slide) does not have black borders any longer. So you can make a reasonably seamless image out of four (or more!) slides which fit together (which you made in sections 1-2 above). In my case I had four “petals” of a strange flowerlike thing for the four areas I intended to cover in my presentation. (If I end up having a lot of time at some unspecified point in the future, I might make a video and upload it to Youtube to make this explanation clearer.)

Of course there are slides you don’t want to see on the top-level zoom result, breaking your carefully crafted layout! You probably have a title slide, a bunch of extra slides and whatnot. To solve this, launch Impress!ve, go through your stack of slides, and use the “o” button on your keyboard to toggle “visible on overview”. In my case, each petal had several slides explaining the topic, and only the first slide of each topic was set to display on the overview. When you’re finished, press “s” to save your configuration! It will be loaded automatically when you start the presentation (unless you moved it to another directory).

So by now you should have the top-level zoom set up. You can trigger it with the Tab key during your presentation. Your medium-level zoom is the default, it just displays one slide on the screen.

What to do about the bottom-level zoom? This is also very straightforward. Impress!ve offers a zooming tool by pressing the “z” key. It zooms to where the cursor is positioned on the slide that is currently displayed. Also, if you press Tab while zoomed in, you will be moved to the top level in two steps, automatically and very smoothly. A further charming feature is triggered with Enter, “this is left as an exercise to the reader”

Make sure you don’t make the text overly small (resist the temptation of the zoom!), because after all, the whole purpose of this is to have slides which can be easily printed!

5. Print out the PDF

See, that was easy!

***

To be honest, when I first tried this, I thought I would mix up Tab, Z, Enter and all that during my live presentation and it would go horribly wrong. But I did not do more test runs than with my usual plain vanilla OpenOffice presentations, and everything went without hitches.

***

Ein großes Dankeschön to Martin J. Fiedler who made Impress!ve. Keep up the great work!

At least I can put something into my “Writing” category – one of my stories will be published in the special anniversary volume (#200!) of GFK – Galaktika Fantastic Books. Be sure to pick it up! I’m really happy because I grew up on the KFK and GFK series, so this is like a childhood dream come true. Also, since I can’t bring myself to write an actual novel, I’d have to wait for the next anniversary volume for such an opportunity! (They usually don’t publish short story collections.)

I know, I know, I should also write stuff in English… hopefully now I’ll be able to get around to doing just that!

Something else – if you live in the area, I made a list of my books available for swapping. (Hungarian, English, German… also a few video games.) I’d use something like BookMooch, but all of the sites seem to be deserted when it comes to people in Austria or Hungary. Any ideas?

Again, these were all drawn with ArtRage, with the exception of All Around Me, which is about half PS and half ArtRage.