Follow me and the crew as we document our Magic like adventures. Well I’ll have to ask them first and the permission of WotC but I’m sure it’ll roll.

SlyFox

From Jalopnik – link here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsdbnQKImVY&fmt=18

http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/salesguy.html

The machines have the ability to play most popular games, and the benchmark that is Crysis, at a respectable 40fps.

Maximum PC’s Build :

Game Centrals build :

Take a look at the comments on the original articles for more ideas on low cost builds.

Links to the original articles:
Maximum PC
Game Central

Thus I bring you a few great articles from Tom’s Hardware, where they do some of the most comprehensive tests of PC hardware.

These articles cover all the usual areas of the concern: RAM , GFX cards and is 64-bit really better?

Do You Really Need More Than 6 GB Of RAM?

4GB Gets Cheap: 9 Dual-Channel Kits Compared

Performance & Value : Is Spending More Justified?

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: March ’09

Gaming In 64-Bit

Hit the link and find out what I mean:

It pops into your head:

“I need to shoot my friends.”

…

With a camera. Of course. What were you thinking? I’m not a sociopath…

The Reason:

Since for some odd reason, despite having a photographic grandfather, there are very few photos of people in my family floating around, I needed to rectify that. This past Christmas, I spent much of my time at family functions behind the viewfinder of my camera, documenting my lovely clan of relatives.

But my friends and I, we hardly ever take pictures whenever we go out anywhere. This is a bit of a problem.

When I started learning photography I never wanted to consider myself a “people shooter”. But damn that predetermination to be a nature-shooter or a macro-shooter or a landscape-shooter. My friends play a huge part in my life, and each of them is a unique and amazing individual. Some are quirky, some are needy, some are beautiful, some are just plain weird – but they’re all a part of my life and they all matter to me, each and every one of them.

So I’m making it my goal, if not just to be able to prove to people that yes I do actually have friends, that by the end of the summer of 2009 (that would be this year…) I will have photographed all of my closest friends in some manner that attempts to convey what it is about them that I love, and what makes them unique.

This should be a fun summer, and I really hope I can pull it off. I’m pretty sure I can though, and I’m giving myself until September 21st, 2009 to fulfill my dream.

I signed my lease agreement officially once and for all – so as long as things stay good, my trips to Toronto in search of accomodation are finally bearing fruit, and I’ll have a roof over my head for the next four months after school is done.

Up until that point (and mostly just after exams are done), I’ll be able to enjoy the other momentous development of the day:

“My” “new” Canon Speedlite 420EX.

Okay, so it’s not really new, and it’s definitely not really mine.  But I get to play with it and love it and hold it and flash it like it was my own until the end of April when I move to Toronto.  My acquisition stemmed from a conversation I had this morning when I was out in search of some photographic targets at the Point Pelee marsh.  I ran into some acquaintences who I knew were very interested in photography.  We got talking about gear and photo subjects when I mentioned that my kit was lacking in the lighting-department.  Alan, being the generous guy that he is, decides he wants to lend me his 420EX at least until I leave for the city – he says he never uses it anyways.  Solid.

So now I’ve got a “new” toy to play with, albeit an unwiedly addition to my teeny-tiny Rebel XSi.  Very top-heavy, and it’ll take some getting used to, but at least I’ll be able to give it a whirl until I have enough money to buy a brand-new Speedlite 430EX II!

I’d really like to get into the whole off-camera flash stuff, as previously seen in blog posts containing links to Strobist.com, but I’ll need a bit more kit and a bit more money to be able to invest first.  Besides, a reflector is honestly the cheapest and best interim solution to using available light right now.  I’ve been watching a lot of Squeezethelime.com videos about dealing with available lighting for creating some very striking portrait work, and I’ve been inspired.  I definitely reccommend watching at least a few videos to familiarize yourself with some basic post-processing techniques, and posing as well.

Check it out at Squeezethelime.com. Dooooo it!

Oh, and before I go, I’d like to show you what I found on my latest trip to my backyard at 1:1 macro level.

A clematis flower's seeds bunched together in the setting sun.

The only browser left standing after the first day of the competition was Google’s Chrome browser which only recently came out of its beta phase. Many account Chrome’s success to the fact that every tab in the browser is sandboxed and so cannot interact with other tabs and other system processes.

Safari was fell victim to Charlie Miller within seconds of the competition starting. Firefox and IE fell later in the day.

Check out the indepth article at Arstechnica here.

It sports a few new features but my favorite thing is that it finally follows Internet standards! Woohoo to no more CSS hacks! Some of the new features are: smart address bar, grouping for tabs, private browsing (AKA incognito mode), and tab crash protection.