Print. Cut. Fold. Glue. Admire. Repeat.

Basically recently got addicted to papercraft, do it most nights after supervised study. tough to make, pretty to look at, awesome to photograph and CHEAP! Favourite one I’ve so far is the cartoony style ‘Link’ from Legend of Zelda:Windwalker.





And here is my collection of what I’ve done so far….

Heres a link to my papercraft album on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jameswhelton/sets/72157625223884156/

So I’m starting to learning PHP, but as a student whose’s bag is already crammed with (uselessly oversized) textbooks, I want to store the eBook/PDF of a PHP book I bought online, on my iPhone. Imagine all the PDF’s you’ve ever downloaded or torrented right on your iDevice (iPad would be savage for this)! Its extremely fastand easy to do! What we need is:

• iDevice: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad (obviously)
• Mac (more obviously)
• eBook or PDF file (more more obliviously)
• WiFi network that both iDevice and Mac are on

If you’re stuck for a wireless network, you can create one on the Mac and let the iDevice join it.

Right lets rock(paper)(scissors)…

First off we want the iDevice to be able to access the eBook/PDF on your Mac. Open the ‘System Preferences‘ application and click on ‘Sharing‘.

In ‘Sharing‘ click on ‘Web Sharing‘ in the left column.

Now click on the checkbox of ‘Web Sharing‘ so it turns blue and has a tick in it. You’ll see the green light is now on and its says “Web Sharing: On“, you will also see a web address in blue, make note of it as we’ll be going to it on the iDevice. In my case it said “http://192.168.1.4/~jw”, it could also say the computer name, like “http://spartan.local/~jw”.

Next, in Finder, goto your home folder (mine is ‘jw’) and then into the ‘Sites‘ folder. Basically anything you put in here you can access on your iDevice (or computer) by going to the web address we took note of earlier. So in this ‘Sites‘ folder, copy/place/drag the desired PDF/eBook into.

Now on the iDevice, first get the iBooks app from the AppStore (if you hav’nt already), now in the Safari app goto the web address we took note of earlier, in my case it was http://192.168.1.4/~jw.

You’ll see a list of files, touch/click on the PDF/eBook you put in. It will open and on the top right, you’ll see an option “Open in iBooks”

Press that option and it’ll open in iBooks and will be saved

Well done! You’ve done it, the eBook/PDF is now in iBooks Library

You can do this to add all your eBooks and PDFs into the iBooks app so you can enjoy them on the go!

Note: When you enable ‘Web Sharing’ everyone can access what you have in your ‘Sites’ folder, now its mega-super-highely unlikely that some will know where or go into your ‘Sites’ folder while you’re doing this, but if you’re adding some explicit content, I’d just removed the evidence from your ‘Sites’ folder when your done. Also in every case, for piece of mind, just turn off ‘Web Sharing’ in ‘System Preferences’ when you’re done.

Like this tutorial? Thank me on Twitter: @jwhelton

BAM! It was only a matter of time before google stuck its hand in the phone markets and now, prepare to gawk! Google Voice is giving free calls to the USA and Canada at the moment, got relatives or friends over there? You’re sorted!

But what about everywhere else? Well you have to pay a tiny-weeny amount to call there, which varies on country and if its a mobile or landline. Heres a list of the rates: https://www.google.com/voice/rates

Now because Google loves Ireland (boy does it), here are the Irish rates:

its a mere freakin’ 2 cent to call a landline in Ireland! Even better, it seems Google give you a full free $0.10 to play with when you sign up or start using voice!

Now how do you use Google Voice and avail of this awesomeness? Hop over to gmail.com, login or sign up, once you’re logged in, on the left hand sidebar, there’ll be a section entitled “Chat”, click that mofo, a it will dropdown to reveal the voice option, you’ll have to install a plugin first and restart your browser, after that go back to the Chat option in gmail, click it again, click the Voice button and on the right hand side of the window the dial pad will pad will appear and HEY PRESTO, you’re prank calling businesses in the states for free! I tested it out and rang a GameStop in Torronto, froze and hung up when they actually picked up! So yeah it works! Also if you upgrade, you also get all neat features like sending texts or SMS’s to phones, a voicemail, a custom number so people can ring you and more!

This kind of technology is called VOIP or ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’, its for  transferring voice or audio over the internet, through a gateway and to a phone. For a long time Skype and other companies were doing this, so really its nothing new, but free calls to the USA and Canada is BIG!

Links:

• Gmail
• Google Voice
• Google Voice Rates

So I’m beginning to write this post on the bus on its way to the Glucksman gallery (http://www.glucksman.org). Its pouring rain outside and I know nothing about this this exhibit bar its name “Mixtapes” and I’m getting a free poster (I have Twitter to thank for that one). Now I’ve never properly gone to an art exhibit, well that said when I was young I think my mom took me to ones once or twice, but I used to use the exhibit pieces as climbing obstacles, which promptly ended my artistic and cultural up bringing.

So I swing upon the big glass door of the Glucksman and trek up the stairs. I meet with the dude at the desk and he tells me the sceal with it. The ‘Mixtapes’ exhibit is contemporary art which focuses on the age old relationship between music and art presenting us with a new, colourful and thought provoking angles to said relationship. Now this contemporary art is not the kind where some punter puts a chewing gum wrapper on a stand with a net over it and says it represents oppression of free speech in botts-god-knows-where! Hard to believe I’ve heard of cases like this. If art isn’t your thing, which admittedly it isn’t my thing either (bar the styling of Salvador Dali), you will still find this exhibit awesome still!

To go through the exhibit piece-by-piece and attempt to forge stereotypical stuck-up-snooty-art-critic comments doesn’t do this exhibit justice. We have to admit that words can never fully convey art and this exhibit does a pretty damn good job of proving this point. I will however say my favourite 2 pieces are the “We Built This City (Don’t You Remember?)(2010) an installation by Dennis McNulty which consists of 8 ‘big f**k off’ mirrors, structured to resemble a bass bin, one of these ‘big f**k off’ mirrors has a projection of video of 2 Dublin bands playing. I think the surrealism of this piece is what caught my attention. Second is the “Dancehall Danceoff” by Sarah Doyle, which is actually really cool and it involves YouTube, basically what this artist did was get videos of girls dancing on YouTube and watercolour painted them and created an animation of them dancing. I like it more for the concept of involving the Internet.

So really if art is your thing, if art isn’t your thing, if you are passing the Glucksman or you are, in my case anyway, avoiding Latin, check out the ‘Mixtapes’ exhibit, its free entry, but a fiver donation never went astray, plus you’ll also find out about upcoming events like gigs and exhibits.

Man, so recently I’ve gotten addicted it to Smallville, but most of the sites that you watch it on use MegaVideo, now MegaVideo has a good service, but it’s 72 minute hourly limit sucks. Theres a few ways to bypass, but I found this way the easiest!

Simply goto http://bypassmegavideo.info/ and enter the URL of the video on megavideo you wanna watch, like http://www.megavideo.com/?v=4TF267S5 or something and click that button to the right of the field and off you go!

Just a heads up, when you get on the next page with the video player, and if theres green circle with a play button within, it’ll tell you to click said play button, doing this opens a ad in a new window or redirects the page to an ad, just hit the back button and the video will start playing and btw pause and leave the video load up for around a minute or so, that way it’ll play without it stopping on occasion to load

Fr Teh Geeks: On the technical side of things, it appears the php file finds the core flash video file and then outputs in the sites own flash video player, the video player aspect itself of megavideo’s videos controls time limitation and whatnot!

Just emailed a energy drinks company for sponsorship, heres what I said…

Sup my energy-drinkin’ contact-readin’ friend,

My name is James Whelton, of the Cork Pirates, a speedball and woodsball team exploding onto the Irish paintball scene with more explosions than Michael Bay can fit into a transformers film. We’re here to kick and paint some ass, but we can’t do it alone! We need your help, see currently we are supported by a paintball retailer for cheaper gear and a site to train on, but we need you to help us with small things like entrance fee’s to competitions/events  and staying awesomely refreshed! Normally per event theres an entrance fee of around 250euro, we are looking for you help us a bit with and smoothly slide us a slab of ——- or so, we’ll fly your flag high, be photographed with your drink and give out ———– stuff at events and show why ———– gives you the extra 9000%+!
Looking forward to hearing from ye,
James Whelton

Man I hope they sponsor us….

So I headed to KartWorld today with Darren and a few of the lads to review and play on their paintball site. Got a few nice shots including nailing some kid in the head shooting through grass and lighting up guys like a christmas tree who went near our flag and a nice crotch shot on one of the guys! Heres the review I wrote on PaintBaller.ie:

KartWorld has gotten it right. Today I visited the site and played with the punters to get a good Idea of the site, I was blown away. Kartworld presents unique game types that makes it a refreshing break away from the linear environments of paintball. With entrance fee including all gear, 300 paintballs and 8euro for an extra 100, you can’t go wrong, Ages 12+ can play here. 3 sites, each with well suited game types, with points given for winning and time, and breaks inbetween to wipe the paint from yourself (depending on the kind of player you are) and a chance to a can of coke and a snickers, the 3-4 hour sessions are extremely fun.

So lets start off with the rental gear you get. Equipped with a Inferno marker, that unlike a lot of site markers, this one is actually accurate and fires far, crono’d to around 280, each tank is replaced after every game so no crying that you ran outta air. Camo overalls, protective gloves, 4 pod pack, hair net and pads (if yer scared). The masks are handled with more love than I was as a kid, with anti-fog lenses, washed after every session and placed in a dehumidified room, they’re clearer than the gulf of Mexico’s water, before BP Oil got to it of course…

After you’re given all the gear, you walk to the main area kitted out with picnic tables and a shop, where you recieve your paintballs and hoppers. Now whats good about KartWorld is instead of being given a awkward arm band, your hopper is coloured red or blue depending on which team you’re on. You return to this area inbetween games, instead of being stuck inside a safety area, where you can buy more paint, drinks or food or talk about how I shot Sam in the crotch (sorry Sam).

Now for the three game sites: The Bridge, Ground Assault and Chemical Alley.

The bridge is a large area with stacked tires and barrels for cover. Theres a big shaky bridge in the centre with two flags, when red is pulled up, blue goes down and vice-versa. The idea of this game is at the end of the time that whoses ever flag is higher wins points. The Bridge is a savage idea, essentially yer out in the open like a target running across it, suffice to say the adrenaline is pumping like crazy. The area below the bridge is perfect for picking off people who go near it! With a ‘go back and touch base’ unlimited life idea is brilliant, means you can go all out for it or rambo it up, I counted 16 bruises on my upper body after going for the flag a few times!

After a quick break we moved to Ground Assault aka the Beach. Its basically a recreation of the Normday Landing beaches with mad bunkers, mounds and even sandbags. Another flag based game, one team starts one end, sprinting up, diving, sliding and rolling for cover, the other team is up at the other end, confined to a base and two bunkers at either side spraying a wall of paint at thoses who have enough balls to try grab one of the three flags. Teams starting out at the end who have to run have unlimited lives and those at the base have a single life. In the case both teams get all three flags in each turn, the team who did it the fastest wins. Irishoutlaw27 and Milsim fans eat your hearts out.

Finally we move to Chemical Alley. Its a varied terrain are with grass, stone, a stream with mini bridges and mountains, scattered around are stacked containers with crates inbetween (perfect for pot shots through)! Idea is to grab the other teams flag and get it back to base, however the marshals mix it up by placing 8 yellow pod yokes randomly around, if you find one, grab it and run back to base like hell coz its worth points! I found 2 by pure fluke! I found it class because at the start I sprinted like hell and secured the area to the left, with my team securing 2/3s of the area! For the first 8 minutes, when you were hit, you moved back, when the fog horn sounded, it meant sudden death. In our game when it sounded, basically all firing stopped and everyone legged it for cover!

At the end, they bought back the pods we didnt use instead of making us waste them which was pretty sound! A nice little final touch was awarding a medal to the most badly bruised! With game types being mixed around for a new experience each time with good and fair marshals, I suggest anyone in the muster area visit kartworld paintball at least once, its a fantastic and colourful (depending on how bad a player you are) experience!

From talking with the guys there, it seems they’re really into having events, wars and skirmishes there and are open to the idea of SpeedBall too! So keep an eye on KartWorlds site for future stuff to come!

Right, so in my previous post I embedded the vid of my first backflip via twitvid.com, however what would I do if I wanted to download that? Heres a guide on how to download vids from twitvid!

1.

Goto the page of the video you wanna download, see the URL bit up top, well in this case its ” http://www.twitvid.com/A7C51 “, well just ” player/” after the “twitvid.com”, so it’d be “http://www.twitvid.com/player/A7C51″, hit enter an go it.

2.

righto, so you’ll be brought to this page, its basically a big screen flash player of the vid, the url will now be something ridonkcolously, pick out the http://www.twitvid.com/playVideo_A7C51/token_87c55b1e07b6647e6e7bf172b6585ef0

copy and paste it into the url bar and go to it!

3.

Right, so this is the movie file playing in your browser, its a .mp4 (MPEG4) file, so you can right click the page and save as, or goto the ‘edit’ tab and save page as, or what ever!

Now you can download and do whatever the hell you want!

Whoa Whoa Whoa, if you found this useful, give something back, follow me on Twitter for more awesomeness

So somehow me and Enda Crowley (@endac - endacrowley.ie) ended up giving talks at the 2009 Barcamp in Cork (barcampcork.com) on Saturday. It was a brilliant event with talks from DIY home servers to Twitter bots to MultiTouch technology!

While Enda talked about harnessing the awesome power of Automator, the mac automated workflow application, entitling his presentation “Automator Awesome”, he demonstrated how to setup a system in which certain torrent files (eg a new episode of 30 Rock or “V”) could be automatically downloaded when available, automatically loaded into the torrent program Transmission, then when finished converted and added to iTunes ready to be added to a iPhone!

My talk was “Using Hacking/Computing to practical jokes”, featuring how to “SMS Bomb”, Fake the “Blue Screen of Death”, fake the 3 red rings of death on an Xbox 360 and demonstrated the script I wrote to loop opening and closing a cd tray! All of which I gave a “how to” and a case study of when I implemented them in the past! I also upon request told the story of how I ended myself and my friend in A&E after making Hydrogen (which then someone asked when my mother was coming in to talk about how to deal which Hydrogen burns!)

Both talks were broadcast live over the internet!

One of the funnier things I found was that 90%* of attendees were twittering constantly, so it was easy to keep track of where everyone was (like when I had to find Martha Rotter and tell Mike Butler he forgot his cards)!

After all talks had finished, we were met with free wine before we when our separate ways… until next year!

(*Perhaps an exaggeration, but a hell of a lot were!)

Since I’ve mounted a whiteboard to my office wall, I’ve needed to hold the markers and eraser in something, not have them all over the gaf, so I spotted a couple of old foppy disks and decided to throw this together…

What you’re gonna need is 5 Floppy Disks and something to hold them together (I used super glue, but duck/sticky tape or ‘BluTac’ or any ‘Tac’ of any colour would also work!) and about 10-25 minutes depending if you get your hand stuck to the work surface…

So its pretty simple right, use 4 Floppys as sides and 1 as the base, just stick them together and you’re ready to rock! When sticking them together, make sure that they’re properly perpendicular using a Floppy Disk or a triangular ruler to make sure the angle is 90 degrees.

Anyway I gotta fix a webpage coz Internet Explorer does’nt “Like” a clients webpage, what a joke…. use Firefox, Chrome or Safari please.