Questing for a Pen Tablet...

Well... my old (not so old ... but old enough to be dead) Wacom Volito2 is dead... so... i searched for a new pen tablet.... my experience with Volito2 told me that a bigger area than A6 is desirable for the kind of stuff i do.... so an A5 area or an A4 would be better... what choices do i have? After google a bit i come to join this conclusions/facts:

• Wacom pen tablets are .... overpriced... no doubt there...
• Wacom pen tablets are the only ones that use battery-less pens
• Wacom pen tablets replacements/extras are .... well.... overpriced... (as expected)
• European Wacom pen tablets are ... more overpriced than the rest of the world
• Other brands seem to have identical models - Aiptek, Genius, Trust
• New Wacom Intuos4 is very very nice .... and expensive (among the Wacom offer is the less overpriced one)

So... to put things shorter (please note that Intuos4 pens have tilt and rotation sensors):

Genius G-Pen M609	A5	1024 pressure levels	4000lpi	70€
Genius G-Pen M712	A4	1024 pressure levels	4000lpi	90€
Wacom Bamboo One M	A5	512 pressure levels	around 2250lpi	180€
Wacom Intuos4 S	A6	2048 pressure levels	5080lpi	220€
Wacom Intuos4 M	A5	2048 pressure levels	5080lpi	370€

I really liked the Genius A4 area and price.... according to reviews some people complains of pen size and weight... but since my hands are big and i'm used to heavy ink pens (bigger inertia, steadier strokes, my calligraphy is horrible) i'm quite tempted to try it... a Wacom pen with the same area costs almost 5 times more... if that isn't overpriced... i don't know what to call it... also in european countries intuos4 doesn't come with a mouse... while in other countries it has it included (as well as some extra software from adobe, and conversion ratio from dollar to euro is like 1:1 - considering that mouse costs 70€ i would say dollar worths more than euro for the given prices/hardware...).

Well after easter i might buy one Genius pen tablet... If i do so, i'll review it... hoping that someone with the same trouble will save some zeny

EDIT: On a side note... after hacking the drivers of genius, i can confirm that genius tablet is in reality an Aiptek ... i did check the one from Trust (that i'm willing to buy since is the one available in stores around here) and the aiptbl.ini file is a little give away... xD oh.. acording to store that sells Trust one, it is supposed to have 60º tilt sensor! I can't wait to get my hands in one...

EDIT 2: 60º tilt seems to be a fake feature... but in the other hand i found the A4 tablet at 68€!

Blender...

Ah... o blender ... aquele programa de modelação 3d que 'ninguem' consegue usar devido a uma interface intragavel... bem... eu nao o consigo usar mas isso nao evitou que perdesse uma hora a tentar fazer algo ... lol... bem o resultado fica aqui exposto para todos os que quiserem ver... eu puz texturas ... mas nao faço a mais palida ideia de como as renderizar correctamente...

"fear the mad kitty" XD

Wacom tablets...

Hmmm ... tomorrow (25th) wacom will reveal something (my guess would go to intuos4) but i'm not here to rant about it... this actually happen a 'long' time ago...

Wacom tablets are good, yes, very good indeed, i had (well... have) one that stop working for quite some time now...

After my pen tablet (a volito2) stop working i solve to open it up to check if a wire from usb cable was broken or something... what i found left me a bit.... out of mood... i was expecting to find some state-of-art circuit board, what i found was 6 small chips (big enough to be hand soldered) and a some cooper tracks... a simple design... the worst part is that for the looks of it, 70€ isn't exactly a fair price.... at least in my opinion... i didn't open the pen... but ... 70€ is way too much for something of that complexity... Wacom is ripping off customers... but ... there are not much alternatives anyway... at least not with the system that wacom has patented... and that is what i guess customers are paying...

If each pen tablet (at least the low-end ones) costs like 5€ to make (i'm estimating - could be wrong of course) and they want 70€ (the new bamboos cost even more and are worse or the same) they are making rivers of money... *sigh* i serious doubt i will buy a wacom tablet soon, mainly because a 400€-500€ cost 150€ on other brands (i'm talking about a A4 area, 4000dpi, 100rps, 1024 levels of pressure), well, yes they don't have extra pens or such, but wacom extra pens also cost awfully a lot...

In the end it is customers choice, wacom's top quality vs other brand's awesome prices... in low-end i actually think wacom is nice, because of the crappy quality on other brands tablets for that segment... but when the features increase quality differences get reduced, making the choice harder.... oh well... i guess my G5 will have to do the job... (G5 is a logitech mouse - i have the 1st revision one, it's OLD ... but works better than any other mouse, specially for it's age)

Oh well... but this is just me ranting ... yes... i was bored when write this (i corrected some - ugly - algorithms that by some reason continue to work wrong)

VHDL considerations...

While programming in VHDL can't be considered a very easy deal, there are certain things on it that are very easy to do... i lost 2 days with one of those things...

Making a crash course into VHDL sintax (and assuming that you know how a computer works in hardware terms), you control bits in vhdl... yes... bits... the simplest think in computers world... of course that it isn't very easy to do complex things of a thing so simple, but anyone understands that shifting bits is just picking a bunch of them and putting them a little bit aside.

In VHDL you can create arrays - vectors - of bits, and you can access each bit or a pack of them by indexing them, sounds scary, but it's very easy actually, one with no knowledge in programming should have no problem doing a static shifter in vhdl.

To index bits, you need to 'create' them... well ... there is a lot of mambo-jambo in VHDL for doing declalations, and while i mastered most of VHDL sintax i still fail in the most basic stuff (well, i'm always learning from mistakes but it doesn't seem enough xD).

Well... lets say you have a array of bits, better saying a vector, in vhdl it is called std_logic_vector, and it's simple a vector of std_logic elements.. std_logic elements are the representation of a signal value in hardware (well, kinda) they can be 1, 0 or other ugly stuff you really don't wanna know...

Ok... we have our vector puppy in a signal, this should be human readable (or i'm loosing my human side):

signal puppy : std_logic_vector (31 downto 0);

So puppy has 32 bits ordered like 31 down to 0... how nice...

if you want a bit from puppy, you just do like this:

puppy(3)

And that is bit number 3... it's 4th bit if you count from right, since there is a bit 0... easy to get right?

Now harder! >:D you want... the 8 first bits... that will be hard, right?

puppy(7 downto 0)

Damn... was too easy... well... this is being great but grabbing bits without interact with them is a bit... worthless... well... you have a nice operator for concatenate bits! So now we can make our shifter... to concatenate bits you just use & operator like so:

'0'&"0000001"

So ... easy to get ('0' is a bit with zero value .... and "0000001" is a vector of bits) ... so 8 bits with the least significant bit (if you consider the right the least significant bit) at '1'

Now ... how to shift? You should get it now without any help, let's shift our puppy 8 bits to right!

"00000000"&puppy(31 downto 8)

Easy... right? I mean... you couldn't fail that... no way.... right? I did fail at doing that... and lost 2 days of work >:(

I wanted to shift one bit to right, i did like this (taking puppy as an example):

'0' & accu(30 downto 0)

That simply replaces the last bit with '0' ... >___>''

PS: Sorry for the length of this post... 

Manga reading...

I found another good manga for reading, it's quite crazy, has lots of action, comic stuff, fantasy and ... well ... boobs ... by some reason author of it put most of the wizards as females with 'some' attributes... The name of it: Kurohime Good reading...

Rubik's Cube

I like puzzles... and i happen to own several Rubik's cubes [at right: 2x2x2, 3x3x3 and the demoniac 4x4x4 (5x5x5 is hard to find...)]

Today i took the day to think a bit of solving approaches to the 3x3x3, the method i first learn was the layer by layer method, the first 2 layers and the top cross are pretty intuitive for me, i found the algorithms to solve them by myself, the top corners are easy but since i have a bad memory i can't memorize all the algorithms (like +50) that allow the a nice optimization.  So i researched for a new method, i found Lars Petrus method to be quite funny to apply, it requires some understanding of the cube, at least to solve the 2x3x3 (first 2 layers) but if applied the top cross will automatically be done and it isn't required to go into that 4 corners twist algorithms application.

I can't tell if the method is faster or not since i can do the cube under 90s (if i don't get too unlucky) with my old approach, this one requires a bit more of look ahead, but is funny how the top cross is automatically created (this is due to a parity trick in algorithm).

---

Now a question for the readers, you don't need to be a cube expert: Do you think it is easier to solve a 4x4x4 cube with different colors on the sides or with different images?

My answer is with different colors, at least with my method. I don't own a cube with images, but by trying to make patterns on the 4x4x4 i found out that it is really hard to make stuff on the place we want, so in a image all cubies have a specific place giving the same trouble.

That was big...

Just some random (funny) fact, this was the message that you would (will - hmm, better don't ask how) get when you've finish Lemmings for Atari Lynx:

Link (7442 bytes .TXT)

Yep... they took almost 7,4Kb of perfectly good space and used it to something that can be called one of the longest game over screens ever made (maybe not, but at that time there weren't many games with such big end), well, it was some way of developers reward player... ...a weired way...

Nexys2 with plexiglass

Pictures speak for themselves...

I know it will get scratched, but at least is not the board that will get those scratches ... :p

"No... I will not fix your computer..."

Hmmm ... ultimamente tenho sido, demasiado requisitado para compor PC's, redes, saber que componentes são uteis ou não, resolver problemas ligados à informática no geral...

Se têm algum problema desses, tenham o meu contacto e tenham a infeliz ideia de me contactar para resolver tal assunto vão aqui umas dicas:

Primeiro, procurem no google, se não sabem o que o google é ou não tenham internet... bem ...ou vão a uma internet pública e procuram ou desistam de usar um PC...

Segundo, procurem por uma solução no google, o uso de termos em ingles ao inves de portugues ajuda... procurar frases completas não é grande ideia...

Terceiro, procurem no google, a serio... não desistam se a primeira pesquisa não der resultados uteis, o google é um ferramenta util, façam uso correcto dela e obterão respostas

Caso após seguir as dicas acima indicadas não resolveram o problema, podem desistir de usar o PC, ou contactar-me, caso optem pela segunda opção devo avisar que estou a pensar em pedir remuneração pelos minutos gastos...

...Por isso ... voltem a procurar no google... caso não gostem do google, têm muitos outros motores de busca: Ask, Yahoo, AltaVista, Wikipedia, kuantokusta (não me venham perguntar outra vez se aquilo tá barato ou caro)....