Evangelion Calendar

This one’s kind of interesting. It’s an app that will generate an image that you can use as your iPhone’s wallpaper. It basically takes one of 12 images and you can overlay a calendar on it. It’s pretty limited because you can’t add more images. The images are not really that interesting. Have I mentioned I’ve never seen Evangelion? Anyway, if you’re a fan I guess it’s cool. The app makes the calendar based on the month and year, though it only goes up to December 2013 (which is one year longer than it needs to be, apparently). Pretty cool if you don’t already have a calendar makin’ app and you like the images (though rotating through them might ultimately become kinda stale).

Evangelion Puzzle

This is just the slidey puzzle game that I’m not very good at, times 9. But you have to unlock the current puzzle to get the next image. I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of algorithm for going through these puzzles if you know which square goes where. But I’m too lazy to figure it out because solving the puzzle is ultimately not very fun. You can choose between easy, medium and hard difficulty (probably determines how effed up the computer scrambles your puzzle) and 3×3, 4×4 and 5×5 grids. It’s pretty easy to get through them all on easy 3×3 mode!

So that’s about it! As an iPhone developer, I can say that the apps work pretty well. They don’t crash randomly, which is hard to accomplish in Objective-C! The premise of all these Evangelion-themed apps is kinda funny. They could literally make anything based on the franchise. I kind of expect to see an Evangelion Farts app next. Anyway, thanks to Appliya for sending me the apps. Go to their website for more info on the first 5 apps they’ve made so far.

Okay, so this is totally off-topic, but I want as many people as possible to read this. I just finished launching my new web app called Notecentric. It’s a note-taking application that’s online. So you can take class notes and access them wherever there’s internet access.

There’s more info at the official development blog, or you can skip that and just try out Notecentric.

Also, if you like Notecentric, please digg it.

ANN reports (or reported about a week ago) that Leaf, a Hentai Game maker, has been forced to release the source code for four of their games, including ToHeart2 XRATED:

This was because Leaf had used the XVid video codec inside their games. XVid is licensed under the GNU Public Library (GPL). When software using GPL licensed code is released to the public, the GPL requires that the source code be made available to the programs users. For a ¥600 shipping and handling fee, Leaf will ship a copy of the code to anyone who requests it.

Quite a loophole, eh? So for about $5 (probably in Japan only), you can get a whole Hentai Game engine! Personally, I’d prefer the source code to Disgaea 2 (XRATED?). Some of the games I’d create with the Leaf Engine include:

• Choose You Own Adventure: Space Ninja!
• Zork Remake
• River City Ransom: Sauna Simulator!
• Doraemon XRATED

On second thought, maybe it’s better if I don’t get the souce code…

Anyway, the odd thing was that the spam didn’t even make any sense! It wasn’t like, "check out my site!" or anything like that. Why don’t I just include the text (minus the links of course):

Great post! I’m looking forward for more. Rape Soldier is very good Pair, Compute Mistery is very good Opponents when Pair is Slot it will Make Grass, Player will Gnome unconditionally when Mistery Percieve Pair Lose

I mean, WTF? Rape Soldier? At first I thought that could have been some anime, but then it was apparent that akismet really picked up the comment spam. Maybe I can collect these, and when I have enough, I can write a really crazy book!

If you’re having trouble with these kind of comments, I really do urge you to install the akismet plugin. That is, if you’re on wordpress. 

I just logged into my Dreamhost Control Panel (the webhost that I use), and read an announcement that they’ve just quadrupled the disk space and octupled the bandwidth!

Seriously folks, this is a lot. Now I can serve a terabyte of stuff every month without going over my quota! On top of that, the allowed bandwidth increases by 8GB a week! For a quick comparison, I used about 1 GB of bandwidth my entire first month. 

With all this extra bandwidth, I need some ideas on how to use it. I was thinking of serving MP3s, but I don’t know how legal that would be (is it legal if I serve the TV audio rips of OP and EDs?). My DDR Videos also kinda took some bandwith, but they’re fairly small.

Give me some ideas on how I can put all this bandwidth to good use… Of course, I think serving entire episodes is totally out of the question…

Oh, and if you were thinking of getting a webhost, seriously consider Dreamhost. The service is cheap ($7.95 a month if you prepay for a year) and pretty reliable. Tell em BasuGasuBakuhatsu (notoupee) sent ya! You can use the promo code BASUGASU50 when you register, and get $50 off, which also helps me pay for my hosting bill too! Awesome!

So I finally decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.0 after reading about how awesome it is at itsumo anime blog. The process was pretty painless. Mostly I was worried that the entire blog would be burned to the ground. Most of the process is backing up in case the process fails, but the upgrade is so easy that it’s kind of hard to screw it up.

The user interface does seem pretty cool, but besides that, I haven’t really checked out any new features because I’m really sleepy. I also read that the database functions are somewhat optimized in 2.0. Being a computer science nerd, that small gain in efficiency makes it all worth the while.

I’m using the built-in wordpress wysiwyg editor right now. It’s ok, but I wish it had spell check and header buttons. At this point, I’m considering just using the old wysiwyg plugin I had been using before.

I just tried uploading that wordpress image using the new upload tool, but it kind of sucks. I wanted to insert it full size, but for some reason, the editor likes it to be thumbnailed. Oh well. I guess I’ll stick with the WordPress Gallery plugin.

Overall, the new features seem weaker than the plugins I was already using, but I’m sure there’ll be new plugins for 2.0 only that will kick some ass, so I guess I’ll just have to wait for those.

Oh, and if you see anything on my blog that’s out of wack (that wasn’t before today) please let me know. I think I checked all of the possible mishaps, but it could be possible that an edge case got by me.

Edit: I just remembered a cool feature that really makes the upgrade worthwhile after reading hand of gory. The preview pane in WordPress 2.0 now uses your own theme, so you can see exactly what your post will look like. I had a problem with 1.5 because it was showing me the styles for the admin pages rather than for my blog’s style.

This is an awesome addition and it totally makes the upgrade a no-brainer. Looking back at the above stuff I wrote, it looks like I was just kinda grumpy from lack of sleep and having a cold. So yes, totally upgrade if you’re on 1.5, but dont’ take my word for it…

(how many of you used to watch Reading Rainbow and got that joke?)

Gmail Mobile
Now you can access your Gmail account from your mobile phone or device. Just point your phone’s web browser to http://m.gmail.com.
Your Gmail account stays synched, whether you access it from the web or the mobile interface. It’s easy to use and it’s free (but yes, your wireless plan
could still charge you).

It also has these cool features:

• Automatically optimizes the interface for the phone you’re using
• Opens the attachments you receive in messages, including photos, Microsoft Word documents and .pdf files

• Lets you reply by call to people whose phone numbers are in your Gmail Contacts list

Learn more

After you have Firefox 1.5, install GreaseMonkey, an extension for Firefox.

Lastly, get this script to change the mailto: links into Gmail hotlinks. Now I can finally click on those email buttons and not be afraid of Outlook popping up!