alphaxion.com
Tech, Gaming and Bile!
vertical slice… the data question.
Oct 6th
It has been roughly 36 episodes of the show now, and a fresh problem that was brewing has come to a head.
Storage.
Initially, when using my old webcam, it wasn’t so much of a problem… but then April came along and I switched to 1080p source and my storage pressures began to mount with every new episode.
You see, depending on how much I fluff my lines and amount of dialogue I spew out, an episode can devour between 10 and 30GB when you add the sources for each item. Despite my network capacity sitting at about 5TB, much of that is devoted to my rather large library of DVD rips and game ISO’s/maps/mods (all of which I own a paid for copy) – you see, I’m too lazy to compress them, and I now rue my penchant for “special editions”
Thankfully, I was forced to replace the 750GB HDD in my main rig due to bad sectors earlier this year and still had the buggered HDD to replace on warranty. So I raise the RMA and ship it off. Luckily, the store I purchased it from (since it was an OEM HDD) no longer stocked that model and was able to More >
The days nemesis has been vanquished!
Aug 18th
This might seem a bit lame to those who actually know what they’re doing, but I have been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out how to grab and display more than one post in a category using the archive.php file.
I’m using the archive.php file instead of creating a specific category file because I want to keep the layout the same with the least amount of editing whenever I do need to make a change. Copy pasta maybe easy, but it soon gets tiresome and is needless extra hassle.
After some frantic “help!” posts on twitter (thank you @wpbeginner for responding!) and friendfeed plus a little searching of my own, all roads seemed to lead to this page in the wordpress codex.
Specifically, this solution:
<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat; // assign the variable as current category
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’; //concatenate the query
query_posts($query); //run the query
?>
Now, dumping this just before the while (have_posts()) : the_post(); line, ensuring you swap out ($query) with (’showposts=10&cat=’.$cat) will give you what you want – upto 10 posts of the category selected by the user.
Sadly, this will break the displaying of your tags, which simply won’t do! Off to the drawing board again!
My starter for ten was to try creating my More >
The goggles, they do nothing!
Aug 17th
Well, as the dust settles on moving from Leeds to Sheffield, my attention returns to working on Vertical Slice.
Not only did I finally crank out a new episode
But I’ve also been tweaking the new website over at dev.verticalslice.tv, not to mention filling it with all of the episodes produced so far. The plan is to migrate dev into being the new www and sliding the old tumblr based one into being a blog for the podcast.
Of course this means setting up a host for it, which I’ll get round to later on.
I’ve also split off the videos into its own account on youtube, this way I’ll be able to keep vertical slice content on its own and let me continue to upload utter trash without getting in the way.
Then there is the facebook presence.
So far, it had only been a group… A poorly visited group.
So, instead I have set up a fan page and hope to keep that updated and running instead of the languishing group. Of course, I could always do with extra fans – especially when you can secure a decent URL once you hit 100 fans.
So lets see how things are… there’s the website, eventually a blog, facebook More >
many a movings going on
Jul 15th
Many apologies for no episode of Vertical Slice last week, this was due to my constantly being on a train to Sheffield and chasing round and meeting people in order to secure a new flat there.
That, and the “studio” (read: living room) also looks like this right now:
I do have a spotlight episode that I have been editing on and off as well as plans to record a quick episode outside, provided it stops bloody well raining long enough…. that, and if I can find somewhere that won’t have me drowned out by the traffic!
Date of moving into the new place is the 20th, which means I’m gonna be without the net for a week or so (will… not… cope!!!).
However, once I’m back up and running in the new place (which has better acoustics than my current locations, so it’ll mean better sound!) I should be getting right back to schedule once again.
There have, also, been a few developments behind the scene that I can’t talk about right now… but it will mean a boost to the show if I manage to pull it off.
And finally, I do have plans to move away from using tumblr as the grunt behind More >
Hmmm…
Jun 9th
Well, last night I suffered the C:\ on my main rig corrupting, guess that explains why the system had gone a little wobbly before I tried to reboot it.
This means I’m spending the day on my macbook while I have the HDD connected to my server for a little data recovery using Arax Disk Doctor, which has saved my arse a few times now (at a reasonable price too! No, I don’t work for them nor do I get any kickbacks!).
So, everything I was working on needed to migrate to there which means I discovered something… the text editor that comes with OSX sucks balls. Seriously, it totally screwed up the html/php I was working on causing the development site for Vertical Slice that I was playing with to break and not load. So, off I went hunting for a real editor.
I finally discovered a free one (since there are so many simple apps that people are trying to charge $70 and upwards for on OSX, definitely a better ecosystem on windows and linux). The editor I eventually decided upon is called Smultron. Well worth grabbing a copy if you want to edit html/php on your mac without More >
more vertical slice updatery
May 8th
Work on Vertical Slice continues. I have an interview with The CodeMonkeys that is in editing right now.
There is now a domain for the place, sitting on it’s own at www.verticalslice.tv. It’s still powered by tumblr until I can afford hosting of my own and figure out how to power it. In addition to the new domain, I’ve begun uploading non-coolshite branded episodes to a blip.tv account in order to take advantage of their itunes distribution, which now means the show is in the podcast directory – linkie.
This takes the strain off of my home net connection and makes it far simpler to publish the episodes, especially since the RSS feed generating app I was using has decided to randomly no longer output anything when I export to xml :S
In a little extra thing from today, Louis Gray posted something he does in response to people reposting and/or blogging about the items he posts to his sites. It’s a good idea and one that I have also decided to do as well. So, whenever someone blogs about or links to Vertical Slice I’ll pop a link to it in the bookmarks and tag it with “verticalslice”.
Of course, in setting this up More >
phorm can go phuck off!
Apr 29th
Just to let the visitors of any domain I own and operate know that I have submitted a request to BT that they hold no permission to intercept traffic to or from my sites and should remove my sites from their profiling system.
If you own any websites, I fully recommend you do the same by following this link – you’ll be joining many people including Amazon.com in standing up for our rights.
The message sent to them is included below.
Hi,
I wish to have the following domains and any subdomains within to be excluded from your illegal wiretapping service known as “webwise”.
alphaxion.com verticalslice.tv pissheadnerds.com
Phorm DO NOT have any permission to intercept or disseminate the information contained on these sites, it is a gross abuse of privacy and of data neither you nor phorm own.
Regards, Chris Johnson
Please join this stand as well as inform as many people as you can about the sleeze, collusion and abuse perpetrated by BT, Phorm and the UK Government when it comes to the logging of everything you do on the internet.
And for those who think “well, I’m not bothered about them seeing that I visit pets.com every month” you need to wake up, your privacy is one of More >
More evolution of the show
Apr 24th
Well, I’ve been playing around with Garageband – side note: now I know where some of the music in my fav podcasts come from! Was flicking thru the sample loops and going “OMG, that’s blahblahblah show!” every so often >.<
Anyway, main reason for this is to solve the problem of there being very little music in my show. Though, I do have a friend of my GF making some 8bit music for me, I thought I’d fill the gap until then and give Garageband a try.
First, a little disclosure: I’m shit with music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m totally buggered when it comes to making it – not a damn clue. Which means whatever I make out of this app will likely be pure dross.
After about a couple of hours I finally end up with a 3min track that I will be using in the “Gadget Show Live” footage episode that I’ll be uploading a little bit later today.
If you want a little sneak peek or if you even want to use it in your own shows, just grab a copy here as you’re free to use this in whatever way you want, just as long as you More >
some thoughts on Rupert Murdoch’s actions
Nov 18th
Posted by alphaxion in commentary
No comments
One of the biggest stories unfolding right now, concerning the net, is the various websites that comprise the online media empire of possibly the most odious man on Earth – Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Lies News Corps – being walled off amid cries of “if we don’t start charging for online content, news media will die”.
Now, as much as I despise the guy, he does have a point that advertising alone just won’t cut it. It’s an uncomfortable point I’ve tried to address more than a few times and, if we want all this cool stuff to hang around for any length of time, there needs to be a more direct route for making money off of editorial content/media on the net than relying on the mcguffin we know as advertising.
With video and audio media, I certainly see the cable subscription and pay-per-view systems being introduced for the likes of Hulu, with user generated content sites remaining ad driven or cheaper ways of proving show concepts/pilots and of harvesting talent, with the media firms paying some form of agent’s fee to the open video sites for their use. It’ll end up as “same as it ever was” for this industry, hell More >