Recently, I have been getting back into art and sculpture stuff, as it was part of my younger days which I never explored. I have been having a lot of fun, and looking forward to lots more fun, expirementing with different mediums and products.

The most recent product I have had the chance to use is Smooth-On Free Form Epoxy Putty which is a 2 part, 1:1 by volume epoxy putty. I wanted to take a minute to review the product, since it is quite new and has very little reviews.

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical and curious about it, expecting it to be like play-dough that hardens. I was unsure how well this would work with a mold that has a lot of detail in it. Turns out, the stuff is extremely light and not dense at all. More like Moon dough, if you have ever seen that.

As far as measuring, you could probably get more precise than I did, but it has been curing fine for me, so I am guessing close is good enough. You dig out an equal sized ball of each part, then knead them together until they reach a consistent grey color (1 part is white, the other is dark gray) then press them into your mold and wait the recommended curing times. The curing times and pot life is mass specific, so thicker masses will cure faster and have less working time. If you are making a large item, it is probably best to roll it out while working, to give yourself more working time.

Because of its extremely low density, it is extremely good at picking up details in your mold. In fact, I picked up details that I didnt even realize were in my mold from when I was tooling the original clay to make the mold.

On the topic of strength, this is where I was most surprised. Based on the weight of this stuff, I almost expected it to cure into something akin to styrofoam, but a sample piece I made about 3/8in thick, 1in wide, 6in long was so strong I have been unable to break it by hand. I imagine that using a tool on it would probably break it.

The stuff can be sanded, drilled, tapped, and what not after it cures, so it is nice for making things that need attachments added later.

The odor is not extreme, albeit not incredibly pleasant either. It smells like those biodegradable packing peanuts. Yuck.

Anyways, I have been having a lot of fun working with the stuff, and I encourage anyone to give it a try as an alternative to liquid casting materials. It seems to work best for hollow objects or thin shell objects (in my case, wearable costume armor)

In the wake of the recent Google announcement covered here, I pondered what will happen to the search market and web.

After a while, I realized their new privacy would have dramatic GOOD improvements to the web, but then they had to go spoil it with their caveat.

So here is the deal. They have implemented security in their searching. The referrer data (which website you are arriving from) is no longer transmitted to unsecure sites, which most are not.

On my blog, this makes it so I cannot see what search terms users used to find my site, or whether they were using Google to reach it. This is a small price to pay for the good it will do.

First, my search history is mine. I don’t always want websites to know what I was searching for to find them.

Second, it will eliminate those REALLY REALLY ANNOYING pages which are a collection of keywords that are populated based on your google search terms. If you dont know what I mean, its those things in the google results that APPEAR to have exactly the information you were looking for, but when you click on them, they are just a mashup of more recycled crap from the web. They are one of my biggest pet peeves.

Because the information is still transmitted to other secure servers, it will increase the amount of secure servers on the web. This is good for consumers, because secure sites are a) secure, b) encrypted, and most importantly c) trackable. Because they have to build a security certificate with a trusted authority, it is easy to see who and what they actually are. Because certificates cost money, and are tied to a single host it is economically unlikely that the massive leeches that buy up domains to put their bulk search recyclers online will continue to be able to make any money, since the cost of certificates for each domain would eat into their low profit margins.

This great new stuff comes with a price though. Google decided to f**k it all up by allowing advertisers to BUY into receiving the referrer data. This sucks. It would have been so great to force the advertisers to use secure sites, because that way I can tell who they are and thusly write tools to block them accordingly, but since google allows them to pay to anonymously receive the data, they just circumvented the best part of the change.

I hope they change their minds. The best thing we can do is to discuss it and let them know your displeasure about it. Since they index everything on the web, maybe they will get the message by sheer volume.

Let me know if something needs more information or is inaccurate, so I can update this post accordingly.

Winter is here! And that means one thing, time to upgrade the Jeep.

I have a great winter full of upgrades planned, but the highlights are:

• 40″ IROKs
• Inner Air Locks
• Corporate 14 Bolt Rear Axle, Shaved with Disc Brake conversion
• Dana 60 Kingpin Front Axle
• 5.38 Gears
• NP231-Dana 300 Doubler
• Borla Headers
• 4 Link Rear Suspension
• 3 Link Front Suspension
• Fox 2.0 16″ Air Shocks
• New Custom Dash
• i6 Propane Conversion
• Roll Cage

Its a busy, busy list, but so far things are starting to come together nicely. I have already acquired my transfer cases, header, 14 Bolt, Diff covers and misc axle parts, 40″ IROKs and Dash materials. Now on to the fabrication parts.

Well, I should have seen this one coming… I went to GameStop last night and got my Fallout: New Vegas, and as I suspected, I stayed up all night playing so I was absolutely worthless today. It’s a little too soon to provide a review, but my first impression is that it is a bit more polished than Fallout 3, and they spent some time thinking about how to make the replay value much better. I’ve been finding plenty of hidden things, and a lot of the changes Bethesda Softworks have made to the gameplay are definitely positive improvements.

Today I went to GameStop to pre-order my copy of Assassins Creed: Brotherhood, and while I was there, picked up Assassins Creed II. Yes, I have already finished the base game of AC2, but I haven’t done the DLCs and have only 93% of the trophies, so I wanted to get those wrapped up before Brotherhood comes out. I hope I have enough time to do these since I will likely be playing Fallout: New Vegas starting next week.

Lately, I have been working on IPv6 Planning and deployments… I am currently working through my Hurricane Electric IPv6 certifications, and wanted to post this image which shows my current cert level. It doesn’t mean much, just a convenient spot to track my progress…

Well, about a month ago I bought Uncharted 2 at GameStop for something to play until Fallout: New Vegas comes out. After several couple hour sessions, I have finished the game on normal difficulty (netting the very easy, easy, and normal trophies at the same time). After my playthough, I wanted to share my thoughts on the game.

First off, storyline was pretty decent, and the use of cutscenes played in well to the story, and was captivating and interesting as an Indiana Jones movie.

Graphics were great, gameplay was smooth. Sexual innuendos and jokes were plentiful between the characters.. Overall I give it 2 thumbs up.

While the control was pretty decent on PS3, nothing can rival the awesomeness of the controls for Assassins Creed II. The guy sometimes hangs onto things you dont want him to and doesnt want to let go.

The game was great, but all in all, I was a little bit disappointed, because I thought it would be a little bit of a sandbox, and it was more of a graphically pretty maze. There is only 1 path through every area, and often, it requires simply re-running the same path until you have memorized it without dying.

I would recommend the game as a used gamestop purchase with an entertaining couple weeks of playtime (for a casual player, a hardcore player probably would clear it in about 5 days or less).

Well, after a few days of tinkering, I finally got the blog back to operational again. Earlier this year, someone hacked a bunch of mediatemple stuff and wreaked havoc on my websites. Had I remembered that they were all stored in SVN in the beginning, I would have quickly fixed them, but I tinkered with stuff for a while first, then had to rebuild my subversion repos after I got everything working properly again.

Needless to say, its now good and happy, and my subversion is up to date, so I should be able to repair it super fast should anything happen to it again.

Recently I installed my other nVidia 8800 GTX 768Mb video card so that I could attach my other 2 monitors. After doing so, I setup the monitors on my desk, in a 4×1 fashion. While this is functional, I find that I am moving my head a lot to go back and forth to all the monitors. I think I will try going to a 2×2 setup, using this adjustable quad screen stand which has gotten really great reviews on Amazon, and at $80, its worth a shot.

Back in 2007, I posted an article about must have tools for windows power users, and one of my favorite items on there was the Image Resizer powertoy. After I switched to Vista64 last year, I was very disappointed that the Image Resizer was not compatible with 64 bit versions of Vista, and now also with Windows 7. I had really been missing this tool, and apparently, so did other people.

A fella by the name of Brice Lambson took the time to create an exact clone of the tool for Vista64 and Windows7x64. Thanks to him, I now have the tool again and am happy as ever. Take a moment to go to his website and download the tool. Make sure you support his efforts by letting him know you enjoy it and use it..

One of the new features in Windows 7 is a nifty little bugger called Aero Snap. The intention of Aero Snap is to improve the management for open windows on the desktop. When a user drags a window to the top of the screen, Snap will maximize the window automatically (you can tell this is about to happen with a brief animation before you release the button). Also, when resizing a window left or right, the Aero Snap will resize the application to half the screen real estate, making it easy to setup windows side-by-side for comparison.

For a lot of users, this feature will be welcomed and hailed as the …Read On

Windows 7 RTM was released to the MSDN network on Thursday, August 6th 2009. Being the curious tester that I am, I downloaded it and had a go with it on Friday. So far, my initial thoughts are that it is a definite improvement over Vista 64, which I have been using for the past year or so.

My initial nightmare was backing up the crap that I wanted to carry over to the new installation, since I always opt to re-install rather than upgrade (ya know, to clean out the gremlins that crop up from when you forget to test new things in a VM). Using the Easy Migration wizard was quite painless, and got 99% of what I needed. They apparently have done a very good …Read On

Now, a lot of you may be curious why on earth I would write an article about the merits of anything containing the letters “AOL” in it. In my job, I write software primarly for use on a webserver running AOLServer 4.0x. I know this is already casting a large number of doubts in your mind, but let me finish.

AOLServer was not written by AOL, but is used by them (and I believe it was purchased by them way back when.) It has many pros and a few cons. I will try to discuss those, so that anyone in the market for an application server/web server can make an educated decision about it.

First off, most of these points were …Read On

Die in a fire. Seriously. I hate you with the burning passion of 1000 suns. I had to delete hundreds of fake users today. As such, registrations will now be greeted with a new captcha system. If this doesnt work, I will extend it to include trick questions which any human should be able to figure out.

<3 Jim

So back in November of 2007, I wrote a short blurb about jQuery where I thought it warranted a look. Well, I looked at it a little bit and quickly passed it off as a fad.

Fast forward to July 2009. I have now built several sites with jQuery, which gained a ton of momentum over the past couple years. It is now still as prominent (if not more) as it seemed back in Nov 2007, and I can only with that I had been using it all this time. I can truly say it is fabulous, and if you aren’t using it today, you should be. The learning curve for a javascripter is very easy, and once you figure out the syntactical differences (can we say ‘chaining is awesome’?) you will quickly realize it may truly be the product that will step in and make everything make sense.