I never thought I would end up posting wallpapers from someone else when I started the blog. I follow some writers who used to do that and even posted them once a week (such as Heinrich Faust).

There will be a difference, I will only post wallpapers I have actually used and keep for a reasonably long period of time! Let’s say at least a month (an etternety for wallpapers, once you get into the habit of changing them they tend to last less and less).

This time I’ll start with a Kill la Kill, as a follow up from the con

You can find the original in a higher resolution at pixiv.net, and thanks to しょういん who’s the original artist!

What do you think? worth of your background? (it is still occupying mine)

See you soon

I’m still figuring out how to include a link in an image to let you click strait to the original.

This weekend was the 4º Salón del Manga de Alicante, an manga/anime/games-centric con at my hometown. I missed the first three editions, living abroad, and therefore was impatient to go. As you may have guessed from the title, it was incredibly fun.

The day was great, a real catharsis. More so than any film, tv-show or maybe even book I’ve enjoyed recently. I’ve got my good-old smile back, and it’ll be there for long! – could be my inner-child taking the wheel this month.

Ok, but what was so enjoyable of it?

Are nice people all over the place to meet, many great costumes and weirder fandoms than yours not enough? Cause, you know:

There’s always a bigger fish

Let’s talk about what happened there (at least what I saw of it, saturday afternoon).

Here are some picks from the cosplay contest!

Competition was harsh, and costumes very elaborate. But please, give me a hand spotting the fandoms!

What if your thing is more video-games? There was also a contest for you. And even old-school titles that resonate deep in the memories of my generation.

There was even a Mario Kart 64 contest going on! Arcade racing for everyone.

Many people my age and many more younger teens enjoyed the show, but also entire families sharing their cosplay theme!

I even caught a Pokemon! No glitch required – I hope the younger ones will get that reference, if you don’t please ask around, it’ll be fun!

There even was a concert within the con.

And a good one! Check it out!

And a small but fully-packed console expo! From a Magnavox Odyssey a limited edition PSX directly from japan!

Before talking about cosplays, let’s talk about tea!

I had my first bubble tea. Mango! Loved the taste, although bubbles were a little to strong for me. It deffinitly won’t the last! Sorry there is no picture, I was too concentrated, enjoying the drink while listening WhiteNoise play.

I’ve already said costumes were great, but I can’t say it loud enough! and of every style you can think of.

I’m saving the best for the end!

That cosplayer nailed it, the costume is incredible and the pose was so faithful I was shocked. I hopped to find a Satsuki cosplay, but I had to wait nearly to the end of the day to come across her! – ok, I might be a little biased towards that character, I won’t admit it though.

I even found a few ToG fans! (yes, SIU has me addicted).

To be fair, the conference was dominated by Attack on Titan. It was by far the biggest fan-group.

There were a few martial arts demo too, too bad I had no time for it (As traditional Jiu Jitsu fan, I would have loved the Japanese archery demo).

Wrapping up, don’t be ashamed of your fandoms’ there’s a reason you like them! (and you’re not the only one).

All photos are release under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. If you want a higher resolution version please contact me via email (PGP keys on their way). Props to all those awesome cosplayers, they are the real artists! And if you recognise yourself in the photos, tell me what you think! I’d love to hang out some time! I also want to thank blackjan86, a good friend of mine for recording and uploading a few videos of the concert!

Ok, some time has passed, I watched the WWDC stream live, and have a mixed opinion about it. Overall I without doubt say I expected more from Apple, something more groundbreaking or risky.

I shall start with the bad, otherwise it would be too much to end with.

Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks brings:

• tabs in Finder, pretty easy to foresee, but at least they could have done it right (many apps do it on 10.6 to 10.8 such as XtraFinder which include several more features including the very useful split pane)
• a multiple display upgrade, well that isn’t a new feature, but rather a bug in Mountain Lion when using full screen apps that needed to be removed…
• tagging is new but not a new concept and already available with third party apps such as for tabs

and feels like bug tracking more than a real upgrade (and this I’m confident is because they are preparing something bigger for next release).

New Macbook air brings many hardware improvements but no innovation, no tactile screen as there is no new hybrid OS. Apple will be one more year behind Windows 8 and it is going to hurt them if they don’t come up with something really big next because many people will go to Microsoft to get a sense of novelty (many “dockable” Intel-Atom based Windows tablets (or with detachable keyboards) are already getting people’s attention, and those can legitimately replace netbooks as they run the full OS (not the ARM version)). One great thing of the new Apple Laptops are the 802.11 ac wireless chipsets! That is modern stuff, but that actually didn’t surprise me. It was rather the lack of it in both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 where both are stuck with n. [between you and me, it is ad I can’t wait to see!]

The good things!

A new Mac Pro (well it was a must, it had been too long since the last update, but at least they are totally fresh models). The shape is weird but according to them it is for cooling purposes (by now, we all know how obsessed they are with fan noise). I didn’t get well the hard disk specs but it seemed like they were going fully flash. It is nice for a production machine but to store the end products spinning hard drives are a must. That will probably be configurable before buying though. The best of them is the 4k support! They really have in mind video and photo editing (all their displays already come nicely calibrated, all of them, from the iPhone to their biggest monitor).

The new Siri voice is just astonishing. Siri has new features, but nothing extraordinary. It just does what everyone expected it to do: it is able to change settings. But those new voices, they are just gorgeous.

The car stuff seems nice. I didn’t get how it is going to work (software-wise) but it will bring better voice control (I imagine it will use mikes already placed inside the car by manufacturers for hands-free systems). I just want to see how deep the integration is and how well they can use the cars’ built in displays.

and now it’s time for the weird things Apple showed us:

iOS 7, I couldn’t call it good or bad. It is a visual redesign and a catch up on specs (as compared to Android 4.2). The Control center, Safari features, multitasking (except for the 4 finger gestures the iPad already has) and the animated backgrounds are nothing new for those on the other side of the fence. As I already mentioned, it seems like a distilled upgrade waiting for something big coming up (the visual change was a necessity, 6 versions alike isn’t good and will help people move to the next one). In mobile Ubuntu touch will soon be a reference to where we are going (for light users at least, phones won’t catch up full fledged desktop anytime soon).

iWork for iCloud, that was a big ‘WTF’ for me. It just remembered me of the web-based LibreOffice, with GoogleDocs as the one to overthrow (it shouldn’t be difficult if Apple is able to bring all iWork features to usable web interface). As for Microsoft… well any of their devices can run a copy of Office, they don’t feel the urge of doing anything web-based that could have a poor user-experience. At least they surprised me with this!

It felt strange that Apple displayed the number of webkit browsers in use, or even silly… as their’s isn’t the most used one. They are also not the only ones to develop it, nor they built it all from scratch (they forked the KDE browser).

I loved the new Apple tv feature, using it as a display instead of mirroring is something I was looking into for some time. It just makes sense to use any set-top box that is not used at that moment as a replacement for wireless HDMI through any WiFI network (but only if the router is in good shape…). I hope Wayland will be able to bring some similar feature to the OpenSource world because the X mess may not be a suited platform to built it.

Those were my thoughts, feel free to comment and start a conversation! I’ll be glad too keep talking about the the upcoming tech.

Image by ©2013 Apple Inc.

We are about to confirm a trend in technology.

Not only a trend, a new way of interacting with computer.

Tomorrow start E3 and today is Apple’s WWDC.

And I expect to see 2 important things:

• more possibilities in tactile and voice interaction with computers (consoles in E3)
• the way Apple tries face the fact that hybrid OS are the future

The first one I believe is more to see in long term, with Google Glass which change the concept of computers. That computer is no longer for content creation (like any modern desktop or laptop) nor for content consumption (tablets and smartphones). It is designed to receive and display notifications. That is it’s first goal, but not the only one. Those computerised googles are a new vector for augmented reality.

The second is yet to be seen. Microsoft and Canonical have bet on hybrid software. A software that runs on different architectures and of very different machines (from smartphones to desktops, with tablets and ultra-books as their target) with the same user experience and even share apps with the older desktop only (i386, amd64, ppc or other) OS. Apple has yet to show something similar, and it will, but maybe not tomorrow. Many new tablets have arrived from different manufacturers with Windows 8, even some with Intel Atom processors and removable keyboards (giving them the potential to be used as tablets and netbooks). Apple still has two distinct pieces of software (IOS and Mac OS X) that run on totally different hardware (ARM and amd64). The problem it faces is that it is a hardware manufacturers and no other hardware is allowed to be released with their software (with the exception of a laptop for designers that had a Wacom tactile screen and ran Snow Leopard).

Will we see a change in computer architecture for Apple hardware tomorrow (for computers and tablets alike)? or will they move their IPad to Intel hardware? They could also choose to wait 6 more months to release a very polished user experience.

We will see at 10:00 AM Pacific!

PS: The conference is over, now it is time let you know what I think about it

Image by ©2013 Apple Inc.

I’ve just lost¹ a full post. yeap, just finished writing it in gvim, hadn’t saved it nor copied it to wordpress online editor and saw miself forced to reboot my computer because.. I ran out of RAM. I couldn’t switch programs, nor input anything. It was frozen. And it had plenty of space to use for swap (Mac OS X uses a swap file by default) but somehow it couldn’t handle it.

So what was it about?

Some weirdness I was confronted after ripping the new Daft Punk CD (I couldn’t resist, I bought it the same 21st of May it was launched).

The problem came from some alac rips (it did not happened with flac).

The files showed some strange creation dates when opened with MPlayer. Some ordered dates starting in the 20′s and ending in the 80′s.

At first I though it was some easter egg but after ripping the files a second time I realised those new files showed some similar dates, but not the same. That’s why I blamed XLD (the program I used to transcode from aiff to alac) but that was another mistake. XLD did a great job in finding metadata in a few seconds and ripping the whole album in under 5 min. I ended up blaming MPlayer, because no other player showed that metadata. THey all showed only ’2013′ as the date (which was also showed in a different line by MPlayer, as shown in the screenshot). Even the OS showed a real creation date which is, as expected, the day the files were created by XLD.

What do you think makes MPlayer show those dates consistently every time I play the songs?