Marko's blog

I really, really hate daylight savings time. I mean, what's the bloody point of making everyone wake up an hour early?

The earth has come over halfway to its position in its orbit around the sun when its northern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun the most. In other words: spring is here. This means more daylight to take photos in, kinder temperatures to take photos in and most importantly, beautiful scenes of nature coming to life, of beautiful flowers, of trees in full blossom, of green pastures, not to mention much less white and brown and gray and much more green. What are you waiting for? Go out and enjoy. Go take a peek in my gallery if you don't believe me about the benefits of spring.

I changed the title banner of the site a bit. Can you spot the difference? If not, click "read more" below. The watermarks are also in the process of being replaced with something in the same style.

Sometimes a photographer doesn't need to get far from home to make great photos. A couple of days ago a distance of about 2 meters was more than enough to capture some bees from very close. You can see them on the right until I post more photos. After that you'll have to visit the bee section of the photo gallery.

I finally got around to adding some photos (15 if I counted properly) to the gallery. Some took quite a long time to get in the gallery. But most are less than a week old. Enjoy.
There they are.

Duke Nukem Forever (DNF), for which the term "vaporware" was invented, is supposed to be released in May 2011. I'll believe it when I see it. DNF sets the record for longest game development time at 14 years.
I just realised that I'm the author of some vaporware myself, it has been almost 12 years since 2 of my games were announced :

Rejoice! I finally got the time to post some photos from the sunday's trip to Cerknica Lake (Cerkniško jezero). It was incredibly warm for the middle of the winter so the snow was only on the tops of the mountains. It was so beautiful it almost made it look kitschy. Enough said, you can go visit the gallery now.

You might have noticed the lack of "Happy 2011" post this year. Does that mean I forgot about it and even missed it? That's hardly possible, one would have to live in a cave to miss it. Better make that a deep coma. I find it silly how much importance is put on a silly little occasion of changing the last number in the current date. Unlike other hollidays when people actually have something to celebrate (or at least think they do) this one is completely meaningless. It's as silly as saying the world will end in 2012 because the Mayan calendar ends.

The site was down for a couple of days because the PSU of the SheevaPlug on which it's hosted fried. I'm starting to think Marvell really sucks. They got a great product here and they're screwing it with bad components and workmanship, and even worse custumer support.
Fortunately NewIT was able to send me a new PSU very fast. I must say NewIT rocks.

I managed to acquire the .com version of my domain. My precioussssssss! :P
 
I'll take this opportunity to thank some domain name backorder spammers.

This site will soon be hosted off a SheevaPlug instead of my old PC.

Did you know you can find the video of FDF coming to life on youtube?

2 days ago Epic released Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free (for non-commercial and educational use) edition of the Unreal Engine 3 (UE3). Here's the official announcement. There's also an official forum where I already found a solution with some installation issues.

This is definetely something I'm gonna at least experiment with and maybe even try to use it to create a simple game, which hopefully doesn't end up in my plethora of barely started and never finished games using various tools lying around my computer.

Making one of the most violent games (GTA: San Andreas) in which you can kill people in countless ways is apparently ok. But add a sex game to it, later change your mind and disable it, but leave the code in the game, so hackers can create a patch that enables it, and end up paying 20M $. Now if that isn't ridiculous, I don't know what is.
The source.
 

MultixII: Revenge of the Squares has just celebrated it's 10th anniversary. I can hardly believe it's been ten years since the last version of one of my better games was made. Sometimes I miss those good old days of Turbo Pascal. Remarkably, this game still works with the help of DOSBox, not only in Windows, but also on Linux and Mac.

I got some "Thinking Putty" for x-mas. Well, on the box it actually said "Misleči kit", but that's just some smart repacking in local language so it can be sold more expensively.

Anyway, I love this stuff. It bounces, it stretches, it tears, it shatters, it can glow in the dark, it can change color and it can attract magnets.

Happy New Year everyone!
But have you asked yourself what's so special about new year? Why is everyone celebrating it? What is everyone actually celebrating? The end of the previous year and the start of the next one you say? So why is this particular point in the Earth' path along the Sun so special? Because that's just what it is, an artificially decided, more or less fixed point in the Earth's orbit. It's impossible to decide where an ellipse starts.

Yeah, it's that time of year again. Manic shoppers everywhere. Kitschy decorations everywhere. Red hats everywhere. Little lights on every house. Same old x-mas movies on tv again. Same old x-mas music everywhere.
Well, I hope at least your presents will be new .
Anyway, I wish a merry merry x-mas to everyone.