Girlyfied

I hardly recovered from Kinder Eggs for girls and pink Lego. Pink Lego! What is wrong with the world?

But girly Nerf guns? Seriously? I first thought those were cosmetics. Maybe the also leave a rainbow trail when you shoot those.

Burger No. 4

Honestly I was a bit skeptical about the goat burger from the Coco at the Roxy because their normal burger is nothing special and ok. But the "Here's looking at you, kid" was a pleasant surprise.  I really liked the greekish/ turkish bread which combined very well with the goat feta paddy.

It had a nice strong flavour but was well balanced and tasted almost like a falafel. Sadly they ran out of the pannelle so it came with normal fries. It was Sunday night and the place was pretty crowded so I don't blame them for that. With that little downside I give it a 9 out of 10 because this was the first burger of the four I tried which tasted really special and held up to the description and they really should put it on their regular menu.

Burger No. 3

The Home Of The Waipiti from The Larder follows one motto: keep it simple.

The only thing that stands out is the minced elk (wapiti) meat. Simply combined with a good sauce, salat, pickles and tomatoes so that you really can enjoy the tasty paddy. To be honest if I didn't knew that it was elk I wouldn't noticed it. Anyhow the best burger so far and with the tasy simple fries I give it an 8 because the buns looked a bit of the shelf and not very special and elk meat sounded great but it also could have been good beef mince. Nonetheless a very tasty burger.

Burger No. 2

Today it was the "Just Plum Decadent" from the Plum. Presented on a wooden plate with chunks of chips it looked very tasty.

The bun was fluffy and ciabatta like and really great. The pork paddy sounded very good on the menu but could not keep up to the description. I missed the slow cooked pork taste and I didn't catch the Pinot juice sauce either. The mayonnaise for the chips was good but again there was something missing. The kick where you say: "This is a tasty burger." Overall I would give it a 5. Well made good burger with fresh ingredients but nothing special. 

The Burger Battle has begun

Wellington On A Plate just started today and that means that the only thing that matters for the next two weeks is food. The best of all is the side competition of several restaurants in the Welly area: Best Burger.

The first was Cafe Polos Blackbull Spicy Slammer. The homemade spicy sauce was great and went really well with the smoky cheese and paddy. The big chunks of chips were good as well but would have been much better without Cajun spice which detracted from the burger a bit too much. A minus was also that the Blackbull was hard to keep between the nice buns and almost resulted in disintegration of the piece. Overall it would be a 7 on a scale from 0 to 10. 

MacPass - finally a nice OS X version of KeePass

It is not easy to find a keepass program for OS X. There is KeePassX which is oaky but looks like a bad port from windows and still lacks functionality. Then there is KyPass Companion which I also bought. And my honest advice is to stay away from it.
For its seven bucks it costs it doesn't give you more than a better looking UI but it still feels cheaply made and also lacks basic features. Why did I bought it? The beta phase ended (well at least for the developer) and I couldn't open the database anymore in KeePassX. So I bit the bullet and bought it to still be able to access my keys.
And now I found MacPass and it is awesome. It is still not finished and still has some UI flaws but it is freeware, open source and really looks like a OS X app. And the developers care about its functionality and the design.

MacPass

So if you are a Mac and keepass user give it a try.

What Is The Resolution Of The Eye?

Looks like our eyes are actually not that good (see minute 3:51). It's the processing power which does the trick. Thanks brain.

BJs ToolBox v1.6 - CameraMatch

After a lot of work the last couple of weeks I finally pushed out a new release of my KIT for MODO. All the time I spent for it was a new tool for matching a camera to a still image and so the name is quite obviously CameraMatch.
I had the idea for quite a while now but I wasn't really sure if I had the programming skills to do this. But after I had a look at an article from fxguide (actually two) I was sure I could do it.
At first it seemed pretty easy and it was going well. At least I thought it would. But after the solving of the two vanishing points it was pretty difficult for me. The math I did for the orientation of the camera didn't work or would only work for some images. Especially the yaw rotation made me headaches. Then I found BLAM a plugin for blender and it was based on Using Vanishing Points for Camera Calibration and Coarse 3D Reconstruction from a Single Image. And this was just what I have been looking for. I then spent about one week to get my vector math skills back on track which have been collecting dust since school. Would I had known that I really could use these I would have paid more attention back then.
Thanks to the modo community I could takle down some major bugs and here is the next version of BJs ToolBox.

Besides CameraMatch, BJ's ToolBox has several other features:

Modelling:
Tools:

• Rotate Element: hover over an element and rotate it through its local axis

Thread Tools:
Inspired by the modelling techniques of Peter Stammbach.

• create inner or outer thread
• define diameter, sides and the number of steps
• the thread itself is currently hard coded and best use in the range of millimetres and centimetres

Animation:

• Cameras To Animation: create an animation from a bunch of cameras

Shader Tree:

• Create Materials in Shader Tree: creates material groups for material tags
• Create Material per Element
•  Create Material per Mesh

The Most Dramatic Sunset… yet!

Todays sunset was just amazing. It just went crazy and was a bit overdramatic if you ask me ;). Anyway made a couple of pics and uploaded them to flickr. Enjoy