Category Archives: Hobbies

Grand Theft Auto 4

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I’m sure there are people out there that are hoping this blog is about news crews, or religious groups, or government agencies, or angry mothers attacking the game for being evil, dirty, violent, disparaging, or otherwise just plain bad. Or perhaps others are looking for this to be a post about the game being amazingly, awesomely, frighteningly great, perfect, terrible or whatever. This is not the blog you are looking for.

This is a blog about a technically awesome game. From that perspective I present information about a game that is graphically beautiful, technically amazing, and even has a pretty cool storyline so far. I own the version of the game for the XBox 360 so can’t speak of the PS3 version here. I don’t know how the versions are different or how they are the same and I can’t tell you that one is better or worse than the other.

As a developer I find loads of things about this game interesting that not too many others even notice. The first thing that jumped out at me was the cinematic opening story, but not that it was pretty or that the story was craftily fed to me right along side the credits for the game. Instead that once control was mine, there was no difference graphically. As some of us remember about Grand Theft Auto 3 for the PS2, the cut scenes were pre-rendered and had a style entirely different from the game itself. Once control was handed over to the player for the first time, the graphics kinda faded into a car on a bridge that very closely resembled the one we were just watching in the cut scene, but not quite. In GTA4 however, the cut scene ended at a car that I was sitting in and I waited for a shift in quality to indicate that it was my turn to play. It didn’t come. I pressed the gas, and to my surprise and joy, the “cut scene quality” car I was sitting in began to move under my control. It was nice to experience quality of game in the realm of cut scene quality.

Many reviewers of games in this series are quick to mention the “sandbox” style of play. This means any number of things to different people, but commonly it can be summarized as follows: the game can be played indefinitely without advancing the story and the world runs on its own without you. In GTA4 this effect has been maintained and I daresay improved. There are still loads of things to do (including bunches of mini-game style things to do with friends or even while on a date) and loads of things to not bother doing if you so desire. The world itself is far more “dense” than in previous incarnations of this series. Things are going on everywhere following their own rules. There are drug deals, and traffic jams, and random events of crime, and if you wander into the right places, there are even bowling games going on.

Graphics amaze me in general for many different reasons. Perhaps the game is doing something to make the graphics look way more amazing than the horse power of the system seems like it should be able to handle. Another possibility is that the system is being used to its maximum and the graphics are both great and are filled with nice little things that add polish. The worst case is of course when the system has loads of power and none of it is used, and that fact is pretty obvious. GTA4 is the one with polish.

The game is full of beauty. In some cases it’s the natural beauty of a sunset over the river, the amazing effect created by waves actually coming in at the beach, the streets getting shiny when it rains, or fog that wafts out of sewers. In other cases the content isn’t necessarily beautiful but the effect is. Walking the streets you occasionally see bits of leaves or garbage caught in a breeze, or someone walking by sends a text message to a friend, or a beaten up car that’s been abandoned has exploded with tremendous visual flare.

The story too is a fun one. Instead of a kid looking to make a name for himself in various crime circles like it was in GTA3, this game places you in the shoes of a Russian immigrant lured to the streets of America by a cousin that tells some very tall tales about how great life is. From the little I’ve played I’ve managed to learn that the main character has been a soldier in a war and has done things he’s not proud of, but that he honestly seems like a good guy over all. Trying to survive and carve out a place for himself in America places him in the path of crime in Liberty City, a place where crime is the norm.

Overall, I doubt I would rate the game as high up the rating scale as so many others do, but I do enjoy the game for many reasons and there is something to be said for the stress relief provided by stealing a cop car for the exclusive purpose of running down hookers and old ladies alike as they innocently wander the sidewalks of Liberty City. I think the game is both fun and visually appealing and grants the user an assortment of abilities to do things any good upstanding citizen would never, and should never, even think of doing in real life.

Digital Photographic Sensors

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In the realm of digital photography there are tons of things that can change the quality of the picture the camera takes. Most of these things take place right within the camera. To start with, if you’ve got a lousy lens, it doesn’t matter if everything else is great because light hitting great stuff will have been ruined before it got there. From the other direction, the same problem can exist. If your sensor sucks, it makes no difference how pristine the image is when it hits it. Besides that, the quality with which the camera plays with the data it gets has a huge bearing on the final output as well. That can mean how well the camera does its ISO noise reduction, how good the JPEG compression algorithm it uses is (or if it’s used at all), methods of analog to digital conversions, and so on.

The two main types of sensors in a digital camera are CCD (Charge-Coupled Device) and CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor). The differences between the two are huge, and arguments about which is better abound. The basic idea of both is to collect light and spit out a bunch of data in the form of a photograph. The similarities between the two almost stop there.

A CCD typically has a single “drain” point. Through that spot all of the data for the entire picture must be passed. The kicker is how that data ends up in that spot to be drained and the form the data is in when it is drained. Each row of the image actually cascades across the entire sensor into a holding row (which is sometimes the last row in the image itself) and then across that row to a single dot. All this shifting of charge is done as actual voltage signals based on massive input from a battery and signal strength data from each pixel of the image. Also, as voltages are shifted across the sensor, data of previous pixels can remain slightly and end up added into the latest shifted row. This can result in smudging within the picture or famous side effects such as “purple edges.” The advantage is that all data is uniformly interpreted through a single drain which has what I like to call a “single opinion” about how each color looks. The disadvantage is that to access any single pixel the whole sensor must be flushed. When the data leaves the chip it is no where near ready to be stored in an image file destined for a printer or computer as all we have is a stream of voltages. These voltages need to go through conversion chips to handle all the steps of converting them into digital data.

A CMOS sensor on the other hand has a drain for every single pixel in the image. The side effect of this is that there are loads of bits of circuitry for every single pixel. As it turns out, this is ok due to sensor creation processes that are identical to the creation of the processor in your computer. In some cases, each pixel has it’s own amplifier to further complicate what is happening at each pixel. The advantages are that data never needs to be forced across the whole sensor to be drained (effectively eliminating any problems of smudging) and that each pixel can be accessed individually (meaning the whole sensor need not be flushed to access it), and the power consumption is usually on the order of 1/100th of a similar CCD. The disadvantage is that every single pixel in the camera can have its own opinion about how it looks. Meaning, what is blue to one pixel may be a vaguely purple shade to the one next one down the line. This means seriously complex noise reduction must be done to end up with a clean image. The output of a CMOS sensor is data that can almost directly be stored as an image since all of the conversions take place right in the sensor. This also usually means there are very few required supporting chips and you can expect tremendous battery life.

Every camera I’ve ever owned has been a digital one. Every digital camera I’ve owned up until now has been a point and click style with a CCD. My current camera marks my first steps into the world of dSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex) and my first CMOS sensor. To the uninformed dSLR represents the “professional” grade cameras that are bulky, support interchangeable lenses and have amazingly high price tags. To me it is the flexibility to choose my own optics for each situation. It’s exciting times from the perspective of photographic freedom, but I’m still learning the finer points of how to use the camera. Some would call this user error, but I think it’s actually more along the lines of user perception. With big complicated lenses comes new photo characteristics and that means that in general I’ve found fewer things to be in focus when the picture is taken.

Standard point and click cameras tend to be equipped with a lens that produces pictures with massive depth of field. With better lenses on a dSLR comes control over depth of field. The reality and learning curve required to identify that which is muddy looking and that which is simply out of focus due to not being in the depth of field is part of what I’m coming to terms with now as I adapt to my new photographic potential.

Wine Making

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For some time now I’ve been a member of an excellent wine club called 4 Seasons that costs me around $750 per year and adds loads of interesting varieties of wine to my wine rack. Each shipment is a case of 12 bottles of wine that includes 2 bottles each of 3 types of white and 3 types of red. They are shipped to me one per season, which is slightly misleading since there are actually 5 seasons in a year through this club. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Holiday, and Winter. Thus, with pretty simple math we can figure out that my wine club is 60 bottles a year at roughly $12.50 a bottle.

Several friends of mine enjoy the hobby of making beer or wine at home. This fact got me seriously thinking. Even as a guy that doesn’t care for beer I have to admit that it sounds like fun. I can imagine an infinite variety of beer types since most of the rules of beer fly out the window when you take control of the entire process. I tend to enjoy activities that are slower but the output is of a finer quality. Beer making and bonsai are prime candidates.

I repeat for good measure that I’m not a beer guy, and also that I am a wine guy. Since you can make both beer and wine at home (with a pretty seriously overlapping list of required equipment for those that are considering it) and I like wine, I saw the direction I wanted to go. After a couple of days of research into prices and lists of equipment I finally felt ready to take the plunge into another new hobby.

Like all hobbies this one has a pretty steep initial purchase curve, but unlike many hobbies, it has the potential to save obscene amounts of money in the long run. My initial purchase of things from my local beer and wine hobby store called Brew & Wine Hobby clocked in at right around $340. That purchase however will produce around 60 bottles of wine. Although I will need a few more bottles and corks when I get to the 2nd kit’s completion, those will only cost me right around $36. So the same math as before leads to the conclusion that for the patient and the passionate the price per bottle is a mere $6.27 and that number continues to drop with each kit I make. With the equipment I now own taken out of the picture, a kit of wine tends to produce 30 bottles at anywhere from around $2.25 to $5.00 per bottle.

The best part is I can now cancel my wine club and that within barely more than 2 shipments from my wine club I will have paid off my purchases. The second best part is the ability to make wines that I would never be able to afford or could afford but have a hard time accepting the price. Beyond that there is control and flexibility in what I make. If I find a kit I like, but have an idea about how it might be better, I can tweak to my heart’s content.

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