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Here's the Links on
this page.
September 4th 2006
The studio's been open for 4 months now! Business is slow but I expected that. At least there's been business. I've sold a few prints, done a couple of portrait sessions and even been hired to shoot
pictures of a show.
May 14th 2006
The big news for this month is the opening of my new studio/gallery check out some pictures of Captain Nemo's studio. I've also been busy with my photo's online, check out
the pictures from Our Botswana trip 2006 March 12th 2006
December 23rd 2005
February 20th 2005
Well there hasn't been too much going on here at chilembwe.com lately but I'm determined to fix that. I'm working on several additions that hopefully will be finished soon. One of the reasons I've been busy this month is I have a new hobby. I've taken up
December 21st 2004
Happy winters solstice! As we near the end of the year I've got lots of
entries for this log. First off check out the 'way back machine' for example
you can use it to see what 'captnemo's home' looked like in 1998! October 2004
Well the big news for this month is of course Happy Halloween
August 21st 2004 The game we've been waiting three years
for is finally out! If you haven't Half
life2 is one example already slated for near future release and
I'm sure there will be many more. The other thing to
remember though is that all the graphic rendering
comes with a price You'll need at
least: 1.5Ghz P4 / AMD Athlon 1500 ID recomends something a little faster
then the minimum though and especially having a faster video card will improve
game play. In the process of fixing my room mates
computer I've come memory
tester and hard
drive test program are always useful. I've used different ones I especially like the abilitie to
defrag the page file and the back ground info program
that displays information about your
system over the top of your desktop image. JUNE 3rd 2004 I bought a new camera last week and so far I am very happy with it. I chose the
canon digital rebel because it was the only digital SLR for under $1000. A few people I know have purchased the Nikon D70 because they already have Nikon lenses but since I'm starting out with no lenses I looked at the feature set and cost of both cameras and decided the rebel was a better deal. I've already taken a wide variety of pictures, indoor/ outdoor with flash/with out, auto focus/manual and it's done well in all of those. I especially like it's ability to take long exposures at night. I set the camera on a tripod and just tried a whole bunch of different settings to get an idea of what the camera would do. One of the nice features is that all the info (iso, shutter etc) is stored along with the image file. I forgot to mention that the camera has a built in exposure meter that shows a range of +2 to -2 from a standard exposure when taking pictures in the manual shutter speed and aperture setting but I didn't pay too much attention to it as I was experimenting.
Maybe later this week I'll put a couple of full size pics up. I'm planning on Saturday to do some comparison with the D70 so maybe I'll be able to post some pictures from both cameras. Also the rechargeable lithium battery it came with seems to hold a charge well- I was able to shoot around 300 pics from a single charge and it still had plenty of charge left. So if anyone's looking for a professional quality digital camera on a budget I'd recommend this one. The only complaint I had was it doesn't come with a compact flash(memory)card at all. fortunately I had a couple already and I bought an additional 512mb card which gives me enough storage for most of my weekend photo trips.Before going on a big trip though I'll have to look into additional storage. Well things are moving right along with the web page- I'm looking at expanding soon which means there will be room for lots more content- maybe even some video clips etc. I've also planned the next few 'DDACN' episodes so maybe I can post those on some sort of regular schedule. Now if someone just e-mailed me to encourage me to keep on schedule (hint hint- Hey I always enjoy getting comments, even the critical ones, well maybe not all of those) I've added some pictures to the site including My latest fishing trip. So check those out. If you haven't tried GIMP there's new versions out now so if you're looking
for graphic software to edit photo's etc give it a try. I had some trouble
with the install at first, a quick search on the website though turned up a
solution- I had to switch windows to a TTF (true type font) then every thing
worked fine. I think a lot of windows users new to gimp will like the new
interface better as it gives you menu commands along the top like a normal
windows program, instead of the sometimes confusing right click you had to do
before. Spybot search and destroy has moved on to version 1.3 apparently- would have
been nice if version 1.2 had at least informed me there was a new version that
had to be downloaded. I saw 'Van Helsing' last week, a bit campy but I enjoyed it, fun story, lots
of special effects, a great looking heroine and some very sexy vampires, oh
and yeah that guy that played Van Helsing did a good job too. Now where can I
get one of those rapid fire cross bows? April 16th 2004 March 2nd 2004 Yippee,
as of yesterday I'm officially done moving. This means no more
driving to
the cartoon and other things, like this log. I've
added a new design to captnemos-locker.com its my new 'question
man'artwork.
Just something I dreamed up while doodling. I have
several more images I should be adding soon. I've started
archiving my POTW (picture of the January 17th 2004 The big news for this week
is that I'm moving. Don't know for sure where too yet.
I have a couple of leads so
far, but the bottom line is the rent where I live is going up so I
have to move.
This shouldn't effect the
site much except that I may be a little late with updates, new comics
etc. till things settle down. I've added yet more pictures to the
site, check out x-mas
2003 . and my giant mushroom
pic needs to be added to my archives I think. I've also had time for some
gaming in the last month- played through the single player game of
'Call of Duty'.
I enjoyed it but it's not a
whole lot different from 'Medal of Honor', Same engine and design so
I should have expected as much. For something a little different I
found 'CUBE' which has
serious potential. It's opengl graphics are a little crude- reminds
me of Quake II or there abouts but the fact the it's open source
means people can customize it to their hearts content and add
improvements. One such project that has already sprung up is 'Death
Illustrated' which has an interesting black and white comic book
look to it. I can't wait to see what else people come up with.
December 8th 2003 Seasons greetings! I hope
you had a good turkey day :) You can now customize the
start up and login screens for windows xp and even switch the login
screens around easily thanks to Logon
loader. I recently obtained an
emprex dvd burner. I chose that brand because it was one of the least
expensive that could use both -r/rw, and +r/rw discs. It came with
Roxio 6 software for burning discs which works fine with the roxio 5
studio I was already using for video editing. I managed to mess up
the first couple of discs but now they seem to be burning fine. For
data backups having 4.7 gb per disc is wonderful. I was able to back
up all my digital photos on 3 discs instead of the 20 or so cd's it
would have taken to store them before. And being able to burn my
video projects to disc so they'll play in most home dvd players is
great.
November 12th 2003 October 1st 2003 July 22nd 2003 May 31st 2003 April 16th 2003 March 22nd 2003 February 23rd 2003 It has come to my
attention that the following DVD Compilation packages just provide
you with a bunch of FREEWARE tools and some lame guides written by
companies themselves, or some decent ones that they have stolen from
places like www.doom9.org. DVD
Squeeze
DVD
Cutter
DVD
Echo
DVD Copy Gold
If you pay for any of the
above, you're totally mad and should ask for a refund instantly.
A note to the companies:
I am totally fed up with providing support for people buying MY
software from you. I dont know how you can sleep at night, knowing
full well that you are ripping people off. I hope you all get shut
down.
So there you have it- don't
buy these, instead go to the site DVD
Decrypter and support the programer. Star Wars was on tv last
night- been awhile since I watched the original, man was Darth's
movements slow and clunky. He should have had some lessons from these
guys- Art
of the Sabre".
January 11th 2003
On a more exciting note I won a blue ribbon at the National Speleological Societies Print Salon for this picture 
Which you can come see in person at the Brick House Gallery 2nd Saturday Art show, on September 9th. The picture was taken on our trip to Botswana and the Masked Model is Karole Ward who was a great sport hanging there while we took pictures.
During the last month I tried some interesting experiments in Cave photography. I took some 110v studio flash units and hooked them up to 12volt batteries using small power inverters. They worked wonderfully though we had some problems with the contacts of the inverter needing to be wiggled before they worked- I'm looking for a better plug to improve this. 
Anyway they provided plenty of light and enabled us to shoot pictures of Rippled cave. 
I also took some pictures on our trips to Samwel cave, Shasta Caverns, Cave City, and a beginers trip to Crystal Cosumnes. Though I didn't use the large flash units on these trips.
I spent some time in June hiking around the Sacramento Delta and as usual took a lot of pictures :)
This weekend is Labour day weekend here in the states which means 3 days off work, instead of going out and enjoying it though I'm stuck at home trying to recover from a cold. Oh well, it gives me time to do this update. It's also given me an oppourtunity to create a gallery of my pictures of San Francisco
I've also started a project to scan in some of my old photo albums and post the pictures.
The last project has been inspired by my purchase of a new canon scanner- the canoscan8400f which does a great job of scanning both prints and slides.
Even with all this going on I've still had a little time for games, I've been playing Prey which is basically a heavily modded version of DOOM3. I've enjoyed the fact that they've taken advantage of the physics engine to add things like gravity walkways (that allow you to walk upside down) Gravity that can change it's orientation and 'spirit walking' where you can, well, be out side yourself. That's all for now- I gotta try and get over this cold.
On the games front I'm a little behind. I've been playingF.E.A.R. They've done a good job balancing the typical reflex FPS game with some very creepy scenes. I also played Serious Sam 2 a little and croteam has certainly done a great job- the cartooninsh characters nearly had me laughing out loud as I played.
Well I made it back. A whole month in Africa! Wasn't nearly long enough. Still, it will take me awhile to go through the 3000 or so pictures I took. There's a few up at My Botswana reports section but I have a lot more to go through.
Wow, a whole year has gone by and I've hardly done any entries in this log.
I've had a very busy year though. Which you can tell by all the new entries in the
Pictures section of this web page.
The most exciting news for me of course is that I am now dating my most wonderful girlfreind AMY. The next bit of news is that I am now an uncle!
I'm getting back into geocaching after a bit of time without a gps reciever, you can read all about my experiences with an explorist 400 and geocaching
Thanks to Amy I got hooked on playing samorost and will probably be ordering chapter 2 soon. I've also been spending a fair amount of time playing DOOM 3 and quake4 (Amy bought it for me- did I mention she's the best girlfriend ever!!)
I loved the detail and gameplay in both these games but they definetly demand a lot from your system, a good video card like the geforce 6200 and plenty of system RAM are a must.
Well thats all for now, but look forward to pictures of my upcoming trip to Botswana when I return in March and maybe I'll even get some more entries between now and February when I leave.
Geocaching and this gives me a great reason to get out of the house and take some more pictures (like I really need another reason?) Anyway I've started my page about Geocaching where I'll post tips and useful links that I find about my new hobby.
Last week I finally got around to seeing 'National Treasure' which was a
fun movie and I enjoyed it but what really got me excited was the
previews.
They showed the earth being blown to pieces and then in large
friendly letters it said 'Don't Panic'.
At that point I almost jumped out of
my seat with anticipation and sure enough coming in May is the movie version
of
'The hitch hikers guide to the galaxy' ! I was also pleased to find out that
the screen play was written by Douglas Adams himself. This surprised me
because I hadn't heard that he had written it before his untimely death in
2001, but I'm glad he did as now it will have his original touches much like
the radio plays, the BBC TV show and the books did.
Thanks to my friends Matt and Heather my dream of owning an arcade cabinet are
now a reality. Check out my new MAME cabinet. I also redid my page describing
my old arcade console.
I've been busy posting new pictures of the places I've visited this year, and
hopefully there'll be more by the end of the year.
Hope every one has a happy new year - keep stopping by for more Captnemo updates :)
I've been lucky enough to get an epson 1270 printer and It does a great job, I'm really impressed with it's capability to print 13 by 19 inch prints!
I've got lots more pictures up at Captain Nemo's pictures and the Yolo Bypass wildlife ones are very fitting for this time of year since they feature a colony of bats!.
Not to much else going on right now- be sure and check back later for pictures and info on this years MLG fright Fest!
seen it, get your copy of
DOOM3. Warning- not for the faint
of heart,
definitely will get your heart going if you play this
one at night with the
lights off :) I really can't wait to see
what gets built using the Doom3 engine as well
384
Mb RAM
2 Gb of HD Space
nVidea GeForce3 or ATI Radeon 8500
across a couple of useful programs to keep in
your software tool box. A
in
the past but with new larger sizes of ram and hard drives I had to
find new
programs to test them. I like the fact that these
programs create bootable
cd's (several computers I use don't even
have floppy drives anymore) and this
way the programs run directly
on top of the bios so any OS misconfiguration
shouldn't effect
them. I also found several other useful little utilities at
Sysinternal
Well another tax season come and gone. Now we can start dreading next years!
Have you seen Hellboy yet?
I really enjoyed this movie, but what can I say I
enjoyed 'The league of Extraordinary Gentlemen'
even though it got panned in reviews.
Hellboy has been doing much better and a lot of that is probably due
to Ron Perlmans excellent lines. I've made a modified xp logon screen in
honor of hellboy- it's a B.R.P.D (bureau of paranormal research and defense)
logon. You can switch the logon screens around easily thanks to Logon
loader.
'
The 'Depth Defying Adventures of CaptNemo' continue- I've done over 100
of them now. That's two years worth, time sure flies when you're having fun.
Some of you may have noticed the new Google ads at the top of the pages, I'm
just trying to make this website pay for itself finally instead of me pouring
money into it. At least the google ads try to be relevant to the subject of
the page and I much prefer the tasteful text to those annoying flashing
animations or pop-ups.On a related note I've added the link to me page and I'm
on a couple more comic countdowns to try and promote the site so feel free to
add a link to your site or click on a vote button, who knows someone may thank
you for leading them to chilembwe.com(or curse you for wasting their time, but
in that case you're probably better off avoiding them anyway.)
across town with carloads of stuff and now maybe I can get
back to more updates
week) over at
captnemo42.deviantart.com - deviantart is a great site- lets me store a lot of my images which saves space here, and it's amazing how
many great artists are out there.
The new demo for Unreal2004 is out and let me say- I love it. It installed and
ran without a hitch- even on my now outdated amd 850mhz machine, the game play
is
nice and smooth, the vehicles are fun to drive and the new game types
are a
good mix of being challenging but still engaging to play.
The addition of VoIP
is awesome- the first time I heard someone
talking to me in the game I almost
jumped out of my chair. Sadly,
it's also good that you can disable this
feature as there are
entirely to many players out there who's entire
vocabulary seems
to be nothing but four letter words and vulgarity.
I've found
out that DARWIN , the core of the mac OS X, operating system is
open
source and compilable for x86 systems so I'll have to give
that a try on one
of my systems.
Look for another update to
my 'CaptNemo looks at
computer networks' section as I continue to experiment
with wireless
networking. (I've successfully networked a router using NAT
to
another wireless network already using NAT and have two
separate DHCP servers
running without problems)
I've updated captnemos-locker.com
a little. It now has thumbnails of the various pictures and designs
I've made to sell on cafepress items which will hopefully make it
easier for you to find one you like.
I've designed my own login screen -'scorpion
system'(1.56mb zip file)
and there are loads more to download from
www.themexp.org . I would caution everyone to be careful with
these modifications. They could prevent you from being able to login
to your computer if something goes wrong, and with the logoui file
being an executable it certainly raises the possability of a virus or
trojan being hidden in one of these. So keep your virus programs
definitions up to date!
Well
this month I was talking to a friend and the subject came up of one
of the best kept secrets on the internet. Back in the early days of
the net, before the web, most of the traffic on the internet was
text. We used things like archie
, gopher
, usenet
, telnet
and ftp
to find and download the information we searched for. Well as the
net developed and people got faster connections the emphasis switched
from text to media such as graphics and the web. I still searched for
text though and one of my favourite finds was PROJECT
GUTENBERG'
Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer
of FREE electronic books' they have a noble cause and there is some
wonderful texts available on their site. Read a book today.
I'm
asking for suggestions for a name for the new character in The
depth defying adventures of CaptNemo if you have a suggestion
head on over to the forum
and let us know.
Well
the Nss Convention is long gone- check out the
pictures and I'm starting to settle down to a life of
normalacy(is that a word)- sort of. I helped dig at Cave
City and we managed to pull out a record of over 500 buckets of
dirt. I went on a good fishing
trip and we had another waterfall
vertical practice. Top that off with trips to Samwel
cave, Crystal
Sequoia, and
lost soldiers cave.
I'll probably add some pictures of the
last two later this week.
Amazingly enough last month I put up
cartoon #80 of The Depth Defying Adventures of
CaptNemo. I've also redone the comic
links page to show that Angst Technology is offline, and to add a
link to bizarre uprising
as thanks for them mentioning me.
I'm
really lagging on the log entries, but that just means I should have
lots to put in this one. I've been busy helping get ready for the
National Speleological Societies
2003 convention
Thanks to comcast raising the rates after
taking over from ATT for cable internet in my area I'm now back on
dial up. I considered going with DSL but surewest is installing fibre
in my area so I'll wait till I learn more on that situation.(10 gig
fiber to my home? whoo hoo!)
I've added new designs to my store at
CaptNemo's Locker and of
course the Depth Defying
Adventures of CaptNemo continue. I even did a new Caving
Carl cartoon. I got back into gaming this month- playing Star
Trek Elite Force II.
I also tried Will
Rock but wasn't too impressed- looked good but the levels had too
many bugs and flaws.
Elite Force II by comparison was very well
put together, continues the story from the first very well and really
gives me the feeling that I'm in an episode of Star Trek. The levels
are well done and I really enjoyed finding some of the hidden levels
such as the 'nintendo' one.
For other programs to try
winoncd5.0 is a very complete
cd burning package, includes dvd, vcd and svcd capability, and
several other nice features such as an audio editor for when you need
to trim files before burning an audio or mp3 album.
Adaware
from lavasoft continues to improve and combined with spybot
search and destroy gets rid of the vast majority of internet
'trash programs'.
Next add free virus protection from grisoft's
AVG or Avast
and a firewall such as ZoneAlarm
and you're prepared to weather the majority of net nasties.
Of
course not every trojan or virus can be prevented and physical disk
failure can occur so a good back up is important for an inexpensive
back up, formating and partioning solution try BootitNG.
It has come to
my attention that several people are stumbling onto my website in
search of the Disney movie 'Finding Nemo'. We are in no way related
:), but here's a link that may help.
Finding
Nemo
Well
this month I've started writing about my experiences with computer
networking- check out 'CaptNemo looks at
computer networks' . I've also added a new tool to my arsenal:
cygwin. Cygwin is a dll for windows
that essentially acts as an emulator providing a Unix or linux like
environment. It comes as a simple setup program that downloads the
rest of the components. I wanted a better destop though and found KDE
for cygwin where I got instructions on how to download and
install the kde desktop. Took some fiddling around but I got it
working. So now lets see if we can get cygwin to work on a linux box
running WINE!
Well
this month I played through Unreal2
. Which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had a couple of complaints
though- The video requirements are pretty high, don't try playing it
with anything less then a geforce2 and a geforce4 would be better.
Even with a good video card it slows down in places, and of course
multiplayer would be nice, but I guess for that its back to Unreal
Tournament 2003.
I've also started playing Never
Winter nights a role playing game straight out of the advanced
D&D rule book with some nice 3d graphics and loads of multiplayer
options. I'm still playing in the single player mission but look for
me online slaying fearsome beast real soon. :)
Well I'm still
doing cartoons for 'The Depth Defying Adventures
of CaptNemo' and it looks like I'm following in great footsteps.
Check out the early ads of Dr.
Seuss
I'm getting a lot of hits at my new web page Captain
Nemos Locker thanks to a link from Langa
List Check it out and tell Fred I said thanks!
I've added a new
'Picture of the Week' page - I'll try and
update it every week with a new picture from my digital camera.
I've
now been creating CaptNemo cartoons
for over a year- It's been great fun and I still have several more
sketches so I'll keep posting new ones.
Sadly it looks like Lilley
Street is no more. Capt Nemo was listed in the thank you's for
promoting them. Very thoughtful, hope things go well.
I thought it
would be nice if I could store some movies on my hard drive, I did a
search and foundDVD Decrypter
It ripped a dvd fine but I'm still having trouble converting it to an
avi or mpg that media player can play normally.
Here's some
interesting comments from their web site:
Well this month the
big news is the opening of my new commercial site
captnemos-locker.com
I'll
be hosting my directory of cafepress stores there as well other
future commercial ventures I'm working on. I have a new Caver
Carl cartoon for my caving page, and of course the CaptNemo
cartoons continue.
