Since Google Desktop was discontinued by Google, I tried to look for an alternative. Finally I’ve found one of the best desktop customization tools which is Rainmeter. Although it may sound like it, but it’s not an app to measure the rain.

Here’s a current screenshot of my desktop. I happen to put lots of skin from different themes.

The cool thing about Rainmeter is the ability to customize and even design your own desktop widget or gadget. Within the Rainmeter community, they call it ‘skin’.

My first attempt: Prayer Time skin v1.0.

It’s not that difficult to learn how to design your own skin. The manual is sufficient and even people with no background in programming can do it like myself.

The reason why I created this skin is to alert myself on the current prayer times, especially when living in a four season country where the prayer times change almost everyday. Besides, I wanted to make it easy for all Muslims in the world to check the prayer times without having to open a web browser.

This skin basically will parse the prayer times data from Islamic Finder website every 24 hours. Please note that this skin works as an additional skin to the existing theme. I’m not designing a complete theme because there are heaps of beautiful skin you can choose from such as Omnimo, Enigma and Elegance.

How to install the skin?

1. Make sure you already have Rainmeter installed on your computer.
2. Download the file from here.
3. Extract the PrayerTime folder into any of the folder in the Rainmeter skin folder. e.g. My Document/Rainmeter/Skin/illustro
4. Open Rainmeter from the tray icon.

5. Choose the folder illustro – Prayer Time and choose PrayerTime.ini.
6. Click the Load button.
7. You can place the skin wherever you like on your desktop.

How to setup the prayer times according to your location?

1. Go to Islamic Finder website.
2. Choose your Country and your City.
3. Click on the Add Daily Prayer Times To Your Website button.

4. Choose the XML Format
5. Select All and Copy everything in the textbox

6. Right click on the Prayer Time skin and choose Edit Skin.
7. In the URL section, replace the entire URL with the one from IslamicFinder
8. Go to menu File and Save.
9. Right click on the Prayer Time skin and choose Refresh Skin.

I hope you find this skin useful. If you have any inquiry or would like to give feedback, feel free to drop a comment in the comment box below.

What is a demo reel?

A demo reel, or show reel, is the motion picture or video equivalent of an artist’s portfolio. It is typically used as a tool to promote the artist’s skill, talent, and experience in a selected field, such as acting, directing, cinematography, editing, special effects, animation, or video games and other graphics. (Wikipedia)

In other words, it is a short video to showcase an artist’s skill because picture alone is not enough.

In this reel, I’ve compiled some of my works when I was working at Danascreen (DS) from July 2009 to June 2010. You might notice some of these videos if you pass through the giant LED screen near Ampang Park, Kuala Lumpur. This explains why most of them are festive wishes from my company.

This is the sequence of the video.

1. Danascreen promo reel (repeated few times towards the end)
2. Deepavali wish
3. Waktu Solat (Prayer Times)
4. Hari Wilayah Persekutuan
5. Info Solat (Prayer Information)
6. Merry Christmas
7. Le Tour De Langkawi 2010
8. DS Opening promotion
9. Winter Gathering OZ 2011 montage
10. Majlis Iftar Perdana Hidayah Centre montage
11. 1Francais
12. Chinese New Year
13. Ramadhan Kareem
14. SUKMA XIII 2010

The videos were mainly composed and edited using Adobe After Effects. While the 3D graphics and animation were done using MAXON Cinema4D. There are more of them but I only chose the best to fit under 2 minutes duration.

If I got the time and opportunity, I would like to explore different styles and concepts in making 3D montages some day.

If you need any help with making video montages, 3D logos or titles, please let me know. I’m happy to assist you with your project.

The reason why I changed this theme is because I’m bored with the current theme. I’ve been using Binafsha 2.0 for more than one year. Anyway that’s not the main issue.

Actually I had the time to work on this new theme since I got two weeks of Eid break.

In this latest version of Binafsha theme, there are a few major features that I’ve implemented. Let’s go one by one.

1. Responsive layout

This is the trend in web design as far as I’m concerned. More people are using smartphones and tablets to surf the web. So I need to make sure they can view my website beautifully in different screen resolutions.

This is how it looks like in an iPhone. You can also try to resize your browser to see the magic of the responsive layout.

2. Threaded comments

In the previous theme, to be honest, I forgot to design the threaded comment section. The framework that I used did not come with a threaded comment function. Now I’m using the Starkers framework and it comes with threaded comments which is cool.

3. jQuery and more CSS3 stuff

I always fancy applying some animation and fancy typography on my clients’ website. So this is my chance to play around with the current trend. In this theme, there are only 5 images. Other effects are achieved by CSS2 and CSS3 alone. Try hovering your mouse on the logo to see the effect!

4. Magazine style layout

I’ve designed the home page to be very simple with a magazine style layout. However the entry page is still the same. The reason is because I believe most of my traffic come from search engines. If you noticed, most ads are placed on the entry page, making the home page less cluttered to achieve simplicity.

References

Credits to these websites for the inspiration and helping me with this theme.

• Web Designer Wall
• 1140px CSS Grid System
• Starkers Theme
• CSS-Tricks

I’ll keep on tweaking this theme for the time being. If you have any comments or suggestions regarding the new look, please let me know in the comment section below.

In this post I would like to share about the character of Megatron in the new Transformers 3 Dark of The Moon movie.

The thing I like about Megatron is that in all three movies, he never transforms into the same vehicle. In the first movie, Megatron is a jet fighter. In the second one, he is a tank and in the third movie, he was downgraded and transformed into a tank truck.

This is the concept art of Megatron in the movie. It is done beautifully by Josh Nizzi.

This is how the toy looks like in Robot Mode

Since Megatron concept setting is in the desert, I took a picture of the toy at a sandy beach. This is the Armored Rusty Mack Titan 10-wheeler Tank Truck Mode.

I really like the details on each part of the toy, whether in robot mode or truck mode. The manufacturer really gave attention to details such as the Bulldog ornament on the truck hood.

Well that’s for now. I’m planning to do some paint job on this toy.

It is quite confusing when I look at the ingredients label on a product and find a few mind boggling ingredient numbers or E-Codes. To make things worst, I don’t even know their halal status.

So I decided to come up with a shopping guide which lists all the numbers that is not halal so I can safely choose the halal ones. I found a website which shows a list of E-Codes with their status.

Here is the first version of my halal shopping card.

Then, I’ve found out that there are few iPhone apps that allow its user to check the status using the phone. They are very useful apps and I’ve been using then when we visit the supermarket. They are iEat Halal and iHalalFoodGuide.

Not everyone has smartphone

However, the problem is that not all Muslims have an iPhone or iPod. It even takes some time to load the app and key in the numbers. Thus, to solve the problem, I’ve designed this second version of my halal shopping card which is more comprehensive to make it handy to bring to the supermarket.

The halal status is based on the iPhone app by MobiDev Technologies. There are four categories based on the colour of the code.

The black is conditional. If it is made from plant or mineral, it is halal. If it is from animal, it’s not halal.
The blue is Mushbooh, it is in doubt of their halal status.
The purple is for unknown. There is no information about its status.
There is only red which means totally Haram.

Instructions

1. Print out the halal-ecodes-card.pdf on a card instead of plain A4 paper.
2. Cut according to the crop mark.

3. Bring it to supermarket. I’ll just put it inside my wallet and flash it easily.

4. Analyze the ingredients on a product. If it states the origin is from vegetable source, then skip to the next number.
5. If there’s no vegetable mentioned, now you can refer to the card.
6. If you still want to buy the product, it is up to you. You can also contact the manufacturer to enquire about the manufacturing process and ingredients related to it, like Is it Halal Blog.

Here’s the download link

DOWNLOAD HALAL-ECODES-CARD.PDF

Till then, have a halal shopping with confidence to all Muslim out there. Remember, looking for halal is fardhu!

As always, it is made with After Effects CS4. This is an experimental of using kinetic typography technique. It is my first attempt using this technique.

By the way, this is my first time doing After Effects this year. It took me less than 8 hours to rearrange and render them.

Looking for a voice over talent

I’m planning to do a kinetic typography with a voice over which means you will narrate the text on the video. If you are interested, please let me know.

This is how it looks like.

What do you think?

I wish the bunting was designed with more effort besides including the cartoon. The typography, colour scheme, graphic and everything else looked so messed up! Such an amateurish design. No offense.

Now back to the cartoon and the copyright stuff. I was a bit irritated because the designer who designed the bunting simply used the cartoon without my consent.

Probably it was my mistake because I didn’t put any license on it. So from now on, effective 23rd April 2011, I’m implementing this copyright license on all my works featured on my blog.

Creative Commons License

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported

You are free:
to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

So, that’s all for now. Just for some updates, I already got broadband connection at home. I’ll get back to my freelance business and participate more in the cyber world after a long 1 month hiatus.

Inspiration

The first time I watched a wedding montage was back in 2002. At that time, I worked part time for banquet at Renaissance Hotel. There were a few times when I served the Chinese set for weddings in the ballroom.

It was my first time watching a wedding video montage featuring photos of the bride and groom, from their childhood until now and how they met each other.

At that time, I told myself that one day I would have my own wedding montage for my wedding.

Besides that, I also had attended lots of weddings for the past few years. I can say that some people who have their wedding in a hall will consider to have a wedding montage compared to those having it at their houses.

Last minute job

Since I’m a designer with some alter ego, I told myself that I wanted to do it on my own. After all, I’ve been doing multimedia presentation since studying in university.

However, since I have to prepare lot of things for my wedding, I forgot to prepare the video. Anyway, thanks to Cyberlink PowerDirector, I managed to do it within 4 hours. I could not imagine if I were to do it in After Effects. I might not sleep at all that night.

This exclude choosing and scanning old photos. Its a last minute job and its hard for me to choose the best photos from the tonnes of pictures in the classic photo album.

The Video

Basically there are three parts of video. The first one is ‘Our Biography’ followed by ‘the Solemnization’ and ‘Reception at IIUM’. I haven’t edited them yet but do enjoy the first one for now. I will continue editing the other videos when I have some free time.

The background music is Yiruma – River Flows in You

Thanks for watching. If you are interested to use my service to create such video, please contact me and ask for quotation.

Facebook Relationship Status

Facebook has a relationship status update that shows the user’s status whether being single, in a relationship, engaged or married. So I wanted to take this concept into the wedding.

Credits to Liewcf for taking a screenshot of his married status. I used the template to design mine because at that time, it was hard to look for the relationship status update on my Facebook homepage.

The date on the placard was when I officially got married which was when the ‘akad nikah’ took place on Friday.

Designing the placard in Illustrator

Then, I opened Adobe Illustrator to trace the design. I imitated the font, which is Tahoma and the blue and grey font color.

I got the Facebook vector icon from lopagof via Hongkiat but there were slight differences compared to the latest heart icon. With some tweaks and editing, I managed to get the same look of the latest icon.

Printing the placard

I designed the placard to be in two horizontal A3 size, side by side. Then I pasted them on a half A1 mounting board. Here’s the diagram on how I put them altogether.

Download the template

I generously would like to share this template in AI. The format is in Adobe Illustrator CS3. Make sure you have Tahoma font installed on your machine.

DOWNLOAD HERE (984kb)

Well, this is one kind of geeky stuff that I have on my wedding. There will be one more final entry about my wedding design project before I’ll write non-marriage stuff again.

Idea and Inspiration

This idea is not new. After seeing some illlustration and cartoon characters on the wedding cards I received, I also want to have it. It sure reflects our persona which are cute and creative. Hehe.

Commisioning artist at deviantart

After I’ve done some research about the cartoon style, which is chibi style, I started to look for someone who can do it for me. Chibi style is a cartoon character with a big head and small body. This is my first time commissioning an artist from deviantart.

I’ve found Mashi from Singapore. So I’ll just commissioned her to do the cartoon. There are plenty of artist on DeviantArt but its quite hard to see those who are open for commission.

So I send the picture of us when we were trying on the wedding attire as reference for the artwork. I’ve forgotten to include the accessories that came with the wedding attire such as brooch, keris and crown. Anyway it looks cute doesn’t it?

Using it for Stickers and Invitation Card

Wedding Invitation Card

Stickers on door gift

Stickers on bunga telur

So that’s all for now. I’ll continue with wedding design project in the next entry which is a bit geeky.

Note
The price for 1000 pieces of 1.5 inch x 1.5 inch round stickers is about RM360.