k6ka's blog about anything!

The below documentation is outdated. If you would like to import the command into your server, please see the  GitHub repository . I joined Discord in August 2017. Back then I was still mostly an IRC user, and while Discord immediately captivated me with many things reminiscent of the good 'ol IRC era, there was still one thing missing: a bot with a timebomb command. For those who are unaware, a "timebomb" was a fun IRC bot command that allowed you to "bomb" other users. Here's how it works: User A uses the "timebomb" command on User B. The IRC bot will ping User B and present them with a selection of coloured wires to cut, along with how much time is on the fuse. User B needs to respond back with the correct colour in order to defuse the bomb. If User B guesses the right colour, they are saved. If User B guesses the wrong colour, or if they don't respond by the time the timer runs out, the bomb will go off. Depending on the IRC bot, an...

Well then . With the COVID-19 pandemic effectively trapping me inside my house, I've basically done no street photography for the past two weeks. Classes have moved online, my routine is messed up, and I think my mental health is declining. That being said, I did get the opportunity to do quite a bit of bird photography, mostly photographing birds near my house. The American robins have returned for the spring, and boy, am I glad to be able to see them! Flickr ,  DeviantArt .

One fine June morning I rolled out of bed early to do some bird photography. Me and my dad had recently bought a long lens together—a 55-300mm beauty—so I was able to do wildlife photography with greater ease. This young American robin hopped by while I was on the footpath and came very close to me. It didn't seem afraid of me at all, and graciously allowed me to photograph it. I did get a number of photos before someone else came down the footpath and it flew away.

Oh look, I let this blog sit stagnant for a long while. Hmm. That can't be good. I definitely have a lot of catching up to do to get up to speed. During this time I've continued to be active on Flickr and Instagram , but especially on DeviantArt , and over the summer I've improved a lot with my photography. I purchased a new long lense and have been using my DSLR more and more, and although I didn't have nearly as much time as I would've liked to use it during the summer, I've been out taking much better photographs than the year before. I'm quite happy with the progress I've made this year and would like to continue with this amazing hobby in 2020. I don't know where to begin, so I'll probably start where I last left off: a photograph of a tulip in my backyard. This was one of the first times I actually shot in RAW, and while I still largely used JPEG during the year, RAW files are definitely a much better investment if the goal is to get g...

Flickr  and  DeviantArt Flickr  and  DeviantArt I recently recovered from a pretty deep photography slump. Also, having four assignments all crammed into the same week in lieu of exams wasn't exactly helpful either. Feels great to be out and about with a camera again.

I wouldn't ever tell you if I ever got lost. I'm sometimes too proud of my geography skills to admit when I don't know where I'm going. 99% of the time I have the right sense of direction and find myself at the other end, sometimes even ahead of schedule. But this  time, you could probably say that I was a little bit lost, but not "lost" lost. My archaeology class was meeting up at Fort York that afternoon. Getting to the location via public transit was a breeze and I knew the route even though I had never actually taken it before. As soon as I stepped off the streetcar, though, that was when the head scratching began. The place clearly changed a lot since the last time I had been there, and on those times I had come in a car or a bus with my parents or my (elementary) school. On top of that, a howling gale was whipping at me so hard that I was being blown to the side and could barely keep my head up to see where I was going. There was a long, brown buil...

A couple days ago my mother emailed me a link to this article : Already I had some major  suspicions about the article just by looking at the headline. "A third of what's on Wikipedia"? What ?! It wasn't until I started seeing links to the article pop up elsewhere on the Internet that I decided to write a response to that email (yes, as you can see, I am an evil and ungrateful son that doesn't respond to half of his mother's emails). I wrote it in a jiffy without much editing or polish of any sort, so it may be rough around the edges, but I hope I got the point across. Here's what I wrote in the email: The article's title is very misleading. 3 million edits to Wikipedia is not the same as 3 million articles, and an edit is counted as whenever you make changes to an article and then click the "Publish changes" button. An "edit" on Wikipedia is considered a technical term and not one of work ethic or merit. It does not take...

I've been using the Vibrance HDR app for a few weeks now, and though it is fairly simplistic in its offerings, it does the job quite well, actually, and I highly commend the app developer for making such a reliable app that gets the job done  in under 10 MB! The app is built to work well with OpenCamera's Exposure Bracketing option, although I've successfully been able to get it to process images taken by my DSLR as well. It can support up to 7 different exposures to create a working HDR image; however, this depends on your phone's specs. My phone unfortunately doesn't have a lot of RAM (only 2 GBs) so I was limited to the minimum of just three. Still, it accomplishes what it sets out to do: be a true HDR app that merges exposures (rather than the "fake HDR" method of applying whacky filters) with not too many extras. There are some basic post-processing sliders you can use to adjust the image, but it doesn't beat further editing in a proper image ed...

View on  Flickr  and  DeviantArt . Sometimes, great scenes for photography happen out of the blue and at seeming random. Most of the time, I let these scenes pass, and although I sometimes feel like kicking myself for failing to even take out my camera to capture a great scene, I usually forgive myself within a few minutes and acknowledge the fact that I can't capture every single moment in life. And that's okay! This photo was taken just outside the Bishop Avenue entrance to Finch subway station, right by the GO/YRT bus terminal, on January 11. I had just come out of the subway when I spotted the scene, and liked it so much that I immediately took my phone out to capture it. I took three exposure bracketed shots that didn't have the TTC bus in the background, then took an HDR one that my phone processed on the spot, which had a bit of motion blur that I didn't mind. I'm not too good with photo editing, but I think I touched it up pretty well for this one. Wha...

For Android users interested in using their smartphones for photography, I highly recommend getting the  OpenCamera  app. It really is one of the better camera apps out there that's for people serious about photography and contains quite a lot of handy features, although its functionality may be limited depending on the device you have and how stingy the manufacturer was at limiting third-party camera apps. One of the neatest features I recently discovered on the app is an Automatic Exposure Bracketing mode. OpenCamera has an HDR mode too that does the same thing but processes the images for you on the spot. For a long time, this was fine for me, since I wasn't really good at image editing, but now that I have PhotoDirector 5 and its amazing Bracket HDR feature (that's pretty darn simple to use!) I appreciated having this feature right on my phone when my Nikon D60 lacked it. The Exposure Bracketing option in the OpenCamera app. For those who aren't so familiar w...