Play Arts Kai Commander Shepard Repaint

I went into this whole situation knowing that Commander Shepard from Play Arts Kai was bad, but man, his face was freaking AWFUL.  The figure itself is really cool and intricate, but damn, that face. The bottom line is the face is so terrible it completely breaks the figure.

Normally, I would never be so cocky as to repaint the face of a figure, but this was so bad, I had no choice.

Okay so take a look at the AmiAmi page for him

http://www.amiami.com/top/detail/review?scode=FIG-KAI-3861&page=top%2Fsearch%2Flist%3Fs_keywords%3Dplay+arts+kai%24pagemax%3D100%24getcnt%3D0%24pagecnt%3D1

Okay so here is my shepard at the start

That's pretty freaking bad.

Okay and now here is me painting him

Here is him after!

 And Finally a Side by Side

Play Arts Kai Tomb Raider Single Player Model Conversion

So I recently was suckered into purchasing the Play Arts Kai Tomb Raider Figure. This is the same one that comes with the collectors edition. Honestly, it is an awesome figure, but while I was in the store, I noticed the WIDE range in Quality of the figures.

The main differences I noticed was:

1. On the forearm, some figures have uneven plastic, where the arm must have been broken off from the mold.
2. The dirt looks like it is painted on free hand with a brush so almost every figure is slightly different. 

I went through all the boxes of Tomb Raiders until I found the one I was most pleased with in quality.

I really liked the figure, however, the one thing that bothered me was they seem to have painted the figure based on the multiplayer Lara. Shes great and alll, but the Lara I know is the poor college kid that got thrown into the action, she got cut, hurt, and really beat up.

I don't suck at the game by any means, but the Lara I grew to like really got freaking messed up and injured. The figure I bought, wasn't my Lara from the game. Well... Since I am a miniature painter in my free time, I whipped out my paints to fix it.

The first thing that needed to happen was that intense stomach wound where [SPOILER] Lara gets impaled at the beginning of the game. 

The next thing was, my bandage on her right arm was VERY poorly painted. I repainted it, and added some blood on it because [SPOILER] She get shot in the arm! 

I also added a bunch of scrap marks after a screenshot I had in game

Here is another view of her stomach wound, arm scrapes, and wounds on her upper chest

And can't forget the wound in her back that came from the impalement! 

Another view of my more messed up Lara. I also added some extra dirt painting to make her more dirty because lets face it, in the game she gets so filthy you wouldn't want to come within 10 feet of her! 

Windows 7 Phone Error: Can't connect to your phone. Disconnect it, restart it, then try connecting again

I recently got this error after I changed my computer name. There are a bunch of different ways you can end up with this. The solution that worked for me is listed below:

It seems that you are having problems with your personal digital certificates! I'd suggest you to create a new certificate as described in KB 2468307 and the steps below:

1.	If it is running, close the Zune software and disconnect your phone.
2.	Open Certificate Manager. To do this, click Start, type certmgr.msc, and press Enter.
3.	Expand Personal, and then expand Certificates.
4.	Click the heading for the Issued By column to sort the column, and then look for one or more certificates that is issued to "zune-tuner://windowsphone/...".
5.	Right-click that certificate and then click Delete. Click Yes.
6.	From the File menu, click Exit.
7.	Click Start and in the search box enter %userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSAand click OK.
8.	Find the folder that begins in "S-1-5-21-".
9.	Right-click the folder and then click Rename. Rename the folder so it ends in .bak.
10.	Start the Zune software and connect your phone to create a new certificate.

Please keep me informed if this procedure helped you out to resolve this issue.


Source: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/winphone/forum/wp7-sync/trying-to-connect-a-windows-phone-7-samsung-focus/fc7b885e-e069-4426-958a-84816e8a19e4

FATAL_ERROR:Portability:PortDynamicLib.c:408:1.33

Ran into a new Xilinx error today.

All my projects now fail when I try to generate netlist in the EDK or in Plan Ahead.


FATAL_ERROR:Portability:PortDynamicLib.c:408:1.33 - dll open of library
   <C:/Xilinx/14.2/ISE_DS/ISE/lib/nt64/libXst2_Interf.dll> failed due to The
   specified module could not be found.  .   Process will terminate. For
   technical support on this issue, please open a WebCase with this project
   attached at http://www.xilinx.com/support.

This error is extremely strange because I have done nothing differently in the past few days.

There are several AR records regarding this including:



http://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/36383.htm
http://www.xilinx.com/support/answers/32123.htm


After closely following all the suggestions nothing worked.

My OS is not some foreign version. ISE was working fine before.

I have tried to:

• Re-install the ISE Suite 
• Open ISE directly from the program folder instead of a short cut
• Copied the .dll in question from a co-worker

As a last resort, I did a System Restore to a few days ago. 

This time when I ran it, my anti-virus stated that it was detecting the files I needed as a virus. I guess something changed in my Avast Free-Antivirus, I must have accidentally, hit the Free try on Avast Pro or something and it was now picking it up as a virus. 

I uninstalled Avast in safe-mode using this: http://www.avast.com/uninstall-utility

You can make your computer launch in safe-mode without messing with the function keys on boot up by doing:

Typing msconfig in the start menu to bring up System Configuration and then select [Boot] and click the box for safe mode. 

After restarting in normal. I just re-download Avast Free as normal. 

My ISE works again! Yay.

Here is the Virus Chest that Avast picks up for ISE:

Japanese/Chinese Characters do not appear in Media Player in Windows 7

So if you have songs or CDs that have information like song titles or artists as symbols they may appear just as boxes on your system. To get them to appear correctly you must do the following: enable hidden fonts in windows

1. Hit the Windows key and go to Control Panel 
2. Click Fonts 
3. Font settings 
4. Finally uncheck the box that says "hide fonts based on language settings" 
5. Restart your computer

Source: Link!

Convert Cue and FLAC files into MP3

The process to do this is actually Relatively simple.

First Download
1. Foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/download)
2. Lame (http://www.rarewares.org/mp3-lame-bundle.php)

Steps
1. Install and then launch Foobar and Extract the Lame ZipFile
2. File > Add Files...
3. Select the Cue and FLAC Files, It will automatically load them all into the screen and parse the songs
4. Ctrl-A or Manually Select all the songs
5. Right Click > Convert > Quick Convert > MP3
6. Select or Make a folder to store the files in
7. When it asks for Lame navigate to where you extracted
8. Happily wait for everything to complete

Cheers.

Too many bonded comps of type "IOB" found to fit this device

This error is generated during the MAP of Implementation of the design.
If you are designing a core that goes inside the design you can safely ignore this error.

What it means is the number of pins at the top level is more than the total available pins of the design, that's why it happens during the implement design phase.

Map fails because the selected FPGA doesn't have enogh resources (I/O pins). 

See this Thread:
http://www.edaboard.com/thread205544.html