July 10, 2007
South California Gathering: To those who are interested, a few of us pen spinners will be getting together on July 21, 2007 at Brea Mall near the Los Angeles area.
This is a casual get together to meet other pen spinners, learn more about our art, and simply have fun. If you are a pen spinner, or have an interest in pen spinning or other forms of manipulation, you are welcome to join us. There's no entrance fee, but you'll need to arrange transportation and bring money for food. For more details, view this topic at UCPSB. Please post a message on the board if you'll be attending.
May 28, 2007
Domain Transfer : Pentrix is currently under the process of transferring its domain to a new domain registrar. Although I have done my best to prevent any interruption of service for the site, it is possible that the site could be out while the transition happens. At the latest, the domain should become stable again by June 5, 2007. I'll be checking the site periodically during this time to minimize down time.
Why is this happening? Pentrix is in the process of transferring to a new hosting company. The current hosting provider does not support some technologies that I am planning on using in the future for Pentrix. The transfer to the new hosting company won't be happening yet; only the domain is being transferred at this point.
[Update 05/28/07] It seems the transfer has been completed without problems or interruption of services. However, if you experience problems with the site, please contact me.
May 13, 2007
New Site Design: As you have noticed, the web site got a complete new look! I decided to pull out a design I've made a while ago. I was planning on saving for a future update, but I figured if I release this now, I'll force myself to make a new and better design later on.
For the techies out there, this is design is entirely HTML & CSS based. Some of my older sites were made using traditional HTML tables, but that made it difficult to update, not to mention it was less accessible.
May 3, 2007
A long due update: I know, there's no excuse. The site has not been updated for a really long time. I've been quite busy lately, I admit (from graduating with a Computer Science degree to shooting cellphone commercials, I've done a lot these days).
But that doesn't mean there hasn't been any work done for Pentrix. I've actually tried several new technologies for Pentrix, but none of them were good enough for me. The problem with trying to get everything perfect is that you never get anything done.
So, without further ado, here's the first update: a Tricks section. This is an improvement over the old Videos section, which only had an ugly list of videos. The tricks section allows you to see what's the most popular or newest tricks, rate the tricks, and other things. In addition, you'll notice that the Tricksplayer (Pentrix's custom videoplayer) has had some improvements as well. Keeping up with user requests, you now have a mirror mode that allows you to flip the video and watch a trick as if a left handed pen spinner was doing it.
And because you asked, I'm in the process of reshooting most of the videos with a higher quality Canon camcorder. Just check out the video and you'll see the difference. Also by user request, there is new video: Butterfly and a tutorial for a combo which I had in storage for a while.
Finally, I just want to say that this is not all...this is just the beginning. I still have lots of unfinished work, including a complete new design for the site, planned new content (such as videos, articles, tutorials, an instructional DVD), new features (a training scheduler tool), and much more.
January 27, 2005
UPSB under maintainance: Our popular message board, UPSB, is currently down due to some important maintainance that needs to be done. This is to improve the security of the board, and will not affect regular usage. I expect the board to be back in a few hours, or as soon as possible. In the mean time, please pick up your pen, sit down, and enjoy the Collaboration Videos, brought to you by UPSB and Pendolsa. The video was produced and is hosted at Superhandz
October 17, 2004
Apologies about the Trojan incident: During the last week or so, Pentrix's server has been under attack of malicious people. However, Pentrix wasn't the only site affected, and we believe someone hacked into its server to changed some settings in the server. These malicious changes made every page on Pentrix (and other sites) to be modified in a manner that every page included additional malicious code. The malicious code attempted to download and install trojans in our users computer (a trojan is similar to a virus, but its main purpose is to collect and send personal information to a third party).
Although I've tried everything in my power to fix this problem on my own, I couldn't do anything since the problem lied on parts of the server I did not have access to. So, I finally contact my hosting company's technical support, who finally fixed the problem. Long story short, this very rare and unfortunate event should not repeat itself.
Pentrix wants to apologize if you were a victim of the malicious code that infected Pentrix the last few days. If you have been, and have problems clearing your computer from the trojans installed, feel free to contact me and I'll do my best to assist you. I hope you continue to enjoy Pentrix and its affiliated sites in the future, and rest assure that I'll always do my best to provide a virus and pop-up free site ;)
March 22, 2004
To Hanmail.net Users: This is not really an update (one should be coming soon), but a notice to all the korean pen spinners that have e-mailed me in the past few months. Unfortunately, if you e-mailed me with an e-mail address ending with ...@hanmail.net , I was not able to respond to you. This is because hanmail.net is blocking all my e-mails. I've contacted hanmail.net , but got no response back. So, if you need to contact me, please resend your message using a different e-mail account. I reply to all messages received whenever I can.
The same thing applies to users trying to register for an UPSB account. All confirmation e-mails are unable to be delivered, so please use a different e-mail account for registration at UPSB. I apologize for any inconvenience, but there's not much I can do.
Feb. 4, 2004
New section: Links
In my old Pentix site, the Links section seemed to be one of the favorites. It
contained links to many other cool sites, each personally reviewed by myself.
But maintaining such a list of sites was painful and time consuming,
which is why I didn't bring this section back to Pentrix until now.
The new Links section brings back most of the old links (except broken ones), but categorizes them better, with groups and subgroups when necessary. All links are grouped from a pen spinner's perspective, so you're sure to find the most relevant sites easily. It keeps track of the number of unique hits a site gets, and shows you the most popular links. It's also easier for me to add, update, and remove links with this new system, so you can expect more and better links to come. Hope you enjoy them.
Jan. 25, 2004
New Article: RSVP V1
A few updates ago, I wrote a short article describing what pens I used. After that, I've received an enourmous amount of e-mail asking me for help on how to make those pens. I should have known...people wanted to have the same pen that I use for spinning. Although the pen that you use won't determine whether you can do a trick or not, it sure can help during the learning process.
For this and other reasons, I've decided to write full tutorials on how to mod (modify) regular pens into the ones I use. The first tutorial teaches you how to make the RSVP V1, the simplest of my pen mods. It gives you a basic idea of how to change any pen to make a better spinning pen. In the future, I'll write tutorials for the RSVP V2, and RSVP MX (if I find time), but for now, you can try the RSVP V1.
Jan. 11, 2004
UPSB
is released
After months of work, UPSB (Universal Pen Spinning Board) has finally come to its completion. This board is a collaboration project brought to you by many pen spinners, as well as myself. This message board allows you to ask questions and dicuss many aspects of Pen Spinning. The UPSB is not part of Pentrix (although it's hosted in the same servers). For more information, please visit the Community page.
Also, please visit UPSB before directing your questions to my e-mail. I'm only one person, and cannot answer all your questions. UPSB already has many of the most common questions answered there.
December 20, 2003
Big Thanks to Modenstudios
Thanks go again to David Karl at ModenStudios.com. For the second time, Pentix has taken up enourmous amount of bandwidth, and caused Modenstudios' bandwidth to be exceeded (this time in an even shorter amount of time. Read the Sept. 26, 2003 update). I don't know where you people were getting the link from, but tell the site owner to update his links! If you still want to see the old content, that's fine. But use the archived version of Pentix, which is being hosted and paid by me. I'll even add the link to the menu.
We have now removed all files from pentix.modenstudios.com to prevent this from happening again. I thank David for doing most of the work.