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< --back 7/10/09 - The award for least popular website goes to...Me! According to Google Alalytics, my site (not including my Gallery) averages 6 unique (organic) visitors a day (30 flat hits), and of these only half stick around long enough to click a link or two.Yes, I know that's pathetic, but hey, this site is here for my own convince, not for traffic. Regardless, what I find interesting is how people find my site. Half come direct, either through bookmarks or typing in the address bar. Just shy of another quarter come throuch links and content I've posted on the various forums and social sites I'm part of. The remaining quarter arrive through some sort of web search engine (with Google alone responsible for half of that). It's interesting, really, to see what drives people to waste time not finding what they're looking for on my site *snicker*. Without further ado, the list: "creating a new item from the selected items could take some time"*NOTE: If you've come here because you searched for one of these terms, try clicking through to the archive or GPS section on the left. you might just find the solution to your problem. 7/9/09 - Make Firefox Load Folders in New Tabs Thank you, Raghav, this has bothered me ever since I upgraded to Firefox 3. Of course, if I REALLY cared I could have scanned through about.config myself, ;)If you want to open a folder of bookmarks in tabs, Firefox normally replaces all of your current tabs?ut reader Raghav writes in with a quick configuration trick to fix that behavior.Read 7/6/09 - AutoHotkey Finally decided to give AutoHotkey a look today. Until now I've been restricted to (though satisfied with) my Logitech G15's "G-series Keyboard Profiler" for macros. There's plenty of other Macro recording/editing applications, but most of them are either incredibly bulky, want your hard earned money, flat out don't work, etc... AutoHotkey is the exact opposite of all these, and so far I'm loving it.Here are the scripts I've been playing with so far. 6/10/09 - Mozilla Rolls Out Add-On Collections 
Put simply, Collections are just a pre-packaged set of add-ons, themes, dictionaries, and language packs that are given a name, a description, and a unique URL. It's kind of convenient if you happen to know of or find a great collection set, but the real power comes in creating your own collections, either by typing and selecting add-ons on the site, or automatically culled from your current extensions with the Add-On Collector.I've culled my current set together to create the Better Browsing pack! Enjoy. 6/4/2009 - FAT32format Living with OS X and Vista means living with the FAT32 file system - it's the only file system writable by both. Unfortunately, XP and Vista are unable to format discs 32gb or larger in anything other than NTFS, and older versions don't support LBA48 or USB2. OS X offers an option to format in FAT (MS-DOS) but for whatever reason, when I do this then plug it in to my Vista box, it shows as "not initialized." Perhaps OS X is using the older FAT instead of FAT32? But then Vista should be backwards compatible and should still recognize it...?Fortunately, Tom Thornhill has you covered with his Windows GUI version of oh his FAT32format cmd line tool. Couldn't be easier unless it was built in... like it should have been! =P FAT32format cmd line tool or [local mirror] 6/3/09 - OS X boot commands I post these for my own reference. Move along.
5/23/09 - Powerbook G4 won't stay asleep thanks to a broken display latch? Simple solution: Set the machine to resist waking from sleep when the lid is opened. Instead, you will need to press a button on the keyboard or perform another "system event" (such as connecting and activating a USB device) in order to wake the system.In Terminal: sudo pmset -a lidwake 0 "sudo" - pmset must be run as root "-a" - for "all" power profiles (when running on battery and when plugged in) "lidwake 0" - turns the automatic waking off ("lidwake 1" would turn it back on) 5/8/09 - Firefox Extensions A friend recently asked me which Firefox Extensions I thought were worth installing. Here ya go, friend.
4/22/09 - Adventures in iPhone hacking - Jailbreak! JailBreaking iPhone 2.2.1
Cydia - the AppStore for non-apple-approved applications
Installing cracked/pirated applications This requires a specially modified MobileInstallation installer file to install hacked apps
Tethering
1/27/09 - Free your m4p's Now that Apple sells *every* song DRM free, it makes no sense that I still have DRM locked purchases sitting around my library. I used to use myFairTunes to strip the DRM almost immediately after purchasing, but the tool was disabled a few versions of iTunes ago and abandoned per Apple's demands. Instead, Apple wants me to pay just shy of $100 to download DRM free copies of music I already purchased. Fat chance!Fortunately, Apple still allows you to burn and reimport protected songs to your hearts content, but as the process is time consuming and can degrade the audio quality, it's not a feasible solution for most people. That's where DVDneXtCOPY iTurns comes in, using it's custom virtual burner to accelerate and automate the process. And as a bonus, the lack of optical media involvment yeilds (suposedly) better sounding rips. I think they're fine either way, and my standards are unusually high for a non-audiophile but either way, it's HANDS-DOWN easier. Cost? Free, or $30 for PRO, which automates ID3 tagging.  http://www.dvdnextcopyiturns.com/ 1/26/09 - System Explorer Truly a MUST HAVE in every tech's virtual toolbox, and it's portable! And free! Read more here.[Official Download] or [Direct Download] 1/25/09 - More free streaming: Monty Python! http://www.youtube.com/montypython1/24/09 - End your horrible relationship with your cable company As much as I like to say I don't watch much TV, I do find myself hypocritically watching a couple hours a night. Frankly, it's entertaining ... and cheaper than dropping $80 a night on dates. Thought I TRY to stick with semi-educational programming like Mythbusters, CSI, and House, our CRAPPY CRAPPY DVR never has anything besides hours and hours of heavily sindicated reruns. And don't even bother with live TV; despite having something like 800 channels, there really is NEVER anything on worth watching.So the cycle stops here; I'm breaking up with Comcast and moving in with free, legal, on-demand streaming... and maybe a little torrenting to fill in the gaps. I've already got plans to run Boxee on an AppleTV, but that's for a future post. For now I'll be using one of these many alternatives.
1/23/09 - Inauguration 2009 ... Gigapan! Containing over 2GB of photo data and comprised of over 220 images shot from a Canon G10 Bridge camera on a Gigapan robotic camera mount, David Bergman's incredibly detailed panorama is filled with pieces of information that you previously weren't able or bothered to see. Some are just obviously cool?early being able to read the sheet music on performers stands, seeing the comically varied expressions in the VIP area behind the President as he speaks, but others are more subtly awesome. Take Yo-Yo Ma snapping a picture on his iPhone, the unreal number of personal digital cameras or the endless, imposing banks of photography equipment surrounding the event from every conceivable angle. [via] [Fullscreen] Picture taken with this 1/21/09 - Inauguration 2009 ... from SPACE! I admit I haven't updated in a while. ... But I'm also not fooling myself. Nobody reads this. At best, someone might stumble across a how-to I posted while troubleshooting an issue. Needless to say, I feel no obligation to maintain my nonexistent fan-base.Anyway, in keeping with the lack of updates, I'm keeping this one small: A picture of the inauguration taken over Washington DC at 11:19am EST from Google-sponsored imaging satellite GeoEye-1. Enjoy!  12/30/08 - Microsoft Lips: Review and solution to Microphone Sync Problems  One of the gifts I gave Gina this Christmas was Lips, though I have to admit I was hesitant to buy it after reading a couple mediocre reviews from gamespot and kotaku. Most of the negativity seems to revolve around the music import tool, allowing you to import your own MP3's, WMA's and M4A's from a connected thumb drive, music player (haven't tried the iPod yet, sorry), and even through a wireless connected media center! It sounds like a good idea, but one reviewer pointed out "importing thousands of my own songs was...largely useless. You don? get lyrics..." Not so. Forget proper karaoke for a moment - if you love just singing along with your favorite tunes but lack a legitimate excuse to grab a mic and rock out, Lips offers exactly that. Matching the music's waveform earns you the same points and fills the mic-gesture-gauge just as though the song were part of the game. It's a blast and we love it! Even if you decide not to import your own music, there's plenty to purchase online with full lyrics and music videos. Unfortunately, with only 40 tracks on disc, you'll find that if you DON'T add to the library at all, you'll quickly tire of repeating yourself. Besides the library, the game itself has a lot to offer over the sing-along competition. The interface alone is super slick and perfectly tailored for group play. Players can sing simultaneously in versus mode, or take turns with phrases and harmonies in duet mode. There's even a few party game modes (vocal fighters, Kiss, and Time Bomb) which can be activated by selecting them as the songs background video. Spectators can even use the standard controllers to make a verity of percussive sounds (ie "noise makers"), and the motion-sensitive mics can be used to activate a star/point bonus when the gesture gauge fills (much like star power in RockBand / Guitar Hero). And to answer your question, yes, Harmonix has promised a patch which will make the wireless mics compatible with RockBand in the near future. Woo! My only complaint is an incompatibility that isn't documented in the instructions: YOU MUST UNPLUG ALL USB MICROPHONES BEFORE STARTING LIPS. I'll explain. First, don't listen to what other people have said -- the process of syncing both mics is just as easy as syncing a normal wireless controller. We ran into no problems here what so ever. The problem was that, though everything was working fine in single player mode, as soon as I tried to join in with the 2nd microphone, BOTH mics stopped working. Then, when starting over, the first mic, which was working fine before, started having timing and static issues. Additionally, the lights on the 2nd mic never light up, making me think it was either broken or not synced properly. No matter which order I connected everything, connecting a 2nd mic broke the connection with the first. Almost ready to take it all back, I ran across this thread on Gamespot, revealing the following observation: It turns out that all my issues stem from the fact I have a USB microphone connected to my Xbox 360. Somehow microphone registration gets all screwy because of that. In my case, I have my Rock Band microphone plugged into the Xbox 360 at all times. The fix is to unplug the USB microphone when you're playing Lips. Apparently this will fix both the 2nd microphone lighting issues as well as the static noise, video and audio out of sync issues, as well as the freezing issues. My problem EXACTLY. I hope someone out there finds this useful. Happy new year! 11/29/08 - Best iPhone Ringtone Ever Portal - Looping "Still Alive" radio 11/28/08 - Black Friday I'm not just saying this to make a point... I TRULY don't understand what all the fuss is over Black Friday these days. Sure, there was a time when deals were far and few between, and having a few neatly bundled into a single shopping day was worth the effort. But these days online retailers routinely beat even the best Black-Friday-only deals WITHOUT the murderous crowds of people, crazy drivers, and having to get up at 4:00am. Why people still go through all the trouble just to "save" $14 total on a couple items they probably wouldn't have bought anyway, were they not on sale, is a mystery to me.Instead, I spent the day sleeping in, watching movies, and catching up on some much needed nothing. Now that's $14 well spent if you ask me ;) 11/27/08 - Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well and prosper.11/24/08 - CPS-2 Suicide No, it's not what you think.Back in the glory days of arcades and endless summers, Capcom ruled. They pushed the envelope of graphics and "q-sound" far past Neo Geo, and to protect their hard work they built in a sort of tamper-proof self-destruct mechanism. Each game ROM is encrypted, and the decryption key is stored in low power S-RAM. S-RAM is volatile, meaning it looses it's memory when power is disconnected, so any attempts to remove and read the key from the chip would be useless. To allow powering down the cabinet without losing the decryption key, the S-RAM is supplied by a 3,6v non-user-serviceable lithium battery. According to CPS Shock, "The average life span of this battery is around five to six years. Once the voltage of this battery is below 2v, the stored encryption key will be lost. The condition of this battery is not measurable due to the fact that lithium batteries will hold their voltage almost constant until the end of their life." Translation: CPS-2 arcade games die after 6 years of inactivity. It's been 6 years and 4 months since I bought my 3 CPS-2 games, and I honestly thought they'd be dead by now. In fact, I even sent a request in to Capcom to see if they still bring them back to life. Their reply was less than reassuring: Hello Mike,Uh, sorry, but they don't bring dead boards to life guys... Lame. Only thing left to do was check my losses and fired 'em up on my home-made portable Jamma Box. Holy crap on a stick, all three still work! I ran straight to Frys on my lunch break, picked up 3 1/2 size AA 3.6v lithiums, and strapped them on in parallel to boost the existing batts. This should work for a couple years, but what I really need is to find suitable replacements with correct sized leads to fit through the PCB's through holes. If only Paul hadn't lost my calipers... 11/11/08 - Lego Indiana Jones, 100% Completed 
Somewhere between getting a real job and getting a real girlfriend, I gave up being a "hardcore" gamer.
I'll still play the blockbuster titles now and then, but gone are the days of staying up all night
trying to get the last dog tag on the hardest difficulty. In fact, it's rare now that I even play a game
past its half-way point. Once the novelty of new game tech wears off I remember there's better things to
do with my time.That's not the case, however, with Lego Indiana Jones. It's a brick-bashing, whip-swinging, cute-as-hell adventure through nostalgia and and adventure...and it's portable! Damned if I could hardly put the thing down. I've had it for two weeks and already finished 100% completion. Was it worth it? Hell yes. Go forth and buy! 10/30/08 - Adventures in PSP hacking (part 3) Success! I've finally got a handle on POPStation. The key piece of information is CDDA. Many Playstation games play actual pre-recorded CD audio tracks as background music, which are recorded in CDDA format on multiple tracks. Not only were early versions of Dark_Alex's Popstation converter unable to handle multi-track games, CDDA support itself is broken under 5.00M33 pops. ...Which is why, no matter what I tried, I couldn't get background music to play. =PAs a workaround you can install and enable the POPSloader SEPLUGIN with FW4.01 support and boot your CDDA equiped games using POPS 4.01 (By holding R while loading up the game). After doing this once per game, the settings are remembered and they'll continue to load properly. And you know what that means... nostalgia for days! Here's a little detail for those that might be interested in ripping their own PSx games to PSP: First, prepare your PSP:
Next, rip, convert, and transfer the game disc image to the PSP
Hooray! Nostalgia for days! 10/29/08 - How to: Find and Download MP3's Without P2P It's a well known fact that Digital Rights Management sucks. Buying a DRM'd song locks you to that vendor and their supported devices. It's a scam. I'm buying into the artist, not the vendor. Worse yet, should said vendor ever go out of business or otherwise take down their authentication servers, your music will be lost forever. If, however, you were to pirate the song, you get a HIGHER quality rip that will always play on any player and will never expire. Money well spent indeed.Now to be fair, industry leaders are starting to realize this, taking action by offering DRM-free MP3 files. AmazonMP3 offers their entire digitized library DRM-free at $.89 a song and Apple isn't far behind with iTunes Plus, offering higher quality DRM free MP3 versions of select albums for a premium. But what about those DRM'd songs you've already purchased? You own the license to the media, but the vendor's anti-piracy measures have taken your file prisoner. Stripping the DRM with MyFairTunes is no longer possible so what are we to do? If you can burn it to a DRM-free CD, I see no reason why you can't also re-download a DRM free, higher-quality version of what you own. That's where these guys come in. They're like Google for MP3's!: Update: Also check out http://mp3search.doremixy.com/
10/28/08 - SysMetrix 
One of the first things I do when I setup a personal system is turn off any widgets, sidebars, toolbars, etc. the vendor may
have installed or enabled. Yeah, they (sometimes) look cool, but they're often bulky, prone to instability, and the added
overhead just isn't worth the constant stream of useless information. There are times, however -- like while testing new
apps, moving large amounts of data between several drives, and working with memory hogs -- that a system resource monitor
is a necessary evil. Since the Task Manager doesn't always load during a hang, and because I tend to take a proactive approach,
I prefer running a monitor 24/7. This amounts to a huge, ugly, inefficient window or sidebar docked to the side of my screen. *sigh*
I've tried shopping around but each time I'm disappointed with too "leet", too bloated, too basic, too hard on the CPU, or just plain
too crappy tools.That was until I found SysMetrix. It isn't particularly more efficient or more comprehensive (although it IS pretty damn comprehensive), instead relying on skins to size and arrange the information it can provide. I almost brushed past it until I saw the absolutely beautiful analog, nearly steampunk theme "Veristic Dark." Looking like the face of an expensive wristwatch (and ditching the "leet" bulk design, it summarizes an impressive amount of information at a glance. It truly is the little things in life... =) 10/27/08 - Adventures in PSP hacking (part 2) So I've played around with the new POPStation GUIs. Though it's now considerably easier to rip your own games, it's still finicky as hell. There seems to be no easy way of knowing which POPStation eBoot requires which POPStation driver, and multi-track conversion still seems to be an issue. I re-ripped and converted Wipeout 1 and it still has no music while playing. You'd think this would have been overcome by now =/ Or maybe it has and I just haven't found the right tool, process, or combination of both.For now, I'm successfully using Alcohol 120% to rip games with Subchanel data, Icetea1.3 to convert to eboot.pbp, and http://popsdb.com/ to obtain PIC1 and ICON0. Looks great and works easily on the 5.0 Popstation. Now if only multi-track soundtracks would play... 10/26/08 - Adventures in PSP hacking Back in PSP Firmware 3.0, Sony included a PS1 emulator (dubbed POPStation) intended to play specially purchased remakes of classic PlayStation 1 games. Needless to say, the PSP hacking community wasted no time in hacking it to allow original (and pirated) PS1 disc images to run. It worked, but the list of supported games was small, and the process was complicated: rip your PS1 disc to a certain format, making sure to record sub-channel data, then locate and illegally download a copy of HotShots2, extract its keys with another tool, then find the latest copy of another tool that does the conversion and stick on the keys you ripped. When all was said and done, none of my conversions had music (thanks to problems with multi-track PS1 games) and only a couple of them worked. I eventually gave up, not only on POPS, but on the PSP in general; I grew tired of having to keep it up to date, and my self up to date with the tools and a lack of new or interesting games sealed its fate.Flash forward a couple years to today. Sony recently released PSP Firmware 5.0 (and Dark_Alex has already cracked it), showing off the new PSP-accessible PlayStation Network store, support for new hardware (I don't have), and a couple other near-useless tweaks like a new background theme and music visualizer. Not having picked up my PSP in nearly two years, I though I'd spend a day checking out the scene to see what's new. Flow finally came out! YAY for hypnotically addictive though entirely pointless games! Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Batman also made it out, which concludes the list of worthwhile games released in the last two years. The storefront looks clean and responds impressively well but isn't something I'll ever actually use. POPstation looks like it's been updated (as of version 4.01 or so), supporting a bunch of additional games and custom button mappings. 10/25/08 - Planet of the Drums... ...was awesome, though totally and entirely WAY too loud. I don't mean that in an old curmudgeon sort of way, 'cause SERIOUSLY, we went specifically for the hard-hitting D&B we love, but even with contractor-grade earplugs we were afraid our skull would explode. We left early, but not before dancing our asses off. Pics temporarily unavailble.Event info @ MySpace 10/24/08 - Finally, Hotmail on the iPhone via IzyMail http://v3.izymail.com/register.aspx10/23/08 - Minor Site Update After putting it off for nearly a year, I've finally implemented a basic CSS sheet to use across my domain. 'Till now, I'm ashamed to admit, all styles were hard-coded in HTML and impossible to change en mass, which is the main reason I've been stuck with the old drab-blue color scheme. Even worse, the reason I didn't implement CSS is I didn't fully understand it. But now that I've recovered my Tuesdays, I've found a little more time to work on old personal projects.For my next trick, I'll be learning to ride a unicycle. ... No, really. =D 10/22/08 - Halo 3 Co-Op and Tilt Skull I finally got a chance to play through Halo 3 with the guys on Co-op after MONTHS of, "yeah, we should totally do that sometime." It's an absolute blast - much fun had by all. Even picked up a couple skulls, including "tilt" which included all three of us getting up on a VERY hard to reach playform in High Charity. Sadly, this probably marks the last time we'll play Halo 3. It's been a good run and a fantastic game. If only they had the Hale Theme on Rock Band... 10/21/08 - Little Big Planet originally posted on 1up.comThe ingenuity and sheer incredibleness of the creations in the Little Big Planet beta continues to ratchet up with each passing day. I really was not expecting to see anything that could top the video we posted yesterday which recreated the theme to Final Fantasy X, but it's been done: Behold the "Little Big Computer." 10/20/08 - Fantastic Contraption!! The most powerful gaming systems in the world still can't match the addictiveness of tiny in-browser flash games. -XKCDEver heard of The Incredible Machine? "TIM" was a popular 1992 DOS game in which you built "incredible machines" (I.E. Rube Goldberg devices) in a needlessly complex fashion using only a given set of objects so as to perform some simple task like putting a ball into a box or lighting a candle. Like any physics puzzle game, it was a brain-stretching, trial-and-error laden delight, but once you'd solved a puzzle, there really wasn't much replay value in it. Enter Fantastic Contraption. Like TIM, you're given a collection of pieces to build a contraption to carry out a goal, except the pieces are simplified gravity-obeying sticks and wheels which can be used as many times as you like, and it runs entirely on-line in your browser, supporting game and contraption sharing. This lends itself to much more creativity, so much so that a sort of subculture has developed, suggesting and sharing challenges for existing levels (like building contraptions without powered wheels, without wheels at all, with as few pieces as possible, which return the target to the goal or prevent it from exiting after completion) and creating entirely new levels. Kotaku put it best: "It's nice nonviolent trial-and-error fun, indulging both the competitive urge to be as efficient as possible, and the creative impulse to be as outlandish as you can get away with."I tried my hand at a few: 03: Mind the GapI thought they were ingenious... until I saw what other people had come up with: Green Champion solutions More advanced solutions 10/18/08 - LOLZ! http://www.palinaspresident.us/10/17/08 - Rock Band 2 ROX! Harmonix has finally made good on their promise to include character-based merchandise in their online merch booth, meaning you can take snapshots, print shirts, and even order real life figurines of your rock band characters! Mike and Gina - Pulse Driver 10/16/08 - Live the proof by Jim Boggia Heard it in a new Blackberry commercial last night.Worth a listen: 10/15/08 - Corrupt Windows Installer SYMPTOM:When trying to install or uninstall programs or updates, you received the following error: "The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed. This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance."Microsoft's solution - Reregister Win installer: Boot into SAFE MODE, open a run box (Start->run) execute msiexec /regserver Didn't work? Yeah, me either. Actual solution: Delete (or rename if you want to be safe) msi.dll, msiexec.exe, msihnd.dll from c:\windows\system32 then download and reinstall Windows installer Good luck! 10/14/08 - Apple's "Spotlight Turns to Notebooks" event Same laptops, "better" case, slightly improved gfx cards. Woo-f*n-hoo.Wake me up when you offer a tablet. UPDATE (10/16/08): So, I got a chance to play with one. It actually feels really, really nice and I like the new battery bay and other design elements. Still, it's NOT worth $1600 to me for the cheapest (yet lone $2500). I'm more interested in a cheap netbook for the web and occasional basic photochop. 10/13/08 - Minor site updates:
10/12/08 - The Geeks Were Right by The Faint
10/11/08 - LoveFest / Love Parade Pics are up!: Check the Gallery link in the nav bar.WARNING: Some images are marked NSFW; just because pasties aren't legally pornographic, doesn't mean your HR department approves checkin' em out at the office. 10/10/08 - LoveFest / Love Parade Video: San Francisco's biggest street party (and consequently, the largest single day electronic dance music event in America) kicked off Saturday, October 4th at San Francisco LoveFest: A Dance Music Parade and Festival. The parade featured 28 floats, starting at San Francisco's 2nd and Market Streets and continuing all the way to Civic Center Plaza for a giant outdoor dance club with the world's top DJs. SF LoveFest is an integral part of the cultural fabric of San Francisco, kept alive by the passion behind the organization, aiming to promote that the electronic dance music scene cares about the community and is sustainable by giving back, by granting music scholarships, providing gear to schools and supporting at-risk intercity youth. 10/9/08 - The iPhone 3G review: Part 3 - The Phone Alone I've already gone into why the iPhone is an amazing jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-only-few. But this isn't just a web-surfing, music playing toy anymore, it's your PHONE, and comparing only the standard cell-phone features to other devices, the iPhone falls alarmingly short. It's great that Apple is making constant improvements to the iPhone as a whole, but it's time they bring focus on these improvements back to the features nearly every other cell phone on the market has.
10/7/08 - Two very simple, very effective display improvements People are so used to their PC's looking as they have since they opened the box, they don't even think to ask, "why is my CRT always flickering" or "why do fonts look so crappy on my LCD?" In short, the default settings are sometimes set by the manufacturer for compatibility and performance, not appearance. A friend of mine suggests this as another proof of Apple's superiority -- "Settings like resolution etc. are set correctly right out of the box." Sure it's a nice touch, but it doesn't make it inherently "better" ... anyway, I digress.These configuration errors are so obvious and easily fixed, I usually reset them unasked while sitting down to tackle whatever it is I've been called over for. The funny thing is, when all is said and done, most people are more excited about the screen fix rather than their initial problem being fixed. To fix blocky looking fonts (usually on an LCD / laptop)
To fix a flickering screen (usually on CRT's)
10/6/08 - Proud new owner of a Sony DSC-W300 Why I chose it over other cameras
 10/5/08 - Andrew, this one's for you. Yes, I beat Green Grass and High Tides on Expert. Once a couple nights ago with the gang, and once on April 20 in solo mode. Proof? Check my RockBand Achievements at xbox.com (not sure if you can without an account). I also blogged it -- check my archive for 4/20/08.
9/28/08 - Helena by Nickel Creek This is a tech blog. Or at least it's supposed to be. I gave up personal web logging a long time ago... little too unnecessarily exhibitionist / narcissistic and offers a permanence otherwise not warranted. Still, I can't help point out a good song when I hear it.
9/24/08 - Hawaii was amazing. That is all9/23/08 - Microsoft's Image Composite Editor Panoramas rock. How do I do it? Photoshop CS3's Photomerge tool. But what if you haven't yetYou shoot a set of overlapping photographs of a scene from a single location, and Image Composite Editor creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all your images at full resolution. Then save your stitched panorama in a wide variety of formats, from common formats like JPEG and TIFF to multi-resolution tiled formats like HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom. 9/12/08 - Cannot bulk move items from deleted items bin (Outlook, all versions) For the last week I've been working on a problem where a user was trying to move stuff from his deleted items folder into a folder under his mailbox called Archive. When multiple items were selected, sometimes it would move the items normally and sometimes it would try to create a new message with the selected items as attachments with the messageCreating a new item from the selected items could take some time. Are you sure you want to create a new item from these (X number) of items.Selecting fewer items seemed to work at first, but as we continued less and less could be selected before it finally stopped working. We tried opening his mailbox on different clients - same problem. It started looking like a corrupt message but had no way to scan 3000 items. Otherwise, the mailstore looked and functioned normally. Eventually, we narrowed the problem to including Calendar items in the items selected to be moved. If the folder you are moving a calendar item into is not specifically set up to hold calendar items (most are set up to hold only mail and post items while the deleted items bin can contain all types) then Outlook attempts to add the calendar item (and in the process all other items selected) to an email message, so it can be stored as a ?ail and post item that the archive folder was designed to store. Simply sort by type, delete or move separately any calendar items, and proceed to move the rest normally. 9/12/08 - iPhone 2.1 Firmware released today Announced change list:
9/11/08 - ROYA! OMG!! =D  9/9/08 - Yosemite pics are up <--Complete album in the GalleryA few highlighted Panoramas: 9/4/08 - Fontifier I've always wanted to create a font of my own handwriting!http://www.fontifier.com/ Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica. 9/3/08 - iPhone 3G problems finally explained iPhone 2.0.2 and Dropped CallsIn short: The iPhone is asking for a stronger signal than it needs. In areas with lots of users, the towers run out of juice, calls start to get dropped, data speeds come to a screeching halt, and signal quality drops significantly. The 2.0.2 update fixes this by properly configuring the iPhone 3G to only request the power it needs. Only when enough people update their phones will the problem be resolved. This is one of the reasons why AT&T has been sending text messages to users to persuade them to upgrade to the 2.0.2 software. Update, people!!! 8/31/08 - Firefox launch bug in 3.0.1 when using profiles If you have Firefox 3.x set to prompt for a profile at launch, and you click an external bookmark or link while Firefox is closed, it'll try to launch the profile manager but instead crash immediately in the background. This not only happens with no error or warning, it also prevents any further attempts to launch firefox until you manually end the process. I've confirmed this behavior on two systems, and two different OS's.Update1: I've seen others complain of the same thing here (see creigs' post) and a post on Support.mozilla. Update2: detailed support thread more info on mozillazine dev forum Update3: Official Bug # 395891 reports this is fixed in the 3.0.2 update, which will be released the the general population on September 16. 8/27/08 - Minor Site changes
8/25/08 - China = Lies. http://strydehax.blogspot.com/8/14/08 - Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer Fix:
8/13/08 - Red X in Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA, Exchange 2003 & Vista) Getting a red X in Webmail when trying to send messages?Install the latest S/MIME control [here]! 7/28/08 - The iPhone 3G review: Part 2 - the Bad. Buggier than a rotting corpse. David Heinemeier Hansson put it perfectly:"I'm surprised just how much impact the small griefs have when they add up to a lack of confidence in the system. It's a great example of the cumulative effects of problems. They have an exponential damage on the experience. ... taken as a whole, the iPhone 2.0 experience is disappointing, especially to new users." The only thing that keeps me from really worrying is knowing this is an Apple product. It's clearly capable of so much and Apple is banking on its success. There's no doubt in my mind Apple will tackle these issues one by one, but until then all I can do is wait and put the word out there in hopes it will be heard. My experience so far:
7/26/08 - A few wallpapers here7/25/08 - The iPhone 3G review: Part 1 - The Good. Jack of all Trades, master of many. It's been 2 weeks since I first got my hands on the Jesus Phone 3G. I have to admit it's a great looking, nearly futuristic device, far more multifunctional than pretty much any other cell phone on the market. It's shiny, has a super-slick UI, and is already a status symbol... all the things my good friend in the Apple business said it was. But at the same time, cramming all that into one multi-function device comes at a cost and at the end of the day, I still find it's only better at the things I don't really need (but still want ;) ) than what I do (namely PIM sync, but hopefully Apple's working on fixing that). Still, no amount of extra features, bling, and flair can make up for the fact that an e-mail enabled smartphone should FIRST excel at being an e-mail enabled smartphone. Until that happens, I stand by my belief that the iPhone is not the best smartphone on the market... though it probably will be, and is already the coolest ;)As a traditional cell phone, it towers over the competition. It already had a great contact system, a great UI, beautiful SMS system, context aware dynamic soft-keys, and seamless integration into the rest of the device. Now, with the improvements introduced in the 3G and 2.0 refresh, addressing the clarity issues, allowing browsing while talking, and adding the curiously absent search capability to the address book, it's almost perfect.
As a pocket Web Device, complete with 2.0 apps, the iPhone beats ANY phone on the market hands down. The near full size, near full speed, and near full featured browser literally puts the world in your pocket at all times. And with the addition of location aware applications, it's glorious; common uses (like facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and looking up conversions or spellings) are made even easier than a PC with custom front-end iPhone apps. I almost prefer using my phone to check movie times over Fandango! It still won't replace a computer or UMPC, but it's plenty usable. Bravo! As a music player, the iPhone is on par with the best players out there -- other iPods -- and is ridiculously by far the best player on a cell phone. There's only two things I could suggest to make it better:
As a gaming device, don't hold your breath. The screen is larger, the graphics are better, but lacking any sort of control other than touch and tilt (which isn't accurate enough for a consistent experience), it's really only suited for the same simple puzzle games already on most cell phones (Sudoko anyone?). Yes, there's a couple physics games with water and the sort, and I admit it's "neater" than my last cell phone, but the frame rate suffers, and the "fun-factor" is no better than KaGlom on my girlfriend's Blackberry or Pipes on my Chocolate II. This is no Nintendo DS or Sony PSP killer by any means. While mobile games are a must, there's nothing revolutionary here in the least. As a PIM / e-mail device, we start to see some of the reasons I still don't feel the iPhone is ready for the corporate world. My biggest problem with the first iPhone was that it couldn't do what nearly every other smartphone out there could: sync with Exchange. Now that it can, I'm sad to say I can't test yet as my company is still putting ActiveSync in place. From what I've heard though, it connects as easily as every other active sync enabled device. I've also already had good experiences connecting to GMail and Yahoo mail.) Unfortunately I have NOT had the same positive experience with the desktop sync and MobileMe applications. More on this in part 2. As a GPS receiver, it pales in comparison to some of the other cell-phone-bases turn-by-turn offerings out there. Currently you can only look up print-style directions and see your current location in the Google Maps app. However, with the inclusion of a GPSR chip, downloadable apps, more advanced GPS capabilities comming in 2.1, and promises from companies like TOM-TOM and Garmin, iPhone will probably regain it's title over the rest in the months to come. Final thoughts As my good friend in the Apple business implies, the fact alone that one device can do all this -- despite how well and with such a beautiful UI -- should be enough to make this the best phone ever. At the same time however, cramming all that into one multi-function device comes at a cost: at the end of the day, I still find it's better at the things I don't really need than what I do ... which turns out to be one of the reasons I like it ;) Alright Apple, let's get the business applications sorted out and you'll REALLY have something! 7/1/08 - Early Adopters It makes me laugh when people belittle technological advancement to ease the sting of being an earlier adopter."I'm going to stick with my piddly 4 GB/2.5G/OG iPhone...as I just don't have much need for 3G speeds or full-on GPS"Sure, cause who wouldn't want a browser that's actually useful, or a GPS that actually knows where you actually are... actually. 6/13/08 - Please stop saying the iPhone is $200 cheaper Original price = 400"New" price = 200 Extra ten dollars on service plan over two years = 240 Mobile Me fee over two years = 200 Actual New Price = $640.00 6/5/08 - Stop accidental copies and moves by changing the DragHeight/DragWidth Ever tried to select a bunch of files by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on each one and then suddenly you've got a ton of copies of all your files?Ever meant to double-click a folder, but instead dragged it into the neighboring folder? Windows default drag-initiator distance is 4 pixels; move an icon more than 4 pixels while clicking/double clicking and you start dragging it. Why so small? I don? know. Even just upping 2px to 6 makes a huge difference in cutting down on these mistakes. To change the distance, manipulate the following string values HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\DragHeight HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\DragWidth If you don? see DragHeight & DragWidth string values in the Desktop key, just create them 6/3/08 - OPH Crack tool updated to crack Vista passwords. Very nice.http://ophcrack.sourceforge.net/ 6/2/08 - Pinnacles 2008 
5/29/08 - Microsoft Outlook Annoyance: Microsoft Outlook could not sign or encrypt this message because you have no certificates which can be used to send from the email address 'name@domain.com'.Solution: Tools -> Options -> Security -> Uncheck Add Digital Signal 5/28/08 - Pay friends with PayPal via TXT: 1) Go to PayPal.com and associated your mobile phone with your account.2) Send money by texting the amount and recipient to paypal (729725) as follows: To: 7297253) you'll get an automated call back requiring a pin and they'll get their money =D You can also substitute their e-mail address with their 10 digit phone number or Call 1-800-4PAYPAL and use Paypal's automated system, however this will require the recipient also tether their phone to PayPal as well. Fortunately, if theirs is not already, they'll receive a TXT and Call with instructions in linking their phone to PayPal and collecting the money. *Note: TXT'ing only works if you're on Alltel, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon. To check your PayPal balance, or cancel a pending payment, text bal or cancel to paypal (729725) respectively. [via] 5/26/08 - ETD Pop 2008 ROCKED 5/25/08 - Electro Techno Disco Pop 2008. Best Rave Ever. Clips from the BEST RAVE EVER! 20,000 people, 100% sold out! HUGE!!! Amazing talent from Kaskade, to Ferry Corsten, to the ultimate: DJ Tiesto. Don't miss Corsten's AMAZING strings mix of "Out of the Blue" at around the 23 second mark.5/21/08 - 10 tips for surviving Office 2007  For 2007, Microsoft has done away with the traditional "file, edit, view..." menu bar and introduced a more visually organized tab bar called a "Ribbon." Designed for easy browsing, the Ribbon consists of tabs that are organized around specific scenarios or objects. The controls on each tab are further organized into several groups. Though it does a good job of making commonly used commands easier to find, getting used to their new locations can be confusing.
5/10/08 - Roya and the Moth Our cat = 2 cute. She caught a moth!Edit: Weezer took down my video because I used their "butterfly" song as a background soundtrack to Roya chasing the moth. What stingy bastards. Please do NOT buy Weezer's music. Thank you. 5/04/08 - Automatically insert sample text into a document in Word A quick (and flashy) trick to test/troubleshoot changes/fixes in word:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/212251 5/03/08 - WindowsXP Tips Bob Cerelli hosts a blog-worthy collection of troubleshooting tips and resources here:http://www.onecomputerguy.com/windowsxp_tips.htm 5/02/08 - Command-line reference A-Z http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb491071.aspx5/01/08 - Firefox: Undo Close Tab Ctrl + Shift + T4/30/08 - Office 2007: Search Commands Tab (extension)  Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you?e looking for in your own words and click the command you need. Search Commands also includes Guided Help, which acts as a tour guide for specific tasks. 4/29/08 - Vista Bug: Volume and Network icons missing from System Tray/Notification area 
Recently I ran into a problem in Vista where the Volume and Network icons refused to show up in the
system tray / notification area. Naturally the first thing I did was make sure they were checked in
system icons section of the Notification Area tab under Taskbar and Start Menu Properties. Low and
behold, not only were they unchecked, they were grayed out. Rebooting didn't help, and as far as I
could tell there was no reason they shouldn't be available. Turns out this is a known problem in Vista, complete with a Knowledge Base article (945011). The fix is to delete the "IconStreams" and "PastIconsStream" values from "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify" in the registry. For a more targeted approach, the Vistax64 forums has a detailed section on this, spanning all versions of vista and a few alternate solutions. 4/28/08 - IExpress 
For years I've been using WinRar to create installer packs -- single, executable, compressed archives that self-extract
then run a specified file. This is useful for simplifying existing multi-file applications and install packages, automating complicated tasks for
end users, or one of my favorite uses, building self-cracking installers ;)Well, it turns out that Windows has this functionality built in. A shame I didn't find out about this years ago. Least I can do is pass on the knowledge: IExpress Technology and the IExpress Wizard 4/27/08 - Rock Band: One Million Fans! 
We did it! Gina and I finally unlocked the 1 million fans achievement in Band World Tour after playing on and off for 45 days.
Not that we were playing for fans per say, but knowing it was possible did add a soft of goal to the game.
Now it's all for fun from here on out, and with new songs every Tuesday, Rock Band has not only become our favorite game,
but one of our favorite at-home pastimes. Next stop, the endless setlist!4/26/08 - Rock Band: Faulty tilt sensor on the new xBox 360 wireless guitar. Well, EA f'd up again - their new wireless guitars for Rock Band on the xBox 360 are flawed. This time 'round, it's the tilt sensors that don't work. I've already contacted EA technical support and been told to"contact the Rock Band Warranty team directly at (650) 628-1001, available 24 hours a day. From here, you will be able to process a request for a replacement item for your defective controller accessory."Rockband support 4/23/08 - Birthday Cards at the Office. SO true. 
4/22/08 - Small Changes So, I've officially taken down my PHP-based beta site. Dreamhost's servers simply aren't fast enough to make a PHP-based homepage feasible. Take that as a warning to anyone who might also be seeking webhosting for their PHP masterpiece. Dreamhost is cheap, increadibly spacious, responds quickly (for static pages) and doesn't skimp on the bandwidth ... but daaAAaam their servers suck PHP balls.In other news, my dad is finally, slowly, taking an interest in HTML, thanks mostly to an interest in sharing his photography ;). He's linked on the left as "C118" and has a TON of beautiful shots from the Nevada desert. Check it out. 4/20/08 - Rock Band: LORD OF THE STRINGS! 
Rock Band's 'Lord of the strings' achievement should really be the 'Green Grass and High tides'
achievement, 'cause 'Till that song came up, I was actually disappointed that Solo-mode's expert difficulty
wasn't much harder than hard, or even Normal. I started the tour just for fun - to see how hard it really
was - and ended up hardly failing a song 'till the last set. Hell, I even beat Highway Star on
expert my second time though. Could "Lord of the strings" really be that easy?"That's when I tried Green Grass and High Tides. OMFG. Like most songs, it starts out slow and easy, builds, moves into a last-song-worthy solo, then backs down for what you think is going to be the ending. That's when all hell breaks loose. The pace picks up and (at 5min 43sec) you're dropped into the longest, fastest, craziest, most insane, endless, impossible, unending (did I mention endless?) solo EVER! Easily 10 times harder than ANY other song in the game and throws the difficulty curve out the window. I truly believe it's impossible... at least, impossible to play with only one hand on the frets; I had to actually lay the guitar down and mash the solo-fret buttons with BOTH hands. Whether or not Harmonix intended this is open for debate, but given the sheer impossibility, doing it AT ALL is accomplishment enough for me. ...Even then it still took a good 10 tries. My sense of accomplishment was dwarfed only by the geeky realization that this is just, in fact, a game. lol! Waste of time? I think not. Good times had by all? Hells yeah!! 4/16/08 - UR-202 -- I. Want. This. Watch. Time on the UR-202 is displayed using telescopic minute hands operating through the middle of three orbiting and revolving hour satellites. The telescopic minute hands precisely adjust their length to follow the three vectors marking the minutes: 0 -14, 15 - 44, 45 - 60. Extended, they enable the UR-202 to display the time across a large easy-to-read, dial. Retracted, they allow for a very wearable and comfortably sized case; thus providing the wearer with the best of both worlds.The UR-202 is also the world's first wristwatch featuring an innovative new winding system regulated by compressed air. The watch is powered by kinetic energy; it winds itself as you move your wrist around. Kinetic watches work best (and last longest) when they?e wound with gentle, consistent motion, and heavy wrist activity can put a lot of strain on the mechanism. To combat this, the UR-202 contains two little turbines, which are coupled to the winding rotor. The turbines act as shock absorbers, using air pressure to cushion the movements of the rotor. A switch on the back of the watch lets you adjust the air pressure passing through the turbines to compensate for extreme activity. They're using air inside the watch to do all this, so the whole thing remains waterproof. read 4/17/08 - 315539: Display non-present devices in device manager 
Device Manager displays only non-Plug and Play devices, drivers, and printers when you click Show hidden
devices on the View menu. Devices that you install that are not connected to the computer (such as a
Universal Serial Bus [USB] device or "ghosted" devices) are not displayed in Device Manager, even when
you click Show hidden devices.WORKAROUND
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315539 4/15/08 - Rock Band: Fans 
So, after poking around GameFaqs for a while, I found out that there's a cap on the number of fans you can acquire
based off the lowest skill chosen by any band member. This means if you're playing expert, and your friend is
playing easy, and you already had 49,005 fans, you will gain exactly ZERO fans for your performance.This is a problem. If you want to progress in the game, you need fans, which means you ALL have to choose a harder difficulty level. If you and/or your friends only play casually and are not able to play beyond easy, you're restricted to a very small part of the game. Fortunately, Harmonix recognized this and updated the fans-per-difficulty in the last patch. Now it's possible to unlock the "1 million fans" achievement on hard instead of expert! =D
4/12/08 - Doom: RAMPAGE Achievement 
Complete all levels on UltraViolent mode, done. Seven days on and off, a couple hours per episode (even spending
the time to find most of the secrets and completing all 4 secret levels. Gotta say, I remember this being
a whole heck of a lot harder back when it was released in 1993. Either we're simply older and better, or the bar
has been raised by games like COD4. Either way, it was still a blast and well worth the $5.
4/10/08 - Firefox logo spotted in deep space by the Hubble Telescope  Captured by the Hubble Space Telescope is an image of the variable star V838 Monocerotis which lies near the edge of our Milky Way Galaxy. The photo was taken way back in March 2004. 4/9/08 - The new age of SPAM 
4/8/08 - Further Adventures of DOOOOOOM! 
Finding my aforementioned shareware Quake CD the other day started me on a short path of 90's video game nostalgia.
After playing halfway through Quake II, Duke Nukem 3D, Ultimate Doom and a bit of Serious Sam over the past few days
I have to say, there's a lot to be said for the long abandoned run-and-gun, arcade style shooter that focuses more on
the fun-factor than on the number of polygons.Don't get me wrong -- Call of Duty 4, halo 3, and Bioshock are all AMAZING first person shooters -- but there's just something about Doom's pace that they'll never be able to touch. Consequently, I'm already halfway through Ultra-Violent difficulty in 3 days. At least no time's wasted on scripted events and dialog. LOL!) 4/7/08 - The Birth of a Pirate 
Twelve years ago id software released a shareware version of Quake for $10 along with something revolutionary: an on-disc
"id store" containing encrypted, full version copies of not just quake, but EVERY game they'd created up until then
since Wolfenstein 3D.Yes. Every game.* The idea was, for the first time ever people could buy software from the comfort of their own home simply by calling 1-800-IDGAMES and providing a credit card. But it was too far ahead of its time. Why id didn't see past its own marketing department is beyond me... You'd think someone would have said, "ya know, if anybody ever cracked our encryption scheme, we'd be basically giving away our entire inventory.." And that's exactly what happened. On October 8, 1996, Gnonom released QCRACK.EXE - a 50kb command line tool which took the challenge string you were supposed to call in to IDGAMES and provided the unlock response code. Now, for just $10, anyone could have access to HUNDREDS of dollars worth of the best software on the market, making possible a new age of piracy long before the internet was robust enough to take over. Needless to say, my friends and I were in on it. Since then, I've easily purchased each title twice over in various packs and for numerous consoles. The DOOM and DOOM II package for the PSX ("PSX DOOM") was a no-brainer with its "new lighting effects" and "super fast speed" (30fps - ooOOoo), and who couldn't resist DOOM and DOOM II on the portable GBA. In fact, just days ago I but Doom -again- this time on Xbox Live. Gotta say, it's still a fast-action, wall-bashing blast! *QUAKE, ULTIMATE DOOM, DOOM2, DOOM2 Master Levels, FINAL DOOM, HEXEN, HEXEN Deathkings of the Dark Citadel, HERETIC, and WOLFENSTEIN 3D. 4/4/08 - Rock Band: Further Adventures 
Ya know, of all the things we'd heard about Rock Band, we didn't expect to have so much fun customizing our characters.4/2/08 - Disable UAC for Administrators only Our sior. net admin passed along a great tip to me today:You can disable the -sometimes annoying- User Account Control (UAC) prompts for members of the Administrators group, while leaving them active for limited user accounts. This is great if you don't want others accessing or changing system settings. Disabling the alerts, however, requires editing the Windows Registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\ ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin - 0 Enable, 1 Disable, 2 unknown (default) 4/1/08 - April fools is a joke Pranks I pulled:
3/18/08 - New Look I know I'm 10+ years late, but I decided to make the jump to a coherent "website" look. My primary goal with inferno999.com is still just to host a few things for personal use, so I'm not too worried that it looks like something from 1998. Hey, at least it's not built with frames ;). I've also abandoned the BETA site as it's been confirmed Dreamhost is notoriously slow at processing PHP on demand. I'd rather have a site that loads immediately than one that's fully automated.3/17/08 - Rock Band!
There's little more to say about Rock Band other than BUY IT NOW. NOW!!! Everything awesome about both music and gaming
are wrapped up in one complete package, including karaoke, playing along in guitar/bass Hero style, and for the first time ever,
smashing it out on a drum kit. It's simple, it's fun, and with a complete set of 4 or more players, it's an absolute blast.
As Gina said, "this may save rock music" from the current spiral in to rap-crap.For those interested in checking out what it has to offer, or in learning the songs for future reference , check out my Gaming section to listen in on the complete "on-disc" song list. And of course, Happy St. Patty's day! Here's hoping you celebrated yours in style. 3/06/08 - Beta site I've stepped away from this site for a couple weeks to try and get my PHP/MySql/CSS based site up and running. Current progress is viewable by clicking the Inferno999 BETA button on the left. While it's going well, I'm not satisfied with performance, and I think it's DreamHost's fault. So, for now, I'm putting it on the backburner.BTW - if you're here from the ACIV411 forums, you probably want the <-- GPS Section 2/20/08 - XKCD I've been reading XKCD for a while now. Tonight's (this morning's?) hit a little too close to home ;) 2/19/08 - The war is over. Blue Ray For the Win!! Toshiba has officially discontinued its HD DVD businesses.We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop...While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality."Toshiba then went on and said that supplies and shipments of HD DVD recorders and players will begin to dwindle by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. 2/18/08 - A-O-Hell AOL is evil. Spawn-of-the-devil evil. It's marketed to help make the internet less painful for "average users" by providing an all-in-one, dumbed-down solution for connecting, surfing, and messaging. In truth, it does exactly that, but doing so requires "protecting" users from themselves by taking over pretty much everything. Again, can't fault 'em for that, but that's not why they're evil.The PROBLEM is once you start using AOL there's no way out -- they offer no tools whatsoever to export your personal data. They're drug pushers plain and simple, distributing free-trials in droves, knowing and hiding the fact that once you use it to build an address book and save bookmarks/messages, you'll never be able to leave without also loosing everything. How hard would it be to include an export to CSV or HTML function? ...About as hard as it would be to lose millions of customers. EVIL. Fortunately, there's hope. ePreserver is able to pull all personal data from AOL and free you from the dependence. I've personally used it and it works GREAT, automatically connecting to individual AOL accounts and Microsoft Outlook profiles. Only catch is it'll cost ya $25, but for how simple it is to use (and how much time it saved me), I gotta say it's worth it. 2/17/08 - Completed all achievements in Call of Duty 4!!! OMFG@#$%^! And here I was thinking 'Epilogue' was difficult on Veteran difficulty, 'No Fighting in the War Room' was even harder D= !! At least Epilogue was close quarters enough to allot benefit from flashbangs and environmental variables. This ... OMG. There's nary a checkpoint in the whole level, and it must be completed in 9 minutes. Go fast = die. Go slow = run out of time and die. The only was is to painstakingly learn the possible locations of every enemy and then hope for a lucky run. Just like 'Epilogue' it's two to four hits and you're dead, depending on where you're hit, and there's NO time to wait around and heal. Together, they've made COD4 the most challengingly fun game I've ever wanted to snap in half... er.. played. Thank god the torturous nightmare is over. 2/16/08 - Recover Your Local Administrator Password (Windows XP) Lets face it, passwords that don't get used often get forgotten, and one that gets used less often than most is the Local Administrator account password. Unless you're a power user, chances are the last time you used it was when you set it the first time you booted your computer, and I'll bet you didn't make a password-recovery disk, did you ;). Well, worry not; if you (or tech support) need access to the account, there's hope: The OphCrack LiveCD. Boot to it and in a matter of minutes -?oof? the local admin password is on screen, no intervention required. I've seen other tools wich either just don't work, or require skill to run and safely change the admin password. This just pops it right up on screen. Couldn't be easier and works a treat!Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman's original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds.Downloaded from: Sourceforge.net 2/15/08 - Windows Vista Snipping Tool 
Vista comes with another often overlooked though quite needed "Snipping Tool". It allows you to do what you've been able
to do on a mac now for years: take EASY screenshoots. Capture the entire screen, the active window, a rectangle, or even a
'freestyle' selection. Once captured, you can save the file to disk as HTML, JPG, GIF, or PNG. If you have ever used SnagIt,
it? very similar. No more need to paste your screenshots into paint or word to edit or use the screen-shot. It already does
this for you! You can also use Free-From to ?raw what you want to snip from your screen, and highlight / notate or even e-mail
what you capture with the built in post-capture editor.Best part is, it? built right into Vista! Start -> Accessories -> Snipping tool Or, just type snip in the start-search bar.  2/14/08 - ROBOCOPY Vista comes with a cool new command line tool called Robocopy, able to copy/move not just files, but also permissions, security, attributes, etc. There's a host of options to choose from, one of which the ability to specify files within a certain age range. For example, if you want to move/backup ONLY files older than a certain date but ALSO keep the directory structure. Not something you need every day, but when you need it, there's no other way...unless you've got a copy of ScriptLogic's enterprise-only solution, "Secure Copy".Useage: ROBOCOPY source_folder destination_folder [file(s)_to_copy] [options] For the aforementioned example, the syntax would be: c:\>Robocopy s:\whatever c:\toburn /s /e /Minage:20061231 :More details: 2/12/08 - Outlook's Secure Temp Folder 
Ever swear you saved an e-mail attachment after making changes to it, only to find that it's nowhere on your computer? Ever opened
an e-mail with embedded images, only to find the images are replaced with red X's?If you save changes to an open attachment by hitting "save" instead of "save as", the file is saved to a default super-hidden, super-secure folder, never to be seen again. This folder, known as the "Outlook secure temp folder," is: c:\Documents and settings\[profilename]\Local settings\Temporary Internet Files\OLKxxx (where xxx is a random string). Because its purpose is to lock down security on attachments, it cannot be seen from explorer unless you know its EXACT path, including the random string. The same folder is used for showing embedded images in a message; if this folder is effectively full (there's a limit to how many "image(01)" files it can create and contain) then it cannot open the image and a red X is displayed in its place. You need to purge the folder to restore functionality, but how can you if you can't find it? One trick I've been using to get access into the Outlook Secure temp folder is to type %temp% into an explorer address bar (or the run box). This seems to let you into explorer with elevated privileges, allowing you to navigate the temp folders and see the OLK folder. Unfortunately, it appears something has changed, as the %temp% has trick hasn't worked on many of the newer the systems I've been on lately. Instead, I've had to fall back to digging through the registry to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\[version]\Outlook\Security\OutlookSecureTempFolder which states the direct path to the current Outlook Secure Temp Folder path, then copy-pasting this value directly into an address bar. Clumsy and dangerous if you're walking someone through the process. After a bit of playing around, I've discovered a MUCH better solution, unlocking access to the OLK folder permanently. Basically, you place an empty desktop.ini file in the temporary internet files folder (or erase its contents if it already exists). I've created a simple EXE (with beloved Winrar) to do this, available in the featured downloads section, making it a one-click-fix. Just double click and there's the OLK folder, ripe for purging or collecting lost files. From then on, you can navigate to the OLK folder through explorer normally. Woo! OLK_Unlock&Reveal(XP).exe OLK_Unlock&Reveal(Vista).exe 2/12/08 - Outlook's NK2 file 
One of the more common tech requests I get is for help editing or locating the saved addresses that are
automatically stored and pop up in the "to" field in a new message in Outlook. Eventually, people start using it to store
their addresses instead of the actual address book. Since this functionality is really just an extension of inline
AutoComplete, there is no BUILT-IN way to view, edit, or export these addresses; they're all stored in a special "NK2" file:[ProfileName]\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\[OLprofile].NK2 Until now, the only way to edit the list was to type in a name, drop down, and hit delete. Any attempts to open or edit the NK2 file would corrupt it. If something happened to your Outlook profile, often the NK2 file would go with it, and the addresses were lost forever. Well, not any more. Recently, I ran across a neat little NK2 editor which displays all email records stored in NK2 files and allows you to easily export these records into text/html/xml file." Check it out: LINK: nirsoft.net Download mirror 2/11/08 - Downloads moved! If you've come here looking for downloads, they're no longer on the front page.<-- CLICK THE DOWNLOADS BUTTON from now on. Why? I've decided to start a new non-personal-life blog, visible to the outside world (and Google searches) in hopes of actually providing something useful to the webernets. Tech and game reviews, experiences, tips and tricks, updated whenever the hell I feel like it, with no need for a damn MySpace account to read it. For now, I'm just marking it up in HTML, but I plan on running MovableType... eventually. For example, after FINALLY getting the COD4 Mile High Club achievement, I decided to slap together a new userbar to flaunt my "membership." Maybe, just MAYBE, someone will feel equally proud of themselves, search the Goog, and use my nifty Call of Duty 4 userbar. If not, well hell, I had fun making it: .ub.png) 2/10/08 - COD4 Mile High Club!!! 
OMFG, after three hours of straight back-to-back attempts, I finally got the "Mile High Club" achievement in Call of Duty 4.
Never in my life have I EVER played, or even SEEN a more difficult minute of tactical first-person-shooter action. ...Which makes it THE
most intense and exciting video game challenge I think I've ever faced. None of this hanging back and sniping from afar like Halo 3
Legendary difficulty; you have one ludicrous minute to complete the entire level. Stop for a moment and you wil fail. Get hit, and
you die almost immediately. Three hours of running the same 45 second stretch over and over, trying to get every single movement perfect.
Finally, I can sleep again.2/09/08 - New Music: Granite 
Added an AMAZING new Drum&Bass track called Granite by Pendulum to the top of my music player.YOU LISTEN NOW! 2/08/08 Added a new tool (Wireless Key Viewer) to the Network Downloads section. It basically reveals stored WiFi passwords on any computer. Great for if you've forgotten yours (or want your friend's).Added a few documentation excerpts to the GPS section, mainly to use in forums. Hopefully someone finds them helpful. < --back |
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©2009 Inferno999. All Rights Reserved. LOGIN The views expressed here are my own and in no way represent the views or policies of any other entity or corporation |
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(no wheels, target stays in goal)
(no powered wheels, target stays in goal) 42pc
(no wheels, clean) 4 pieces
(no wheels) 49pc
(target returns to building area) 6 pieces
What happened to the File menu?
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To change the default save type so everyone can view documents you've created: click the Office Button, Word Options, Save, "Save documents in this format" drop-down box. Choose Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)