only to recently recognize that even today they can help maintain Registry hygiene.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Do you have confidence in your SATA controller?
I certainly don't in my J-Micron SATA controller which is the secondary SATA controller on my ASUS P5K motherboard. The screen shot below shows a CRC check done on a bunch of files. The CRC's were generated on the same drive and then verified back as soon as they were calculated.
Yes, in between taking the CRC's and reading them back, there are now 194 CRC mismatches. Maybe J-Micron consider that acceptable, but I certainly don't, the words "epic" and "fail" spring to mind.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
PCSX2 is a working PS2 emulator that can play many PS2 games some even at full speed and with graphical enhancements
Wireless Performance Issues with Vista and the ReadyNAS | The Bott Blog
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Saturday, November 07, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Microsoft and excessive packaging
So I ordered some Microsoft points from Play.com because they were cheaper than buying them directly with the credit card on Xbox Live. I expected them to show up stuck to a small piece of cardboard a bit like the iTunes vouchers you see at the supermarket checkout, instead I got this:-
Yes, that is a whole DVD sized case for one credit card sized points card that is useless when its been used once. To compound this example of excessive packaging madness, I actually ordered two 2100 points cards, which both came in their own box, because it was almost £1 cheaper to order two 2100 points cards than one 4200 points card. Of course, both were cheaper than actually buying the points from Microsoft themselves through Xbox live. Next time I buy points over live instead of mail order, I am tempted to phone Microsoft customer services and ask for my free DVD case.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Linden Scripting
I've been dab
bling in Second Life a little recently. I always wanted to see what was out there on the Second Life grid, since I'm fascinated with video games of all kinds (though my friend insists "second life is not a videogame!" ). When people talk informally about second life, they usually tell you about seedy virtual strip bars and walls covered in phallic imagery. While Second Life is probably the only game where you can buy a fully functional avatar "Penis with HUD" in actual fact the main "grid" has much more interesting content, like the Chernobyl exhibit and Lost Gardens of Appolo and one of my personal favourites, Da Vinci Isle. Second life does look dated compared to the beautiful graphics in more modern video games, but that's kinda missing the point. The whole game is organic, user created content. If you enjoyed exploration games like Metroid or Tomb Raider, you can certainly waste plenty of time exploring around Second Life.
What really caught my interest was the Linden Scripting Language. Objects in Second Life can be manipulated by attaching scripts to them. The language is C like in its syntax, but obviously without things like pointers and suchlike. Bizarrely there's no arrays either, instead it's possible to create type agnostic lists, which can store any kind of variables (except other lists). Though the syntax for working with them is a little fiddly. What it does give is the sort of instant gratification that you used to get when you programmed in BASIC on the old 8-bit machines. Being able to instantly see an object react to your code is much more rewarding than a boring old console window that most beginners start with. It makes me wonder if anyone has studied how effective LSL or something similar is at getting people interested in programming. Certainly I've heard lots of people put off just by loading something like Visual Studio. Any barriers we can dissolve that prevent people getting into programming are good. Yes I know, LSL is far from perfect, especially when we get onto bigger projects. Then again you could hardly describe C, C++ and Java as perfect either.
What Second Life also encourages is the kind of cooperation and teamwork amongst people with different talents. Those who can forge the shapes and scenery often need people who are skilled in scripting to bring their visions to life. This kind of cooperation is of course vital on larger software projects, particularly games.
Second Life is certainly an interesting community and though the games interface can seem a little clumsy at times it's easily mastered. I'm not sure at the moment if I'll be bored with looking around on there in another couple of weeks or if I'll be going back more often than that, but it's certainly worth a look.
bling in Second Life a little recently. I always wanted to see what was out there on the Second Life grid, since I'm fascinated with video games of all kinds (though my friend insists "second life is not a videogame!" ). When people talk informally about second life, they usually tell you about seedy virtual strip bars and walls covered in phallic imagery. While Second Life is probably the only game where you can buy a fully functional avatar "Penis with HUD" in actual fact the main "grid" has much more interesting content, like the Chernobyl exhibit and Lost Gardens of Appolo and one of my personal favourites, Da Vinci Isle. Second life does look dated compared to the beautiful graphics in more modern video games, but that's kinda missing the point. The whole game is organic, user created content. If you enjoyed exploration games like Metroid or Tomb Raider, you can certainly waste plenty of time exploring around Second Life.What really caught my interest was the Linden Scripting Language. Objects in Second Life can be manipulated by attaching scripts to them. The language is C like in its syntax, but obviously without things like pointers and suchlike. Bizarrely there's no arrays either, instead it's possible to create type agnostic lists, which can store any kind of variables (except other lists). Though the syntax for working with them is a little fiddly. What it does give is the sort of instant gratification that you used to get when you programmed in BASIC on the old 8-bit machines. Being able to instantly see an object react to your code is much more rewarding than a boring old console window that most beginners start with. It makes me wonder if anyone has studied how effective LSL or something similar is at getting people interested in programming. Certainly I've heard lots of people put off just by loading something like Visual Studio. Any barriers we can dissolve that prevent people getting into programming are good. Yes I know, LSL is far from perfect, especially when we get onto bigger projects. Then again you could hardly describe C, C++ and Java as perfect either.
What Second Life also encourages is the kind of cooperation and teamwork amongst people with different talents. Those who can forge the shapes and scenery often need people who are skilled in scripting to bring their visions to life. This kind of cooperation is of course vital on larger software projects, particularly games.
Second Life is certainly an interesting community and though the games interface can seem a little clumsy at times it's easily mastered. I'm not sure at the moment if I'll be bored with looking around on there in another couple of weeks or if I'll be going back more often than that, but it's certainly worth a look.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
We need to repeal 12 years of vile laws attacking our liberty
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
YouTube - Microsoft BOB - A tour of Microsoft's forgotten desktop "enhancement"
What is Microsoft BOB? In this Youtube exclusive I'll show you one of Microsoft's failed experiments with alternative user interfaces.
WirelessKeyView: Recover lost WEP/WPA key/password stored by Wireless Zero Configuration service
Recover lost WEP/WPA keys stored by Wireless Zero Configuration service
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Good simulation of the old Amiga Workbench, and free chip tunes too!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, August 01, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
ProcessLibrary.com - The online resource for process information!
Connect My Car - Experts in hands-free car kit sales and installation
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Monday, June 22, 2009
Is Radiant Silvergun really dated?
I've been playing a lot of Radiant Silvergun lately. It's sad to notice my Saturn stuttering more and more on those grainy but great MPEG videos in the game. The game really is a work of genius, its levels bathed in colour as they sweep and swirl around the screen, its bosses spectacular and challenging, its soundtrack mesmerizing. There's no doubting it's place amongst the greatest shooters of all time.
It's hard not to mention Radiant Silvergun without thinking about it's spiritual successor, Ikaruga. Ikaruga is, of course, also a stunning shooter. Its pace even more relentless than Radiant Silvergun, it demands constant attention and focus and is as brutally unforgiving as its older brother. Of course, we've had a stunning port of Ikaruga to Xbox live, but it looks like we'll never see Radiant Silvergun on anything other than the Saturn and the ST-V. I for one think this is a shame. The real reason we will never see a port is probably due to the effort it would take. The Sega Saturn had some very esoteric hardware, quite alien from anything in circulation today. Radiant Silvergun would certainly have been written in non-portable Saturn-optimised assembly code. Emulation would probably be out of the question, since the Saturn was so unusual that accurate emulation is probably impossible even for the Xbox 360. Basically, creating an Xbox live version would most likely mean starting from scratch.
Imagine if that were to happen, a high definition, widescreen Radiant Silvergun sounds very appealing and yet, it would never be Radiant Silvergun. It might even be a better game in its own right, but Xbox Live Ikaruga is Ikaruga through and through, but when the last Saturn in the world finally dies, Radiant Silvergun will die with it.
Personally, I think that is a shame. Treasure CEO Masato Maegawa recently said, when asked if we could look forward to a port of Radiant Silvergun for Xbox Live Arcade, "If you play Radiant Silvergun nowadays, it's certainly aged in assorted ways, and I'm not sure they're all good." Not counting aesthetics, in my opinion very little has aged in Radiant Silvergun, particularly not the game-play or level design. The game plays out like an epic space opera, its bosses stunningly varied and challenging, its pacing swaying between fast and slow, but never anything less than intense. In comparison, Ikaruga is a rock concert, its frantic, adrenaline pumping levels topped by an even louder, more intense boss battle at the end. Really, the two games are quite different, both brilliant and more than worthy of any hardcore gamers attention.
Even after all this time, there's not been a shooter that has come close to being a better Radiant Silvergun. There really isn't another shooter like it that I am aware of (please mail me if you know of one!) Let's hope that in two or three hundred years time, if humanity is still around, there's still some way of playing Radiant Silvergun. Be attitude for gains!
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
vxSniffer is a complete network monitoring tool for Windows CE-based devices.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Laptop Repair Help » HP Compaq laptop manuals with step-by-step disassembly instructions
Service manuals for Compaq/HP laptops
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
ReadBleach.com - No waiting. No archives. Just Bleach Manga, Right Now!
GameSpot Forums - Ikaruga - Quotes (spoilers?)
I will not die until I achieve something.
Even though the ideal is high, I never give in.
Therefore, I never die with regrets.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Mark's Blog : Registry Junk: A Windows Fact of Life
- Interesting contrast to Ed Bott's opinion - post by buckoa51
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Campaigners monitored by civil servants | UK news | The Guardian
MATRIXSYNTH: Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
I believe in Karma again!
Sadly, in these modern times there are elements at work in our country that threaten our freedom and our way of life. Even more worryingly, one of these people is our current home secretary. Yes, whacky Jacqui, who wants to ban cartoon porn and make it so that you have to show an ID card to buy a pay-as-you-go mobile phone has been caught fiddling her expenses to buy pornography, courtesy of the tax payer.
Now, this is old news, but frankly its so funny that I couldn't help blogging about it, oh and hopefully Google might index these pages for the keywords "Jacqui Smith is an evil bitch" :)
Meanwhile, enjoy the story on the register!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/30/jacqui_expenses_entertainment/
Now, this is old news, but frankly its so funny that I couldn't help blogging about it, oh and hopefully Google might index these pages for the keywords "Jacqui Smith is an evil bitch" :)
Meanwhile, enjoy the story on the register!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/30/jacqui_expenses_entertainment/
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
Using Google Calendar, Thunderbird and Lighting to full effect - Ubuntu Forums
Synchronize your mobile with Thunderbird and Sunbird | www.birdiesync.com
A password vault is as mandatory as anti-virus | Zero Day | ZDNet.com
• View topic - If I schedule a backup for 1pm and the PC is not turned on
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Weekly auto blog post (weekly)
http://127.0.0.1:4001/
Creative SBS Vivid 80 Red Speakers - SVP
Might be good for your kids PC when you get it fixed
Campbell Smith: Anti-piracy law a reasonable way to protect artists' rights - Politics - NZ Herald News - Annotated
- They would then prepare evidence, complete with details of the names of the copyrighted files being uploaded, exact timestamps and the protocol used, and send it to the relevant ISP. They would never see the personal details of the person behind that IP address.
- In other words, the music industry nominates itself police, judge, jury and executioner. I hope for the sake of everyone that this law is never passed. - post by buckoa51
Reviews for Diigo: Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes :: Firefox Add-ons
- An all around excellent tool
- qwerty - post by buckoa51
heise Security - c't Projekte - Offline-Update
The heise Security Offline update maker is a viable alternative to the now defunct Autopatcher. It works by downloading the updates directly from Microsoft themselves and then compiling them into a DVD that can be burned and run on the target system.
- The heise Security Offline update maker is a viable alternative to the now defunct Autopatcher. It works by downloading the updates directly from Microsoft themselves and then compiling them into a DVD that can be burned and run on the target system. - post by buckoa51
Why the Wii will never get any better - Annotated
- seriously, what the hell were they thinking with 512MB of internal storage and no sane infrastructure to ever expand it externally?
- This is a terrible oversight. For a console that is designed with ease of use in mind, do they really expect Joe public to copy games to and from SD cards? Surely they could have seen this one comming. - post by buckoa51
- All in all, the Wii’s software stack is designed with little to no future proofing. There are basically zero provisions for any future updates; even obvious things like new storage devices or game patches.
- A shame. I still held out hopes for a Wii hard drive, looks like that's out of the question. Not that it was very likey in the first place. Oh well - post by buckoa51
- Hard copies of both the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary and the current edition of T
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Stardock Fences - Best desktop enhancement ever?
I remember when Yahoo Widgets (then Konfabulator) came onto the scene and suddenly all my geeky friends were plastering their desktops in weather forecast meters, network monitors and other such oh-so-useful little windows. Of course I was eager to try this for myself, but actually ended up uninstalling the whole thing because, well things were just not tidy. I am the kind of person that has a lot of icons on their desktop and they would get obscured behind widgets or tidy themselves away behind them.
Well, those champions of the custom desktop, Stardock Software have solved the problem. Fences, a new free program just released is the answer to your messy desktop related prayers. Now you can create little fances, or mini-desktops on your desktop. Stick your icons inside a fence and they won't go astray under any of the other clutter, er I mean useful desktop widgets, that you already have running. Such a wonderfully simple idea that it's remarkable nobody thought of it sooner. In fact, I'm told that the KDE 4 dekstop has a similar system. Linux doing a user interface better than Windows? Whatever next (I'm just kidding Linux fans, please do not flame me).
Have a look for yourself http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ It's still in Beta at the moment but seems pretty stable.
Well, those champions of the custom desktop, Stardock Software have solved the problem. Fences, a new free program just released is the answer to your messy desktop related prayers. Now you can create little fances, or mini-desktops on your desktop. Stick your icons inside a fence and they won't go astray under any of the other clutter, er I mean useful desktop widgets, that you already have running. Such a wonderfully simple idea that it's remarkable nobody thought of it sooner. In fact, I'm told that the KDE 4 dekstop has a similar system. Linux doing a user interface better than Windows? Whatever next (I'm just kidding Linux fans, please do not flame me).
Have a look for yourself http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/ It's still in Beta at the moment but seems pretty stable.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Google Mail transition
These days I'm pretty organised within my digital domain. My bookmarks are all sorted by Diigo, my computer indexed by Google Desktop, important paperwork scanned and OCR'd and backed up. I've even had people compliment me on how quickly I can find information. Stark contrast to the state of my non-digital documents which I normally have to hunt through for hours to find a note I wrote last week.
In spite of this, my e-mail is, to be quite fair, a complete mess. My mum, bless her, has her inbox better organised than me. So I decided yesterday that it was time to do some serious spring cleaning of the old e-mail system. After all, e-mail, for all its insecurities and shortcomings, is still a vital part of both my business and my social calendar. Up until now I've been running my own IMAP server, which pulls down mail from my Yahoo and ISP e-mail accounts and makes it readable on whichever particular PC I happen to be using at the time. This system worked fine for the most part, but requires the PC running the mail server to be left on. External IMAP access was possible over the internet, but just watching the number of hack attempts on that port through my firewall made me feel a little uneasy, though moving the port to something random helped a lot. External access was also fairly slow from a lot of places. Researching alternatives, I noticed Google mail offered to do everything I needed, plus give me a snazzy web interface. Sure, there are privacy concerns with a service that seems geared to archive every email you ever write, but to be fair, you can't expect a great deal of privacy from any kind of e-mail unless you use PGP.
So that was the plan, move to Google Mail and sort out the mess that was my inbox. Starting with an inbox clogged with around 4000 messages, I decided to do some serious pruning and cleaning before I tried moving to Google Mail. I've always used Thunderbird for my IMAP email reading, it's way faster than Outlook. Firstly, I decided I would archive any e-mail over two years old. You might ask why I would want to keep mail this old and to be fair I don't have a good answer to that, but storage is so cheap these days you might as well. To archive off my old messages, I used a utility called Thunderstor. With this little utility it is just a matter of copying your messages to a local folder, running the program and saving the messages to a folder of your choice. That took a dent out of my inbox, but it was still a messy pile of digital papers.
Sifting through my E-mail, I divided things up into several categories. I'd like to see more e-mail from real people in my inbox, so firstly I set up filters to move all the various automated e-mail into separate folders. Mail shots from Amazon and Play (you might consider this Spam that I am actually interested in) automatically gets sent to an "Adverts" folder. I then set up separate folders for each e-mail newsletter I was subscribed to (I really should unsubscribe from some of these). Finally, I set up a separate folder for receipts (your order has shipped, etc), Ebay and for anything to do with my websites/business. Finally, for the forums and places I read, I made a "notifications" folder for those "xyz has replied to a thread you are subscribed to" messages. Running each filter as I created it seriously thinned out my inbox. For the folders such as adverts and notifications I set the retention policy to 180 days, thus automatically pruning older messages that were of no longer of any interest or significance.
At this point I was making good headway and I decided to set up my Google Mail account. This was all relatively straightforward. Enabling IMAP was a matter of ticking an option and then adding the account to Thunderbird. Google provide walkthroughs for each step, so its pretty painless. The guide I found at lifehacker also had some handy tips. Next up was the challenge of moving messages from my existing IMAP server into Google mail. I considered Mark Lyon's Google Gmail Loader, but that messes with the timestamps on messages which was unacceptable to me. In the end I opted to add both IMAP servers into Thunderbird and move my messages manually, folder by folder.
Manually copying the messages like this was way more time consuming than I originally anticipated. Largely due to bugs in Thunderbird. Messages with no subject would not copy, setting Thunderbird into some kind of infinite loop of logging onto my Google mail account and doing nothing. Furthermore, Thunderbird frequently gave up in the middle of a copy operation, one time even insisting that my IMAP server was not an IMAP server. It took a great deal of time to copy everything, but having got that far I was determined to see it through. For the last few messages I had to switch to Outlook instead of Thunderbird, I never though that an IMAP operation would work better in Outlook than Thunderbird, but there you go. I imagine that copying masses of mail between IMAP servers is not something people do very often and so has probably not been extensively tested by the Tunderbird developers.
Finally, with my mail all safely in the hands of mother Google (stop sniggering at the back, I already said you can't expect privacy for your emails unless you use PGP!) there was just the matter of bringing my existing Thunderbird message filters across to the new account. Fortunately this is easy as pie. Thunderbird stores filters in a plain text file called “msgFilterRules.dat”. It's in your thunderbird profile folder (on XP that's somewhere near C:\Documents and Settings\Bucko\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(random characters here).default. Making the filters work on the new server was just a matter of a simple search and replace for the server name and bingo, next time Tunderbird started the new filters were in place.
So, a slightly more painful transition than I had anticipated, but now things are running nicely and I can't imagine going back to my old system. I notice a handy add-on for Firefox called "FireGPG" that even allows you to use GPG with Google Mails web interface. Would be nice to install this to my Ironkey to provide a portable GPG e-mail solution. Maybe I'll post again when I get that working. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a mail, if you know my address ;)
