Hello Again

Hello there. It's been a few (three, four?) weeks since my last post, sorry for not updating more but I've been quite busy lately. (More posts about those things later prolly...)

First of all, I've been enjoying my two weeks vacation. Or at least one week: I got sick in the first week forcing me to stay in bed and watch movies. (Which is not that bad.)

Speaking of movies, I've seen a few recently. I can recommend V For Vendetta if you haven't seen it yet. Lord Of War is nice but not that special. Ice Age 2 is still cute. I'm also expending my video-collecting with philosophical movies. I Heart Huckabees for example, was a really good movie. If you're in into lucid dreaming (which I am trying to learn): you might like Waking Life.

I've also been fiddling around with Imagemagick and other image manipulation problems in PHP, more about that later... Heck, I even experimented with Ruby On Rails.

Gameswise: I've played the San Andreas Multiplayer (SA:MP) betas, which were running surpisingly smoothly with 90 player at once. I've also played a little MTA: race again.
I also picked up Dreamfall 2 and I am really sorry I've just begun to play it. The story is incredibly cool (especially considering the lucid dreaming topic I became interested in, but no spoilers). The graphics really create a supporting atmosphere and look nice. This really may be called an adventure. Or even better: interactive movie (although that term has been used to describe games since what... 1995). It stands together with Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) on my list of favorite modern adventure games!
I will probably finish Dreamfall this weekend, I have to :p.

So there you have it: a quick update. I will post full reviews and news in the near future. But now: I'm off to bed (just had a long Dreamfall session)...

Night.

Technorati Tags: Personal, Update, various.

Dualscreen Glory

Becoming annoyed by the lack of real screen estate, I decided to add a second screen to my rig (still CRT though). This brings my total resolution up to 3200x1200, which is nice.

Configuring the thing however was a real pain. nView (that stupid bloatware you get with the nVidia drivers) decided to make Windows believe that I only have one monitor, which happens to have a fat-ass resolution of 3200x1200. So e.g. all my games decided it was time to kick those normal resolutions out of the door. Oblivion for example, did this by crashing when I wanted to play on 1280x1024 (my normal resolution).

A few click later, I was looking at this (bad quality, sorry). Nice view but both my eyes and especially my XFX 7800GTX card couldn't handle the load. I wanted to play on one screen while keeping an eye on my RSS feeds and mail on the other.

Solution: completely disabling nView. (Services, msconfig,...) And eureka: Windows recognizes my screens as two separate ones.

Why this long rant? I'm making a point here: driver vendors: stop including bloatware! Please.

Another example: people who have tried to install drivers on the otherwise very nice IBM^H^H^H Lenovo Thinkpad laptops will know what I mean: all those toys and tools completely cripple your machine. A taskbar with 20 unnecessary icons is just plain annoying...

But since everything is working now, I'm quite happy. I only wish I didn't have to spend the 15 minutes on it.

Technorati Tags: Technology, dualscreen.

OMG!!! Ponies!!!

It's the first of April and the Internet surely has noticed it.

A few of the greatest jokes today:

http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/31/1644225.shtml: slashdot changes design for wider appeal. From now on, all article titles must contain "OMG", "!!!" and caps.
It went well until this article came along ;).

For the ones feeling lucky today: try out Google's new service (their blogpost), be sure to take the tour! Also, this is hilarious:

Profile Upload Rejected
[...]
...ha ha, wasn't that amusing and harmless and mostly in good taste and not
all psychologically damaging under various and sundry aspects of contemporary
tort law, please don't sue us; and/or
[...]

Priceless!

Maybe you're also interested in working at Google, learning about the technology behind it or trying a new kind of search. Have a beverage[1] while you're at it. And if you're using Google Earth: watch out for visitors from above.

By the way: if you're in the hacking scene, check out this new exploit for openSSH!

Wikipedia also has a comprehensive list about April 1st.

Of course, one can go on and on. Check out Matt Cutts' post about April Fools.

[1]: I would really like to have a sip from the Sero-Tonic-Water, it looks delicious!

P.S.: Yahoo just bought all the Web2.0 companies.

Technorati Tags: April Fools, jokes, teh funniez.