Tech, Gaming and Bile!
Archive for November, 2008
Windows explorer status bar.. in memorial
Nov 25th
When the change to Vista came it sounded the deathknell for a single UI element that I loved.
Within windows explorer you could enable something known as the Status bar, along this you would see information such as what security zone you were in, how much space you had left, how many files were in a folder and what size of data this represented.
It was this ability to see not only how much space you had left but how big in terms of storage capacity the folder I had open was consuming that I loved – system info at a glance that was germain to my task.
Not even OSX showed you this information, going out of its way to hide how big a folder is and breaking up the information as to how much space you have left into little locations across applications and folder views.
The only thing I wished it did was count up the values of the folders within that folder, but this would have made explorer very slow. I wonder if this is why browsing the file system in vista is very slow because this functionality was added, but for the tooltip hover instead of the status bar!
My hopes for this to make a return in win7 were dashed when I opened up explorer and it was just the same as vista.
Am I alone in wishing for this little UI element to return? Do you know of a way of returning this to vista/win7? If so, would you be willing to share? 
Surely I can’t be the only person who mourns it’s loss?!
PHN episode 67
Nov 18th
Quickie one this time around.
Stream it here – podshow
Show notes
Song: Angel and the Reruns – Why Do Good Girls Like Bad Boys
Rocketboom job loss, games I’m playing, bump update and gig I’m attending.
Song: Blues Brothers – Everybody needs somebody
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We’re not alone, pt 8
Nov 17th
At least we now have a boost in fire power, sadly they’ve all upgraded to these damn BFG’s.
Can’t we ever get a break?
Seems our ‘cuda pilots aren’t having much luck either.. a few scrapes with a number of big craft almost always end up with our guys having to turn tails and run.
That’s a damn big one, there’s gotta be something more going on. Whenever I press about them all the command staff get sheepish. Anyway, I’m too tired for this shit right now.
The whole squad appears to be shattered, thankfully we get a few days break from the action to sleep, sleep and more sleep.
5 days of restful bliss and we’re back to the grind…
The back of my mind is trembling at the thought of this being the lobstermen – they’re bad enough with a small team, a full on terror mission would be worse than the finest horror Mr King could dream of.
As we set up initial pointp; Melanie spots something in the shadows.
The silhouette looks depressingly familiar, don’t let me be right. Oh please please please please….
Oh crap.
“We’ve kicked their arses before, we’ll kick them again.. lets remind them why humans aren’t going down without a fight!” I yell out, picking up the cue Melanie and a couple others unleash a few volleys into the creep. They seem even more resistant to our fire, that or the guns just aren’t as effective on land.
Just as team confidence begins to rise, it takes a dip as the cry of “What the fuck is THAT?!” rings out.
A brain in a mini UFO? That’s just creepy. Of course, Gung-ho Greer lets out her soon to be trade mark battle cry “Twat it!” and lobs a grenade over the skip.
“What the hell” I think to myself and chuck one over. Lets see what these things are made of.
It takes a couple more blasta rounds before we take it down, I’m about to bemoan at how useless those grenades are the fallen brain craft lets off an almighty explosion.
We’re gonna have to be extra careful around these fuckers, take them down too close to each other and you’re toast it seems.
A few more pitched battles and we’re gaining the upper hand.
A couple of UFO brains head towards two of the guys in the warehouse, who take a few pot shots at them landing squarely on the left hand one when Melanie fires a couple of helpful rounds their way. The left one drops and detonates, amazingly the other was in range and blows up too.
Talk about luck, don’t think she’ll ever shut up about this one!
Gerhard takes a moment to have a look at one of the corpses and provides a little comic relief
“hey guys, when did Ann Summers make the ‘rampant xenomorph’?”
I get even better news, only 2 blips left on the motion scanner and one of them is pinned down in a corner.
Just as I’m ordering Melanie to conduct a search of the warehouse with Otto, a grenade whizzes out of the 2nd floor window knocking Stuart off his feet.
“Get off that roof now!” Otto yells. Stuart is too dazed to move when there’s a sickening BOOM
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Melanie and Otto race up the stairs and launch themselves at this creature – it never stood a chance. And with a little bit of teasing, the lobsterman comes out of his, er.. shell long enough for my two guys to chop it down.
All clear. Time to clean up and take off.
The ride back is silent, we all knew it would happen again. We can’t keep running mission after mission without losing some here and there.
Still doesn’t make it any easier and it brings everything to sharp focus. That could have been anyone and it certainly shows we need more firepower.
When we get back I immediately demand more resources be spent on researching those damn cannons or this will become a much more regular occurrence. The commander relents and orders some of the other projects have their staffing transferred.
He also lets slip as to why they’ve been cagey recently. The number crunchers have pointed out what could be an alien base not far from our pacific base.
This day gets worse, it’s about to get a whole lot worse for Stuarts family. That’s one job of the commanders I don’t envy.
I tip my hat as the body is taken away for shipping back home.
“See ya later buddy”
Continue onto part 9.
Good vs Evil – a ponderance on the imagery used.
Nov 14th
Think of evil.
Now what does it look like to you? I’m pretty sure most of you out there have an image of something with horns, hooves and fangs. If not that then it’ll be something equally as base -a human in the throws of violent fury.
Think of good, and look at the picture in your mind that you have formed now.
I’m sure you now have a mental image of pure white, supernatural beings that can’t possibly exist in the animal kingdom. Or, if not that it’s of self sacrifice. Both of which being anti-nature if you will.
This is no accident that evil will symbolise everything we can say really exists and that good exists outside of nature (hence supernatural) because when you boil it down to the very base level, our concept of evil is really the natural urge for self preservation and is one of the most animalistic tendancies we humans possess.
Our imagery of good on the other hand represents our control over these base animal urges, which is why they are symbolised by things totally alien to the natural life on Earth because stopping the selfish action goes against one of the fundamental rules of nature – survival at any cost.
This schism is very noticable in our religions where they elevate humanity above the animal kingdom, as something seperate and special. Anything that reminds us we are just like every other animal on this planet, and therefore a potential question over our purpose and origins, is suddenly labeled evil or sinful.
This is prolly nothing new to you guys n gals, but is a stream of thought I felt I had to scribble down somewhere.
If you disagree or agree with the above please post your thoughts into the comments, I’d love to see where I’m going wrong or if I’m on the money.
Friendfeed, Apps room.
Nov 12th
Want to know where you can find total gems of applications or even share your favourite ones?
Maybe you’re developing the next killer app and want somewhere to advertise it or ask for help because it has grown way beyond your capacity and you now need extra hands.
There is a place you can go, we may not know your name but we’re friendly anyway!
It’s the Apps room in friendfeed. If you already have a friendfeed account you know the drill, just hit the link and add yourself to the room.
If you don’t have a friendfeed account and maybe haven’t even heard of friendfeed, then you’re in for a treat!
Friendfeed is a microblogging community, kinda like twitter on steroids. It allows you to pull in loads of your activities such as videos your favourite and publish in youtube, pictures you favourite and publish on flickr, updates to your blog, every one of your tweets and so many more!
People can then leave comments to your messages and whole conversations, debates and tomfoolery can ensue.
If you haven’t heard of friendfeed or if you have but you’ve been holding out then I fully recommend you take the plunge and sign up here.
Once you’ve signed up, add me – I’ll add you back – and jump into the multitudes of rooms and simply take part!
Here are some starter rooms for you:
New camera in the house
Nov 10th
It’s my girlfriends birthday soon and I was stuck for what to buy her. Well, that is until she bitched about my decrepid digicam which is dieing a slow and painful death.
The lamp went on in my head and I decided to have a look for a new digicam as this years pressie – it’ll help her immensely since she needs to take photos for her game concepts and textures.
Off I went, scouring the web for good deals.
For a while I flitted between a couple of Fujifilm, Sony and Cannon compacts and the price was steadily going up with every "It’s nice, but this one it just that little bit nicer" comment. By now I had climbed to £180 and thought "fuck it, why don’t I just get her an entry level DSLR instead" it was only £60 more.
And so off I went, onto more researching. The Sony A200 is very nice but I couldn’t push myself to meet the asking price, the Cannons have a far better range of lenses but this is just a starter unit and she’s not gonna need them for quite some time yet.
Which left me with only one logical choice…
A Nikon D40 . I could have bought the D40X, but I figured there wasn’t really that much of a need to spend the extra cash for not a massive difference when this will be perfect for what she needs right now.
It turned up last Friday, and I had a quick little play around with it to make sure nothing broke during transit/manufacture – honest! The result of which can be found on my flickr account here .
I was also nice and gave the camera to her early so she could have a play and get accustomed to it as quickly as possible. Seems I have definately picked a geeky girl to fall in love with, she was as giddy as I get when around new tech. "I’ve never owned a DSLR before in my life" she gasped with a massive grin lighting her face.
It wasn’t long before she was out snapping pics all over the place – I’ve had a quick play with it, so many options!
It seems that she has gotten the hang of it quite quickly, as you can see from a selection of pics below.
The performance of the camera is stunning – click the button and *snap* the picture is there. Low light conditions are great when you bump it up to ISO1600 and it’s ready to go within seconds of turning it on. The kit lense, while only 3x zoom still brings up a fantastic amount of detail.
Definately recommend it as a starter DSLR camera. We just need to get the hang of this manual focus malarky.
Also, keep your eyes open for random pics dropping onto my flickr account because of it. Think I’m gonna need to upgrade my account to Pro if this keeps up!
windows 7 taskbar
Nov 9th
windows 7 taskbar in 60-ish seconds from alphaxion on Vimeo.
Older youtube video – http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5dmuR4c1Nlg
OK, I take it back, the PDC version of windows 7 does indeed have the new interface hiding away in there for those who know where to look.
So, joining in with everyone else who has access to this here is my run through of the new taskbar in 60-ish seconds.
Sadly the quality of the video is very poor, so you can download it here (6mb divx file) and I’m pending a vid on revver.
Windows 7 screens
Nov 9th
Well, I said I’d post a few screen grabs showing the subtle changes between vista and win7, here they are.
First up is the Solution Centre
The usual incessant blast of messages have been bundled up into a single system tray icon. Also, that little translucent rectangle next to the time is a “show desktop” quick button.
Then we have the streamlined desktop settings
In here the alignment of multiple monitors is now done by dragging and dropping, it also gives hint to one of the windows quick key combos – something of which many still remain unknown by most users (win+e for explore, win+r for run prompt, win+l for a quick lock of the PC and win+f for the search dialogue being 4 extremely useful combos). A very minimalist interface.
The interface has been cleaned up..
Since there is no longer a difference between the interface when opening and exploring, they have finally tidied away the two options and turned them into a single one. Win7 is full of these little cleanups that vista was just missing.
Tablet edition is basically cooked into the system.
Seems to be quite odd in that it’ll pick up words from mindless scribbles :S It must have an inbuilt bablefish for gibberish!
More to come in due time 
PHN episode 66
Nov 8th
Stream it here – podshow
Show notes
song: Lit – My own worst enemy
catchup episode! Jobs, bumps and windows battles
song: The brighton line – Four dollar popcorn
more catchup
song: screaming banshee aircrew – going down
Forgot to mention something + a bonus bit of music
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Good example of screwed up priorities in UK media
Nov 29th
Posted by alphaxion in commentary
No comments
Flipping through the Metro newspaper on Friday and the most rediculous of page space allocations became immediately obvious.
On page 3 we have an almost full page spread about the storyline in the comic Batman R.I.P. – yes a fucking COMIC. A work of fiction.
Only the weather section stops it from taking up all of page three. Yet a glance at page 2 will make perfectly clear why our mainstream news is totally screwed up…
Encircled is the story of a Tory MP being busted by counter-terrorist police for allegedly handling leaked documents from the Home Office. (Times Online article, another Times Online article – I would use Daily Mail articles, since the Metro is their publication but they’re typical (hate) Mail items..)
Those documents contained no national secrets, nothing that could be determined to be a national security risk.. instead they were items that the UK government simply didn’t want publishing because they showed ineptitude of the UK politicians as well as just how bad they’re getting with regards our civil liberties.
A tiny item snuck away in the corner of a page designed to force the majority to pay attention to the bright yellow advert and not the abuse of terrorism laws and the attempts of the UK government to stifle any info it regards as damaging to its image.
You’re not a company attempting to use PR as damage limitation, you’re a government entrusted by us to ensure the country as a whole doesn’t descend into chaos and lawlessness.
ALL info regarding our government should be fully disclosed to we, the citizens, who placed you into your positions and pay for this machavalian nightmare.
It also doesn’t help when our population has been lulled into rejecting any talk of politics and instead spends it’s time obsessing over “celebs” and crap that just doesn’t matter.
I know that I shall be devoting as much time as possible to re-educating people around me and getting them to look at our government in a critical fashion once again. It’s no surprise that satire, once a great British staple, has been steadly declining across our media – replaced by shite such as the ceaseless tide of “reality” shows.
Wake the fuck up Britain, please.. we need to send a collective message to Downing Street that we know you are broken and require fixing.