One of the projects that I am working on is centered around gaming. I thought that I would post this video of some Team Fortress 2 gameplay, just for fun.
The machine specs: Dell Dimension 9200, Quad Core 2.4ghz, 4gig ram, RAID 0 HDD, GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb, and a Dell 24" wide monitor running at 1920 * 1200.
Update 30th May 2008: Added another TF2 video, this time with me playing as Pyro. Low and high quality versions below.
Trying to contact someone that is stuck in the 1980s? Previously I would hook up my laptop to a phone line to send faxes, but that was a real hassle.
I have just recently discovered the PamFax plugin for Skype, which allows you to send faxes using your Skype credit. PamFax accepts a variety of document types, I simply sent a PNG of my scanned document.
PamFax was kind enough to let me know via Skype chat that my fax sent without any issues. You can also check the status of your faxes via the “portal”.
YouTube appear to be rolling out an option allowing users to watch videos in higher quality than before (example).
Not all source videos uploaded will be high quality/definition (cell phone video etc), but it appears that when a high quality video is uploaded to YouTube several conversions are now being made. This allows users with fast internet connections to watch the high quality version.
Sites, such as Putfile, that have had high quality video streaming functionality (example) for over a year have now lost an edge over YouTube which previously swayed some users to register on their site rather than YouTube.
With YouTube providing free high quality video streaming, revenue sharing, groups, and various other features; the days of UGC video sites popping up quickly or established non-niche sites even surviving are surely numbered.
Vista Service Pack 1 was released a while ago but at the time there were a lot of reported install problems, these appear to have been resolved.
I have just installed SP1 which took about 30 minutes to complete. Amongst other fixes that I have yet to notice network transfers now begin much more quickly, or atleast the status bar begins working more quickly. Network drives also appear to mount more quickly, but that could just be my imagination.
You can download the 32bit version here: 32bit Vista SP1
More programs are making use of multi cores now that they are being programed or reprogrammed to do so. Only a few games currently make use of multiple cores but Nero Vision and Windows Movie Maker (vista version) both make use of multiple cores reducing video transcoding time dramatically.
Converting a 90 minute movie from .avi to dvd format used to take about 45 minutes on a 3ghz single core processor, but on this 2.4ghz quad core machine it now only takes about 16 minutes to convert the video.
I’ve created a web spider and sent it on a crawl for specific pieces of information. I will update this blog with the findings in a month or so once it has analyzed enough data. The current crawl rate is quite slow, but should improve as I make tweaks to the code.
I purchased a copy of Adobe’s “Creative Suite 3 Web Premium” today, but I did so via the Adobe US store rather than the UK store and saved £604/$1209 by doing so.
Adobe sell the product for $1599 on the US site coming in $1,209 cheaper than the UK store list price of £1404.02 ($2,808). Even without VAT (UK Tax) the product is £1,195 ($2,390) from the UK store, a $790 premium over the US price.
You will need a US credit card / billing address to purchase from the US store.
I’m sure if Adobe ever comment on the matter they will come up with something along the lines of “UK support costs…..”. Well I don’t know about any of you, but I have never in my life called any sort of software technical support line.
Shame on Adobe for charging Brits nearly twice the amount that they charge people in the US.
Need I say more? Yahoo mail doesn’t seem to be able to filter out the spam very well at all. Perhaps Yahoo thinks that I might benefit from various drugs and a few Nigerian 419 scams.
If you’re not using gmail yet then you should be. I have been using gmail for about a year now and have not had any spam get through to my inbox, nor have I had any emails incorrectly marked as spam.
If you are using an encryption program like TrueCrypt to keep your hard drive data encrypted, you should power down your PC when ever it is not being used.
A recent video, by researchers at Princeton, demonstrates how an attacker can recover the contents of RAM from a running machine, or even one that has only been shut down for a short period of time. If you have your encrypted drives mounted at the time of the physical attack then the encryption key can most likely be recovered from the memory image.
People, including most experts, previously believed that RAM instantly lost all of it’s data when power was removed. This appears to not be the case with most DDR RAM, with memory taking a few seconds to several minutes to fade away.
Check out the video below for more information and a demonstration of the attack. Be sure to put your RAM modules through your shredder if you suspect an imminent physical attack.
I just got the following error whilst trying to make an rsync transfer:
rsync error: error starting client-server protocol (code 5) at main.c(1296) [sender=2.6.8]
I couldn’t figure out what the issue was for a little while, I tried running the rsync command several times and entered the password when prompted. Unfortunately the error message provided (code 5) didn’t really help. It turned out that I had CAPS LOCK on and the password I was entering was incorrect. Silly mistake, but hopefully this will save someone searching for this rsync error some time.