Miitomo

Having recently joined the "wonderful world" of smartphone ownership, and having been in the Nintendo ecosystem for a while with two 3DSes (and now a Wii U, not to mention the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, NES, SNES, and GameCube), I was interested in Nintendo's smartphone application, Miitomo.

They call it a game, but I'd hesitate to do so.  99% of it is just your Mii walking around a room.  The "gameplay" is answering questions and periodically changing your Mii's outfit.  Also, every single time you change your Mii's outfit, you have to deflect not one, but two requests to take a picture ("Miifoto") of your Mii in that new outfit.  No thanks, Nintendo, my phone has limited storage space and I don't want to fill it up with pictures of my Mii.

As I've just implied, the usefulness of Miitomo is limited, so even if you're in Nintendo's ecosystem and have a smartphone or a tablet or something that can run it, you may still want to pass it up.  The only thing really game-like at all about it is Miitomo Drop, a frustrating minigame where you drop your Mii in one of a few differently-laid-out boards in a mostly vain attempt to unlock new outfit parts.  Most of the time you'll just bounce all the way to the bottom and end up getting candy, which is only useful for when you're interacting with your friends.

The reason I don't have any information on how the friend interaction works is because none of my friends still play it.  There was an initial boom of activity, as there is with any new high-profile software release, but then it promptly died off, and took the application's popularity along with it.  Its only primary use is to get Miitomo coins for My Nintendo, so you can... wait for it... unlock more Mii outfit parts.

Because apparently having real money transactions in a smartphone application is something that can't be avoided these days, you can also use your hard-earned cash to buy in-game currency to be able to purchase more outfits or play Miitomo Drop.  It's completely overlookable, though, because the daily bonuses give you plenty of stuff, and none of the outfits and outfit parts are really "must-haves".  I've grabbed some stuff that looked neat out of Miitomo Drop, either through sheer luck, or using YouTube videos as a guide to know where and how to drop my Mii in order to get the thing I wanted.  I've also used my Miitomo coins to grab outfit items from My Nintendo.

It's kinda neat, I guess, but as long as the main gameplay only involves answering questions and turning down photo requests, I don't think it's really worth playing for very long.  Miifoto is kind of neat, but just like the rest of the application, it's a novelty that wears off rather quickly.

I will leave you now with the only Miifoto I've ever taken that I'm reasonably proud of.

Trying out Maxthon

In my seemingly fruitless search for a web browser that doesn't suck, I tried Maxthon.  Here I am with my impressions after tinkering around with it, and in some cases hacking away at it, to attempt to get it set up for daily use.

The issues popped up immediately after installing.  As per my usual, I deselected the options for creating a desktop icon and a taskbar icon, but left the Start Menu icon enabled, and told it not to set itself as my default browser.  It created both icons that I told it not to create, and set itself as my default browser.

Also, immediately after the install finished, an error dialog popped up saying it couldn't find some function in a DLL, which was somehow related to its auto-update thing, and because of that it couldn't install its auto-update thing.  Being that I hate auto-update, not a single tear was shed that day, and I moved right along.

I immediately inspected the options, and upon finding that mouse gestures are enabled by default, I quickly disabled them.  They also provide a lot of default URL aliases that I also removed.  Options save as soon as you change them, which is nice.  I'm not going to bother making an exhaustive list of the options I enabled or disabled, because nobody really cares.

For whatever reason, it's set to use Internet Explorer's proxy options by default, so I disabled that nuisance.  Fortunately, it gives me the option to disable proxy, use IE's proxy, or use its own proxy, so it doesn't really matter.

Maxthon comes with Adblock Plus installed and enabled by default, which is really cool.  You still have to go into the options and tell it that no ad is ever acceptable, but... whatever.  Except that, initially at least, I couldn't figure out how to get into Adblock Plus' options, at all.  Despite the menu item sitting right there.  It was disabled, and the indicator said it was off.  The Maxthon extension site had an annoying ad, front and center.  After much annoyance I ended up elsewhere on the internet, on a page with ads, and finally I could get into Adblock Plus' options.

As it turns out, they added exception filters for all of their sites and advertisers by default.  If an exception filter is hit, apparently you can't get into the Adblock Plus settings with that tab focused.  So don't forget to remove all that shit.

Next, I messed around with the search settings.  I use keyword searches, where I can just type the keyword, a space, and then what I want to search for, and the search engine I gave that keyword to pops up with my results.  Well, I set that up no problem.  Even did the standard neutering of the regular "let's turn anything we don't recognize on the location bar into a search, including when the user is trying to load a server on their LAN by its hostname" functionality.  That was all well and good.  Except that there were search suggestions coming in from somewhere, and there's zero option to disable them.  What this means is, all my keystrokes were being sent to a server somewhere so these suggestions could be generated, meaning they can easily track everything I ever type in the location bar.  I wanted that gone ASAP, and judging from my Google searches on the matter, a lot of other people feel the same way.

The method of disabling it isn't pretty.  There's actually three things you can do, but it didn't work for me until I did the very last one, and I haven't tested removing either of the other two to see what's truly necessary.  Paths may vary on your system, depending on 32/64 bit stuff that you should probably be used to by now.  Do all this with the browser closed, for best results.

1. Set the read-only flag on C:\Program Files\Maxthon\Modules\MxSmartUrl\update.db, creating it if necessary.  To make it, just right click, make a new text file, and if you've got the "hide extensions for known file types" option turned off like a good computer user, then you can simply replace the default name with update.db and it'll Just Work™.
2. Add the line 127.0.0.1 api.bing.com to your C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file.  Despite not having an extension, this is just a regular text file that you can open in Notepad.  It needs to not have an extension in order to function as intended, so don't add one.
3. Rename C:\Program Files\Maxthon\Modules\MxSmartUrl\MxSmartUrl.dll to something else.  I chose MxSmartUrl.dll.die.

As I said, it didn't work until I did the last one.  Also, somewhat related, you can safely uninstall the installed-by-default Search extension, it's unnecessary.

During my configuration, I removed the multitude of search engines they provide by default.  At some point, they reappeared in the list, but that hasn't happened again.  Also, this includes their default Google search, for which you can't edit the URL to remove the "hey this is the client that's making the search" information.  I also removed Maxthon Multi Search.

The New Tab page does what it does in most other browsers: you can set pages to appear there for easy access to frequently used sites.  There's even a search box there.  You know, to be redundant with the enabled-by-default-with-no-option-to-disable address box search and the location bar search box sitting right next to it.  Except with this one, you can't edit the list of search engines or change the URLs they use.  The space it takes up also prevents an entire row of bookmarks from showing up.  Thankfully, you can get rid of it.  Just make a new page of bookmarks on the New Tab page, then delete the very first one.

Once it's brought within reason, the New Tab page is actually pretty nice.  You can even configure a background image for it, though Maxthon doesn't do any scaling on that image, it just takes a curiously-positioned chunk out of the image that changes if you resize the window.  It's biased towards the left side of the image, and the vertical center.  If you don't have an image you want to use, they have a few defaults.

Switching the browser's theme is also pretty simple.  In the condensed menu, there's a "Skins" option at the bottom.  Clicking it brings up a window that shows a few preset skins, as well as letting you set your own image and/or color scheme.  I like how simple and straightforward the process is.

My attention turned to that cluttered location bar with its ton of icons.  I like mine to be mostly the address field, so I set out to rectify this.  Unfortunately, you can't just right click and select Customize to change the toolbar icons around like in other browsers, but you can remove most of them from the View menu, just by unchecking them.  You can even remove the search box in this manner.  The icons to the right of everything, just before the condensed menu thing, can all be hidden as well and are still accessible by clicking an acceptably small dropdown indicator.  Also, the Status bar, straight out of the '90s, can also be hidden.  The sidebar, which is enabled by default, can also be hidden, even directly from the sidebar itself.

Having gotten it configured for screen space, I looked through the options once more, and noted that its cookie options are sorely lacking.  It has zero cookie management, and you can't disable just third-party cookies.  They're an all-or-nothing deal.  A definite hit on the usability of the browser as a whole.

Also annoying, and a common problem with all Chromium-based browsers, is that when the window is maximized, it covers and prevents access to my taskbar, which is set to auto-hide like any sane person would do.

Another interesting feature is the ability to switch the rendering engine between Webkit and Trident.  Not sure why you'd ever want to use Trident, but hey, the option's there.  You can even enable a toolbar icon to switch it on the fly.  I honestly can't picture the use case for this, though.  What site that exists today that you'd ever find yourself on doesn't render nearly identically in all rendering engines?  With Microsoft having been bitchslapped into being more standards-compliant than they once were, even Trident renders pages reasonably consistently with the other rendering engines out there.  I honestly don't see the need for switching the rendering engine, at all.

I didn't notice that it had set itself as my default browser until the next time I restarted Firefox, which I have set to prompt me if it isn't the default.  I quickly reverted back to Firefox as default, to find that Maxthon now goes "...hey..." with a red dot on the condensed menu icon, and another one next to the "set as default browser" option.  How about no?

After all that, I decided to try out YouTube and see whether it used HTML5 or Flash.  It defaults to HTML5, with the same jittery sound as any other Chromium-based browser on my computer.  Forcing it to switch to Flash was a matter of installing the YouTube Center extension and selecting "Aggressive Flash" in its options.  Even with the Flash player, it's an unacceptable experience.  Video decoding lags and is full of artifacts.

I have yet to actually log in to any website I normally use, because quite frankly, Maxthon is a browser from China and I just don't trust it.  Not even over HTTPS, because it still has the ability to read every single thing I type.

It's an interesting browser, but full of unexpected critical fails, and my lack of trust towards it in general is going to lead me to not recommend using it.

Ubuntu 12.04

So, it's been quite a while since I last used Ubuntu.  The most recent version I used prior to yesterday was 6.06.  ...Yeah.  This will basically be an "impressions and some useful tweaks" post.

Overall, in the graphics department, Ubuntu has come a long way.  I remember popping a freshly burned CD of Ubuntu 5.04 into a CD drive, booting it, and seeing that ugly as all fuck brown theme for the first time.  Now it's actually pleasing to the eye.

Usability-wise, well, it's Ubuntu.  It's the Windows of Linux.  If you can't see the nice big Firefox icon and click it to browse the internet, well, you're probably blind.  The thing it's on, called the Dash, works similarly to the taskbar in Windows.  The button up at the top brings up a screen that immediately shows you the programs you've run most recently, and it has a search box so you can type in the first few characters of what you're looking for.  This is neat for novices, but to be honest I prefer the old Applications menu structure, and I'm dying for some menus so I can organize things.

Thus begins a long list of things I preferred about older Ubuntu distributions.  They didn't adulterate the environment so much, leaving it up to you to customize its look and feel from thousands of options.  This one has about three options for the look and feel.  If you don't like those, well, you're stuffed.

The settings program is fairly straightforward and I was able to tweak a few things to my liking through it, but two of the big things I like that I can't adjust through it are the workspaces and sloppy focus on the mouse cursor.  In fact, even though there's a nice button on the dash that shows four workspaces, I can't get into any workspaces other than the first one.  I even made sure I had the keyboard shortcut for changing workspaces correct.  Still, the button is useful in that clicking it shows you all the windows on the current workspace and you can click one of them to focus it.  So if you have a lot of stuff open and overlapping, it makes it easy to find the window you want.

Ubuntu also has an "app store" of sorts, which is basically their replacement for the Synaptic package manager from earlier versions of the distribution.  In addition to letting you install free packages, you can buy commercial Linux programs through it.  Including a lot of popular indie games, like Braid, World of Goo, and more.  Heck, you can even buy the Humble Indie Bundle 5 through it.  I'd get the bundle, but... I already have Psychonauts and I'm not too interested in the rest of it.

Ubuntu also has a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One.  Just by using Ubuntu, you get 5GB of free cloud storage.  Which is cool if you have files that you want to be accessible from elsewhere and maybe happen to lack a USB flash drive with the capacity to store them all.  But generally speaking, you probably already use Dropbox and will be installing the Linux Dropbox client.

Getting a multi-monitor setup going is fairly simple.  To do it entirely within the GUI without having to mess around with config files, you pretty much need to install the proprietary drivers for your graphics card, which are recommended anyway because your visual experience and 2D/3D performance will be greatly increased in comparison to the open source driver.

However, multi-monitor in Linux does have its nuances in comparison to Windows.  When watching YouTube, if you have hardware rendering on, the hue of everything is off and it all looks blue.  Fullscreen works as expected in this mode, though.  If you disable hardware rendering to get correct colors, Flash sees both monitors as one big desktop for the purpose of determining your screen resolution.  So it sets its fullscreen window to that size.  But then it goes "oh hey, our fullscreen window shouldn't span monitors!" and scales it down to fit in one monitor.  So what you end up with is a really wide and not very tall fullscreen window.  And since Adobe has discontinued Flash for Linux, it won't ever get fixed.  All the more reason to promote HTML5 video, I guess.

As far as running Windows programs is concerned, you have to install Wine.  Wine is essentially an open source implementation of the Windows API and all of its libraries.  The majority of regular old Windows programs will simply work out of the box, with no configuration changes.  It's when you delve into the realm of playing Windows games that you start having to mess with things.  Fortunately, there's another package called Winetricks that helps greatly with that.

Overall, it's pretty easy to use, but parts of the whole ease of use thing grate on me because I want to get in and tinker with things and Ubuntu doesn't really want you to get in and tinker with things.  Still, it's decent for an intro to Linux, and proof that Linux is more than ready for the desktop.  Tweaks after the break.

Janetter

With TweetDeck having been acquired by Twitter and the subsequent removal of useful features including but not limited to TweetDeck's long update service, deck.ly, that let you post updates that were longer than 140 characters, I've been thinking about switching Twitter clients.  I moved to TweetDeck originally because the very first New Twitter was absolutely horrible and the redesigns that have followed haven't improved it at all.

A few friends of mine are using Janetter, so I downloaded it and tried it out for a bit.

It's got a simple interface similar to TweetDeck and lets you easily follow conversations between people.  TweetDeck has that feature but it's glitchy and sometimes only shows one tweet from one of the people.

Also, it has something that intrigued me.  Its themes are done entirely with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.  This came into play straight away because I browsed through the themes and discovered that what I really wanted would essentially require me to combine aspects of a few of them together.  I most definitely have that capability, but it suffers from a complete and total lack of documentation.  I can't just make a new folder in the directory where the themes are stored, copy data from another theme there, modify to my liking, and have my results show up in the theme list automagically.  There is a button you can click to add a new theme, but it prompts for its own special format, which may possibly just be a renamed ZIP archive, but once again, there's no documentation.

Playing around with it I noticed it's got some horrible custom window border bullshit by default, but when changing themes you can check a checkbox that says "Use the default Windows visual style".  And you have to do so every time you change your theme, because the box helpfully unchecks itself.

I was a bit disappointed that it doesn't seem to have the ability to disable automatic updates.  I don't really want anything I have installed automatically updating any portion of itself.  This even goes for Steam and games released upon it, but there even if you disable it you'll find the automatic updates mysteriously re-enabled if you go back in some time later.  I would much prefer a simple notification of an update and a yes/no choice for installing said update.

Feature-wise, it's missing a few things I use in TweetDeck, like the ability to see tweets from people you're following that are replies to people you aren't following.  You can actually see those tweets, but it's buried on a dialog box.  Also missing is a UI column that shows you who's following you.  Once again, it's buried on a dialog box.  And even within that, you can't use Twitter's "Block and report spam" feature.

So, whatever, it's a Twitter client, and the main functionality works.  I kind of went about my business and ignored it for a while, while I did other things.

Then I decided I wanted to play around with it some more, only to discover I couldn't find it on my taskbar.

Double-clicking on its tray icon brings it back up.  I went into the options and verified that "Show in taskbar when minimized" was checked, but it still minimizes to the system tray instead.  I then thought "well, maybe I need to restart it for that change to take effect", so I closed it.  Or so I thought.  The close button also just minimizes to the system tray.  Instead of, you know, actually closing the program.  To close it, you have to right click on the system tray icon and select "Quit".  Which is retarded.

I absolutely hate "minimize to system tray" as a general principle.  I want my shit to be right there on the taskbar where I can find it.  I hide all my system tray icons so that there's more space for the taskbar entries.  I really don't want to have to go into the system tray on a regular basis.

After noticing several updates from people I was following in TweetDeck and having Janetter not notify me about them, I inspected the notification options and noticed that the one notification feature anyone would ever want over any other possible notification feature, being notified of new tweets from the people you're following, is disabled by default.  A lot of sense that makes.

The verdict: I guess I'll just stick with TweetDeck, until the Adobe Air version stops working.  After that, I don't know what I'll do.

TiddlyWiki

While browsing around for Javascript code that I could re-use in my image script, or at least learn from and reimplement, I happened upon a site that had another article that suggested that all developers should have a TiddlyWiki.

What is a TiddlyWiki?  Well, it's a wiki.  Contained within a single file.  Intrigued at the possible simplicity, I grabbed a copy.

They boast that you don't even need a web server for it, which is neat, but I'd much rather have each of my computers specialized for purpose.  No content hosting should happen on my desktop box.  So, I dropped the file on my server, which for the uninformed runs on my local network.

Browsing around I noticed they have some custom terminology in play.  Specifically, your wiki articles are called "tiddlers".  TiddlyWiki works differently from most other wikis in that you can have multiple tiddlers loaded in the page at once.  It also has some slightly different wiki markup, but there's a pretty good reference for that.  They also don't like to use spaces in tiddler names for some reason, even though they work just fine.  I guess I'll just use it as "no spaces, camel case = system page", and title all of mine so they're more easily readable.

Initially I was very confused.  The GettingStarted tiddler says "oh yeah you'll want to go to all these places and change stuff", so I went to those places to change stuff, but everything was read only.  After much searching of documentation, I found that there was an option in the AdvancedOptions tiddler that when disabled enables editing via HTTP.  So I enabled that and went on my merry way changing things and documenting my image script.

Then it came time to save.  Apparently by default it doesn't save your changes permanently as you make them, rather, there's a link you have to click to do a "master save", and an option you can enable to make it automatically save.  Clicking the "save changes" link to do the "master save", I was confronted with a confusing error dialog that said I would need to save my TiddlyWiki to a file before I could save.  Once again, I went searching to figure out how to "save my TiddlyWiki to a file".

This is where I ran into the biggest case of fail.  Apparently, even though I have the extra and optional TiddlySaver.jar, it can't save changes when the file is loaded from a web server.  So essentially, I lost everything I'd worked on, all because I don't want a copy of it on my local hard drive that I actually edit, and then a copy of it on my server that I just ignore because there's a copy of it on my local hard drive.

TiddlyWiki supports plugins, so I figured "hey, maybe there's already a plugin to make this work."  After a while of browsing plugins I came across one that would use WebDAV to enable saving server-side, all without me having to have files on my desktop's hard drive or add anything extra to the TiddlyWiki directory.  The only trick: you have to be able to save to the TiddlyWiki in order to install it.

I solved that by quickly chucking my TiddlyWiki into a network share on my server that I have configured as a network drive in Windows.  Loaded that up in Firefox, and now of course it would let me save.  I installed the plugin (which is as simple as copy/pasting the code into a new tiddler and tagging it systemConfig), then put it back in the original directory I had it in.  After refreshing and having it still not work, I derp'd and enabled WebDAV in my web server (and set it up for the directory), which wasn't too difficult.  Now I finally have the ability to save.

If you use it as it's originally intended, to be loaded off of your computer's hard drive, via the file:// protocol, it will work as intended without this extra step.  But if you're like me and have a personal server you want to install it on, you'll need to do it.

Now, excuse me while I go rebuild my documentation for my image script.

The verdict: Setup may be tricky (as I described, and for that reason only), but overall it looks incredibly useful.

Trackball Software

So apparently I've been incorrect about this for a while now.  Kensington has indeed released proper configuration software for their trackballs for Windows 7, to allow remapping the buttons and so forth.  The only problem: Nowhere in the list of features do I see the ability to define program-specific settings, something I use the hell out of with X-Mouse Button Control.

In my setup, I have a left/middle/right click, and the fourth button is double click.  However, in Steam, it's set to send my push-to-talk keystroke (which I put out of the way so it couldn't possibly conflict with any game's default controls: 9 on the number pad) while held.

As it looks like there isn't a way to do this with the newer software (it's no longer called MouseWorks, it's now more accurately called TrackballWorks), I'll stick with X-Mouse.

I am thinking of getting a new trackball though.  It's nowhere near urgent as my current one is still perfectly functional, but the rubber ridges on the scroll ring have completely worn off over the years.  I'd just buy the same model again anyway, because it's a fucking awesome trackball.

If anyone who's reading this is looking for a trackball, this one comes with my personal recommendation as I've used it for many years now.  Just one thing: Don't bother with installing Kensington's software.  Just use X-Mouse Button Control instead.

Also, I updated X-Mouse Button Control to version 1.53, and the much-awaited scrolling config stuff is in, along with axis-locking, which I know I'll get some use out of in Photoshop.  Sadly, it doesn't seem like I can use the scrolling config stuff to force mousewheel support in Windows 3.1 (not that it's really crucial).  Also added is update notification, which I left enabled because I keep missing updates since I don't periodically scout the internet for them.

Update: X-Mouse Button Control

Original post: http://xt-8147.blogspot.com/2010/03/x-mouse-button-control.html

I don't know when exactly it happened (the changelog doesn't have any dates), but X-Mouse Button Control has been updated (twice!) since I wrote my review of it, and the first update added the layer-switching hotkeys I'd been looking forward to.

I now have version 1.51 installed.  Not a heck of a lot has changed functionality or layout-wise, it's mostly new features and bugfixes.  I quickly enabled the Layer Modifiers in the settings and set it to switch to layer 2 while I'm holding Ctrl.  Then I went through and made sure layer 2 was configured for everything I've set it up with.  The only change so far has been to my layout for Steam: in layer 1 it uses the defaults, but in layer 2 my double click button is replaced with my push to talk button.

Immediately sidetracking myself, there's a Steam update I'd like to see.  Specifically, relating to the Steam overlay hotkey.  The default (Shift + Tab) works for most non-Steam games I've added, but conflicts with a couple of them.  I changed it to Shift + F12, which resolves the conflict with Guild Wars, but still conflicts with EDuke32 as EDuke32 will see I'm pressing Shift and go into walk mode, and then when I leave the overlay I miss a jump and die due to not moving fast enough.  The feature I'm asking for is simple: there should be a way to override the overlay hotkey on a game-specific basis.

Anyway, back to X-Mouse Button Control.  I think my opinion of it is rather obvious, given that I use it every day whenever I'm at my computer.  So "the verdict" will be about the changes.  But first, a feature wish that came up while I was reconfiguring.

Perhaps a good feature for the future would be a way to easily duplicate one layer to another, so you can build on that base if you need to.  I would have appreciated that as most of my config changes were simply duplicating layer 1 to layer 2 so my trackball would continue to function as expected with the modifier key held in applications that I have no specific need for layers in, which I don't even know if it was necessary.

The Verdict: Great software got even better.  I look forward to having the GUI for configuring scroll wheel compatibility.  Then we get to see if I can use that to force scroll wheel functionality into Windows 3.1 for the lulz.

Advanced Renamer

I realize now that I mentioned Advanced Renamer in passing a while back, but never made a post specifically about it.

We've all been there before.  You have a directory full of files and need to rename every single one.  Not anything drastic, but just simply reordering parts of each file name or replacing certain characters with other characters.  The last thing you want to do is rename each one individually.  That takes forever and is extremely repetitive.  This is where Advanced Renamer comes in.  Simply select the files, tell it how you want them renamed, and then hit Start Batch.  That's it.  Here's a screenshot of its interface.

Haiku

I tried to write this whole post in haiku, but it just kept getting more difficult.  Plus, I would have had to cheat and split sentences between haiku.  You may notice that this next paragraph is worded so it will split up into groups of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables again, but partway through the paragraph it stops abruptly mid-sentence.  Deal with it.

I started browsing Wikipedia on a mathematical article about Euler's identity, and just through clicking links ended up on the article about BeOS, and then found Haiku.  What is it?  Well, it's an open-source OS that's inspired by BeOS.  Its aim is to be a fast, simple, and easy OS to use.  It's similar to most Unix-based OSes, but it's its own entire thing.  It's also in the alpha stage so far.  Regardless, they have an iso of alpha 2 available for download, so I grabbed it and set it up in VirtualBox.

Linux Mangaka Moe Fail

I'll say right up front: the outcome of this review should be 100% obvious.  This linux "distro" sucks.

But why does it suck?

I'll admit, I wasn't expecting much.  In the end, I got less than what I expected.  What could one possibly expect from a linux distro aimed at anime/manga fans/fansubbers/scanlators?

Here is a list of the things I expected:

• From looking at the screenshot on the page with the download link, I expected it to be a reskinned Ubuntu with a custom set of preinstalled applications.
• I was right.
• When booting the livedisc in a VM to test it out, I expected to log on automatically (as is done on a regular Ubuntu livedisc); click Install, enter account information, time zone information, etc. (as is done in a regular Ubuntu install); and have it install.
• No automatic logon.  The livedisc has a regular user account, and root.  The regular user account cannot perform the install.  You must LOG ON AS ROOT to install.
• After unmounting the ISO and rebooting the VM, I expected to be able to log on as the user I created during the install.
• No such luck, the user wasn't present.  Furthermore, upon logging in (as root) I discovered that it was acting like the livedisc, even when installed to the hard drive.  The Install option was still present.
• I expected the regular user to have access to the same application set as root.
• Sadly, nope.  It has an entire Wine menu that only appears in the system menu when you're logged on as root.  This menu contains 7-Zip and Notepad, like there aren't readily available graphical archiving utilities and text editors for linux.  Only root has the Terminal in its menu.  A terminal is necessary for anyone with even a passing knowledge of Linux, some things are just flat out simpler and easier to do on the command line and it's simply not feasible to have a GUI frontend for every last command in linux.  Hell, even Windows has things you can only do from the command line.  Both of these could probably be fixed with enough poking around, but I shouldn't have to do that.
• I expected Firefox to be, you know, a default install of Firefox.
• What do you think?  Firefox was configured to look like Chromium.  Or maybe it was Chromium with Firefox's icon and "Mozilla Firefox" in the titlebar (yeah, it had a titlebar), who knows.  I didn't use it long enough to check.
• Being targeted at the anime/manga community, I expected some anime wallpapers.
• Well, at least I got this one.  Not that any of the characters were recognizable.  I found where they were (/usr/share/backgrounds) and copied them to the samba share on my server for reasons unknown.

Two for six?  Linux is much better than this.  You're better off installing whatever fansubbing tools you want to use on a default install of Ubuntu if you want an Ubuntu-based Linux install to fansub with.  I deleted the VM, didn't even dignify the ISO by seeding it back to a 1.0 share ratio, and promptly deleted the virtual hard disk and the ISO. Good riddance.

The verdict: SMASH IT WITH A HAMMER, KILL IT WITH FIRE, ET FUCKING CETERA.

<insert title>

For <insert time frame>, I've been <insert activity>. It's pretty fun, but <insert drawback>. So to try and get around that, I've been <insert possible solution> for <insert approximate time spent searching for solution>.

I thought I'd found it, but <insert fatal flaw in possible solution>. <insert sentence explaining fatal flaw>. So for <insert time frame> I've been looking around for another way to do it.

Randomly browsing the internet <insert somewhat recent time frame>, I happened upon a/an <insert internet posting type> that made mention of <insert eventual solution>.

I <insert past-tense verb enabling me to use the solution (installed, ran, etc.)> it and right away, <insert reaction>. Not only does it remedy <insert issue>, but it also does <insert other useful things>.

<insert screenshot of solution>
<paragraph describing how to configure solution>

<paragraph orgasming about how useful the solution is>.

So overall, I'd have to say <insert overall statement>.

The verdict: <insert random rephrasing of "it's awesome">

X-Mouse Button Control

If you've read any of my past posts on the subject, you'll know that I'm quite annoyed at Kensington's decision to not release a Vista/Win7-compatible version of MouseWorks.  I've considered other trackballs, but quite frankly the competition (led by Logitech) doesn't have what I'm looking for.

Recently, searching around for something unrelated I found a thread on a forum somewhere about Kensington input devices and their (lack of) compatibility with newer Windows versions.  MouseWorks is, after all, the only thing keeping me on WinXP SP3, so if I could eliminate that dependency I could install Windows 7.

In that thread someone mentioned X-Mouse Button Control as a viable alternative for doing exactly what I needed MouseWorks for that Windows won't do: remapping the buttons.  They provided a link, which I followed.  The site says it's compatible with Windows 7, which is awesome.

I waited a while between downloading it and installing it because I wanted to completely ditch Kensington's software first, which requires a reboot, and I hate rebooting.  But earlier tonight I got up from UT2k4 to go take a shower and when I came back my computer was frozen, so after restarting it I immediately went into "it's okay to reboot" mode and switched over.

The install process is straightforward, accept defaults (outside of install directory there isn't really anything to change anyway) and keep clicking through and it'll automatically start up.  Look in your system tray for its icon, double click that icon to bring up the Setup window.

The setup window

Setting it up is as simple as it looks.  You can have a mapping for any program you want.  If there's no mapping for the specific program, the Default mapping is used, so set that up before you go and do anything else.  Just go through the dropdown for the button you want to configure and tell it what you want that button to do.  If you have a doubt as to which button is which, click that button and it'll highlight the appropriate dropdown.

The tabs for different layers allow you to define multiple configurations for a single program.  These layers can be switched between using the right-click menu on the tray icon.  The author intends to add support for temporarily switching between the layers with a keypress in the future, this would be awesome.  With a feature like this you could, for instance, set up your trackball to have a double click button (as I have) but when you hold Ctrl and click that button it would activate Windows 7's Flip3D feature instead.

The settings window

The Settings button brings up a window with some advanced settings where you can control the sensitivity of your mouse and some other things.  One very nice feature that I enabled as soon as I saw it is "Make scroll wheel scroll window under cursor".  I've always been annoyed at how Windows never did this, and now I can enable it for more intuitive scrolling through things.  No more having to click to focus the thing I want to scroll.  Other than that and maybe the sensitivity, the other settings are generally good left as their defaults unless you need to change them.

If "Enable global hotkeys" is checked, the settings window gets another tab (aptly named "Global Hotkeys") that allows you to configure them.  There are configurable hotkeys for switching between layers, which could come in handy if you use them.

X-Mouse Button Control is very light on resources, so you won't even have to worry about that.

One important thing to note: X-Mouse Button Control is not a driver.  It simply hooks into the mouse events and redefines them.  You'll still need a driver for your device.  Fortunately in my case my trackball works with the default driver that Windows installs when I plug it in, so I don't have an issue here.

Also good to note: With MouseWorks out of the picture, I'm no longer having to periodically re-disable "Snap mouse pointer to default button".  The option exists on the regular Windows control panel (at least in XP SP3), but it actually stays the way you set it.  So no more aggravation there.  Finally.

If you haven't gotten the full picture yet, this program isn't needed if you use a regular two or three button mouse.  It's only really useful if you have a more exotic input device with more buttons and you want to remap them without using bundled software.  It's also very handy for taking such an exotic device to newer versions of Windows where it may lack support from the manufacturer.

The verdict: Install, use, and inform others about.  Also, now I can install Windows 7.

EDuke32: I just couldn't wait...

After downloading the High Resolution Pack (HRP) installer, which includes EDuke32, high res versions of all the textures, and the Duke Plus mod that enables many more things than Duke Nukem 3D ever had in it, I just had to install it.

Then I just had to run it.

Then I just had to play for a while.

When you start it up, you'll get a window that looks similar to this one: (The HRP installer isn't updated quite as often as the core engine installer, so it comes with an older version of EDuke32 than the most current one available)

You won't really need to do much on this window other than hitting Start unless you want to enable Duke Plus, which is enabled in my screenshot.

Once you're in the game, you can (and should) thumb through the options. You can play around with the graphics and sound and everything and tweak it to your liking. Most notably, turn that resolution up.

The high resolution graphics are way better. They take a while to load at the beginning of each level, but I think the vastly improved visual experience is worth it. The old school 2D sprites of enemies are replaced with 3D models. Since I can easily turn the high res stuff off and back on again (there's a toggle in the options), here's a few side by side comparisons of good old E1M1, Hollywood Holocaust. I've customized the HUD and the crosshair a little but other than that these screenshots reflect EDuke32's default options. Both screenshots of each location were taken without moving between taking them.

The spawn point. The texture difference is huge, just look at the wood floor.

The theater, with the film turned on. The difference in the quality of the film is like night and day here. This screenshot also shows the much better overall colors in the high resolution graphics vs. the original graphics.

The bathroom. Screencapped through the mirror for fun. You can clearly see the difference between the 2D sprites and the 3D models here. They might be difficult to see, but the hand dryer and urinals are 3D models as well.

Just like other source ports of other popular old 3D games like Doom Legacy and D2X-XL, EDuke32 allows you to run the game in higher display resolutions than the original engine did. My only gripe regarding this is that it sets my refresh rate to 60Hz, which I can see refreshing. Fortunately, in eduke32.cfg there's an option called MaxRefreshFreq that you can change from 60 to 75.

EDuke32 packs a whole slew of new options. Mouselook is enabled by default and the mouse sensitivity is very configurable. Everything is configurable through its in-game menu, there's no need for the old setup.exe from the old one.

I guess I should talk about that. The installer (for the HRP at least, but I'd imagine that the regular installer does this too) asks at one point if you want to search for the original game's data file, duke3d.grp. If you hit Yes you can tell it where to look and it'll automatically copy it to the right place. Then when you run EDuke32 everything just works. This is in direct contrast with the setup for D2X-XL, where you have to manually move files around into their appropriate directories, and if you want high resolution textures you have to download and decompress like 5000 files separately.

I mentioned that the HRP installer includes a mod called Duke Plus that adds even more stuff. Duke Plus adds all sorts of effects like rain and snow, extra weapons like an SMG and a Gravity Gun (hi there Half-Life 2), movable objects, soda machines that vend health-replenishing soda, grabbable ledges (you can grab a ledge and then move on it to cross a pit, or use it to jump up to higher places), working ladders, and a ton more stuff. It's completely optional but it really does add a lot to the game. It has its own series of levels that show off what it can do, so just start it with Duke Plus selected in the custom game content dropdown (see the startup window above) and then hit up the Duke Plus Levels episode to try it out.

Something I noticed while taking the in-game screenshots: It saves them in .tga format. Photoshop handles them just fine, so it didn't really bother me when I was making the side by side comparison screenshots. I don't think there's an option to make it take .png screenshots instead, which kind of sucks. Luckily, there are free image manipulation programs available on the internet that you can use to convert your screenshots to a more usable format. If you want to travel the open source route, try The GIMP, and if you'd rather have something else try Paint.NET.

The verdict: Hail to the king baby! Duke Nukem 3D running natively on modern operating systems = instant win.

My Unending Search

Before I finally break down and write my own wallpaper rotator, I figure it's best if I search around some more and see if anything's popped up that fills my requirements.

From a random thread on /w/ I found out about WallPapa, so I installed it and set it up with my wallpapers and played around with it for a little while. Its user interface is way better than Winwall's, primarily because it's resizable and not tiny.

The first thing I looked for, it actually had: resampling the wallpaper while preserving its aspect ratio. Set it to "stretch" and it will fill the screen, preserving aspect ratio. It also has a setting for the background color to use when letterboxing/pillarboxing, as would be expected. It defaults to black, which is what I want, so I didn't have to change it.

Importing directories is really easy. You just click the add button and select the directory. It'll ask you if you want to include subfolders, and then it'll go about looking for every image it can find. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to import a directory structure and then selectively exclude certain files or folders within it, which is necessary for me since I have two subdirectories containing images that I don't want to be set as my wallpaper.

So I manually imported all the subdirectories of my wallpaper folder. This would have gone faster if it had an option for "always include subdirectories" so I wouldn't have to select the directory and then hit yes once for each directory.

So now I have the wallpaper list populated with everything I've got. Scrolling through I noticed something strange: it groups files together not alphabetically by filename like one would expect, but alphabetically by file extension, then alphabetically by filename. So all the JPEGs are together, then the PNGs. This is likely due to how it's searching for the files, looking for each extension one at a time and neglecting to sort the results together.

All set, right? I hit Change Wallpaper. It only does things sequentially in the order that they're in the list, but it has a button to randomize the order of the list, so whatever. Then I actually look at the wallpaper. Its resampling is horrible. All the lines are jagged everywhere. It's like it's passing it to Windows' resampler instead of using GD or anything else that's better. I'd actually like to be able to look at my wallpaper without saying to myself "shit that's ugly".

I haven't yet contacted the developer with my concerns, so if I do that maybe there's hope.

Since I like the program overall, I'll do as I did for Polynomial and list some constructive criticisms:

• Rather than the "shuffle" button reordering the list, it should make the program randomly choose a wallpaper from the list. This way the list can stay sorted.
• Speaking of sorting, fix it so it's not sorted by file extension.
• An "exclude file/subdirectory" option is a must for recursive imports.
• Rather than prompting every time to ask if the directory import should be recursive, have an option for it.
  
• Automatically scanning imported directories for new images would be great. I'm not sure if it does this or not because I didn't specifically test it, but it does have an option for manually rescanning the directories.
• Do resampling with the GD library so it's actually pleasing to the eye.
  

The verdict: It looks like it'll be an excellent wallpaper rotator in the future.

Maybe I'm too paranoid

I was being paranoid about what my computer was connected to earlier today, which prompted among other things a reboot.

One of the domains in my netstat output had caught me off-guard: 1e100.net. Don't try it in your web browser, it doesn't work. I did some searching and then promptly facepalmed as I realized it was owned by Google. 1e100 = 1 * 10^100 = a googol = another of Google's bad jokes. It shows up as the reverse DNS for GTalk and GMail. That's almost as bad as Microsoft's faked reverse DNS of whatever.phx.gbl for when you're connected to MSN.

In the process of discovering this I happened upon a pretty neat tool called TCP View. It shows you not only what your computer is connected to, but also which process owns each connection. It's basically netstat on steroids. In addition, it updates constantly, letting you know what's happening. It also provides some useful tools, such as the ability to kill the process or the connection, or to whois the remote host.

The verdict: eases paranoia.

Mega Rant

I typed this offline and copypasta'd it into Blogger for reasons stated below.

I updated to the latest SRWare Iron and it's a huge improvement over the last version I used. Chrome themes now actually work. No weird glitches upon maximizing the window anymore either. It's still a web browser with no useful extensions at all (i.e. ad blocking, script/object blocking), but at least I can make it look similar to all the rest of the things I'm running.

Then for shits and giggles I installed Opera. Spent a little bit browsing their widgets site, concluded that there aren't really any useful ones on there with only one or two exceptions. There's a Google Translator one that's pretty neat, and one that hooks into GasBuddy to show you gas prices in the area you specify. The Google Translator one works well, but the gas prices one? Even though its linked site has information on Charlottesville gas prices, it just says "no information for this area." Useless. Opera's widgets have nothing on Firefox's extensions. If you want to block ads in Opera, there's no easy way to go about it. There isn't a community-maintained block list (or the infrastructure to have one and fetch updates from time to time), you have to manually block everything and edit the list to wildcard bad domains yourself. There's no object subrequest blocking either, so you'll still see those ads in YouTube videos.

So while I was using Opera (and speaking of YouTube), I figured I'd log into YouTube and see if anyone I'm subscribed to had put up a new video. This is where Opera fails. Since I have it set to block third party cookies, as any security-minded person would do, I can't log into YouTube at all. Never mind that I have Firefox set the very same way and I can log in and out of YouTube all I want.

Then while I was browsing around, it stopped wanting to load YouTube entirely. It must have been a Comcast thing because I went back over to Firefox and it wasn't working there either. It was either that or a Google thing, since I couldn't get Blogger to load either and Google owns both.

So with everything I wanted to do on the internet not working, I moved on to something that's been bothering me for a while. Before I panicked and reformatted/reinstalled windows, I had no operational problems with Winwall. Now it seems that even with the exact same wallpaper list I had before, it insists on adding all the images in the root of the drive my wallpaper directory is on when I load the list. I swear I didn't have to hide five million things before. I have IncludeSubDirs=Off in patch.ini since there are two subdirectories I don't want it picking up on, but the images it adds are one level up the directory structure. All the more reason to write my own wallpaper rotator I guess. Since none of the available solutions do it correctly, I'll just have to do it myself.

Last but not least, Sankaku. Artefact has started putting the shock image a few images before the end of the gallery instead of it always being the last image in the gallery. Just when I'd finally gotten all the bugs out of my greasemonkey script. I don't think it's in a predictable location, and there isn't anything identifying about it that I can see (or access via Javascript). At least stick an id="shockimage" on there so it can be easily targeted (in Javascript via GreaseMonkey; in CSS via Stylish; or even via AdBlock Plus element hiding rules, which kick complete ass).

Sankaku has also been undergoing subtle changes to their site's structure that caused it to conflict with NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Apparently Artefact wanted to merge the blog portion of the site with the forums. In the process, the javascript needed for the blog portion got buried so far that I can't have the site work 100% without allowing their ads via an exception rule. I tried making a greasemonkey script to work around it, but came across a critical flaw in greasemonkey: scripts you write run after the target document has finished loading and its scripts have had a chance to run. To uproot Sankaku's scripts and replace them with my own to keep functionality without allowing ads, I'd need to be able to access the page's content before its scripts get the chance to run. Basically this means I'd have to learn how to write Firefox extensions, which will take way more time than it's worth because the documentation is horrible. So instead I just put in the exception rule and then added a few more element hiding rules to get the ads out of my sight. So now I've got ten element hiding rules for Sankaku, nine of which are sets of three that seem to be interchangeably used. Overkill much?

So, verdicts: Comcast sucks, Google Chrome/SRWare Iron are still just flashy toys, Opera always sucked, Winwall sucks, and Artefact is a fag.

Deluge: an interesting experience thus far

So all my torrents reached share ratios where I felt comfortable stopping them, and I closed Azureus and started Deluge installing.

It churned away for a little bit and popped up something about installing GTK 2.12. Can't it see that I already have it installed? I couldn't install GTK from there because Pidgin was still running and using it. It was the exact same version anyway, so I didn't really need to install, and had I tried it would have failed since it would be trying to overwrite files that were in use. So I pressed on without it and the install finished.

After deleting the icon from my desktop that it never bothered to ask me if I wanted, I went to start it up. I really wanted the web ui, but I figured for kicks I'd start the GUI first. No dice, a command prompt window comes up and disappears immediately and nothing happens. Not even a rogue deluge.exe in task manager.

But that doesn't really matter, since all I really wanted was the web ui. So I start that up and visited the url it told me in Firefox. The url by default is ht­tp://localhost:8112/, but you can change the port, and I promptly changed it to 8147. It pops up asking for a password. I go "lol wut", then notice that there's an FAQ link at the top of the page, so I click that and find that the default password is "deluge". So I'm in. Next it asks about its daemon, and I'd noticed a shortcut in its start menu entry for that, so I clicked that shortcut and sure enough deluged.exe popped up in task manager just below deluge.exe. A neat feature of Deluge is the daemon. It handles all the torrent traffic, regardless of the frontend you're using to view the relevant data and tell the daemon to do stuff.

The extra special neat thing is that you could run the daemon and web ui on another computer and just access it remotely, or install the frontend and configure it to act as a thin client. So if you wanted to have all your torrents running on a dedicated box with a lot of hard drive space, maybe running RAID, etc., it's really easy to do with Deluge. It even has a setting for a directory to monitor for torrent files to automatically start up, so you could just have a torrent dropbox network share and add torrents by dropping the file in it. And of course you can configure it to move finished files to a specific directory when it's done, so once again you could have another network share for that on your file server.

I just might do this once I get my shit sorted out and build a file server. I've needed to modularize my computer usage for some time now so I don't have to worry about free hard drive space on the computer I use for general web access and multimedia. Though honestly all the multimedia would probably reside on the fileserver too, and I'd just access it over the network. net use drive: \\remote-server\share-name FTW.

Anyway, enough about Deluge itself. On to the RSS feed plugin for its web ui, called feeder.

Deluge plugins are .egg files, which is once again neat because you just download a single file, plop it in the plugins directory, and restart Deluge to install them. Then in the web ui you go to Plugins, check the one you want to use, and hit Save. Therein lies the problem, however. Feeder doesn't create its configuration tab when you activate it. I don't even think it's loaded. I added the two plugins it came with, Labels and Blocklist, and both of them created config pages and .conf files, but I have neither a config page nor a .conf file for feeder.

A quick trip through feeder's thread on Deluge's forums found me a possible solution: for whatever reason feeder has an external dependency that it doesn't have the common courtesy to tell the user about, so it just silently fails to load, being the exact opposite of helpful. This external dependency is a Python script called feedparser. Deluge is written in Python anyway, so it makes sense. Someone posted saying "I had to do this to get it to work on Windows" so I went and tried to follow their instructions, but the directory they say to put feedparser in doesn't exist on my install.

I really don't want to have to be stuck with Azureus any longer, but as long as I can't get a proper RSS feed scanner working in Deluge, I don't really have a choice. I'd write my own but that would require learning both Python and Deluge's API, and hours upon hours of debugging just to reinvent the wheel and have fewer features than those supposedly offered by feeder. The thread is full of people who have gotten it to work and/or had it Just Work™. I've posted my issue and hopefully soon I can join the ranks of those who have it working.

Deluge verdict: a nice torrent client. A little rough around the edges but overall very usable with neat features for those who need them.

feeder verdict: it'd be less of a steaming pile of crap if I could get it to load.

Overall verdict: for now, back to Azureus :(

mp3 player oddness

I think I mentioned a while back that someone left a blue SanDisk MP3 player in the LAN room at MAGFest. I posted on the site about it, and gave its owner a few months to claim it. No response. So, I claimed it. I removed the music from it (I still have it around, I guess I'm just paranoid) and have been using it for myself.

Recently I noticed a weird problem with it. I had put a few entire albums on it and had been listening to them on shuffle, so I hadn't noticed it until I tried to browse for a specific track to play at a party. It basically sorted my music in random order. It's not completely random, however. The files I have in the root of the player are sorted alphabetically by name as one might expect. The complete albums (in folders by artist), however, were completely randomized. My naming format is <artist> - <track number> - <title>, which coupled with the player's tiny screen means that I have to wait for the filename to slowly scroll across the screen to see which track it is.

So, I broke out Advanced Renamer, a batch-renaming utility I got off of SoftPedia a while back, and used it to rename one album to <track number> - <title> - <artist>, using its handy dandy feature that reads ID3 tags from music files. I figured if it didn't fix the problem, at the very least, I'd be able to find the track I wanted a lot more easily. I start the thing up, go into the folder, and wham, everything's sorted by track number as it should have been to begin with.

The only logical explanation that I can come up with to explain this is that it uses only the first few characters of the filename to sort the list, to save time over comparing each character until it finds a difference. Maybe that saves battery power or something.

So if you've got one of these and are experiencing this problem (or for that matter, are experiencing this problem with any audio player), try renaming your files to put the track number first. This will especially help if you're trying to listen to an audio book on any player affected by this problem.

I dunno if there's a firmware update that fixes this or not. When I look at the player's software version, it says "2.0.007A 2005/09/09" and the most recent firmware I can find is 1.24. The player is a refurb, maybe they have a special fimware version they install onto players when they refurbish them.

Now that I've explained the problem and its solution, I can drift away from the topic. Here's some of the features that I like.

• It appears as USB Mass Storage instead of requiring the use of special software.
• That means it can be used on any OS that supports USB. Cross-platform compatibility is always a huge plus.
• Simply open a file browser window and drag files onto (and even off of) the device, when they're done copying, you're ready to go.
• It has an FM radio that gets pretty good reception. I successfully used it to listen to WCNR 106.1 FM. Compare that to the clock radio I have on my desk which loses the signal if I get up from my computer (no joke).
• It also has a voice recorder. I haven't used it except to record short clips of me saying "testing, testing", but it works pretty well. Not sure how well it'd work for recording audio that's coming from farther away (say, your professor's lecture).
• It's fairly configurable. You can change equalizer settings, tell it to keep the backlight on longer (or shorter), turn on a sleep timer, and much more.
• It runs off of one AAA battery. I haven't evaluated the battery life, but I got a couple hours out of it at the party with no dent to its battery meter (which only shows three bars, terrible resolution).
• It gets its power from the USB connection when you plug it into a computer, instead of using your battery.
  

As with pretty much anything, there are some downsides:

• The UI is fairly horrible. You have to navigate it with this tiny stick that can be pushed in four directions as well as inwards.
• Pushing the button inwards and releasing it quickly lets you browse the folders, pushing it and holding it brings up the config.
• To go into a folder you don't push the button in, you push it towards the right. Luckily you can play a selected file by either pushing right again or hitting Play.
• The screen is tiny. The Gameboy Micro has a bigger screen.
• No ogg vorbis support. Just MP3, WMA, and WAV. I could get so many more songs into the 512MB of available space if it supported vorbis :(

I don't think it's worth looking for one of these, as I don't think they're manufactured anymore. To find anything related to it on SanDisk's website I have to use their search. Their Sansa players are featured much more prominently and look to be much more iPod-like in appearance, whereas the SDMX1 is a clear take-off of an iRiver IFP-700 or similar looking audio player.

As for Advanced Renamer, all I can say is I wish it supported regular expressions. If someone releases a batch renaming program for Windows that does, I'd use that in an instant. Yeah, I did link you to the portable version, but whatever. Just tell your unzipping utility to make a folder in Program Files and unzip it to that, then make a start menu shortcut pointing to ARen.exe. Bam, same effect as an installer.

The verdict: keep and use until someone makes one that supports regular expressions. Maybe someone already has, there are a few other batch renamers on SoftPedia.

Windows 7 Beta

So yeah, I'm running it in a VM. I'm not sure how much of the new stuff is new since VistAIDS and how much of it was added in VistAIDS (I've never used it), but I know what wasn't in XPoop. And since it's a public beta, there aren't any NDAs or any of that faggotry involved, so I get to tell you about stuff.

I'm not sure if some of my complaints are caused by the fact that it's a beta, or the fact that I'm running it in a VM, or the fact that I gave it half of the 1 GB of RAM that Microsoft recommends. I just didn't feel right giving a VM half of my computer's total RAM. It's a bit sluggish with only 512MB of RAM, but still usable. Keep those three facts in mind when reading the rest of this.

Tsuruya watching me install the Windows 7 Beta.

The install is actually fairly quick. I was surprised, given how XP's takes bloody forfuckingever. Boot off the DVD, it copies and extracts files for about 15 minutes, then you remove the DVD and reboot and it's maybe another 15-20 minutes (with some interaction such as entering account name, computer name, password, and product key) and you're good to go.

VirtualBox setup for Windows 7.

If you want to run it in VirtualBox like I am, you'll need to set the network card to the Intel PRO/1000 Desktop card, as it doesn't have AMD PCNet drivers. Once you have the network card set properly, you won't have sound (even if you've set that up properly), but it'll solve that itself with a feature I find partly really neat and partly scary: It just goes out onto the internet, finds the device driver, and installs it all by itself with no prompting or interaction required.

Annoyingly, they turn on ClearType by default, and have it set to do subpixel rendering by default instead of just anti-aliasing. They also claim to have invented ClearType, which just makes me laugh. Subpixel rendering and antialiasing were around and even implemented in other OSes long before Microsoft caught wind of either of them. In addition, subpixel rendering only works on LCDs. Being that I have a CRT, I could see the green and red borders on either side of things. Once I got through the install I went straight to the control panel, found the ClearType tuner, adjusted it to just antialias things, and text looks pretty good.

The login screen.	Select Pin to Taskbar...
...and it gets pinned to the taskbar. Yay.	The taskbar with Firefox and Windows Explorer pinned to it and running.
Taskbar properties.

What I noticed almost right away: The taskbar. It works more like the dock in OS X and has a feature that can greatly help reduce taskbar clutter. Instead of having the Quick Launch bar, you can instead pin any program in the start menu to it from the right click menu. When you run a program that's pinned to the taskbar, it doesn't create a separate taskbar entry for it, instead it just highlights the pre-existing icon. If you have more than one window of that application open it shows a small bar next to it (like it's layered, like a stack of playing cards or something) and you just hover it to get a menu showing all the windows. From that menu you can restore/focus each individual window, or even close it without having to give it focus. Also, by default, taskbar icons are grouped so that multiple windows from one application make the aforementioned menu, and the taskbar entries are also just the application's icon by default (i.e. the text is hidden, but you can un-hide it in the options if you want). I tweaked the taskbar a bit (small icons, and auto-hide), but generally the defaults are good.

System tray config.

The next thing I noticed: It actually fucking obeys your preferences for hiding system tray icons, though annoyingly enough you'll still have to tell it to hide each and every one. XP would just be like "lol wut you don't want to see this icon? I'll show it for you! I r being helpful!"

My custom theme file, open in the Windows version of gedit.

I've been unable to change the Aero window color from the default blue. Even though it comes with themes that set it to yellow and pink and I found the color value in the theme file and set up a black one. It also supports alpha blending on windows, but even though I've specified that it doesn't do it. By the way, the only way to set the Aero window color or the alpha blending is to locate the theme file itself (which is a chore), open it in a text editor (it's just a text file), and then figure out that the 32 bit color value is organized as such: 0x(AA)(RR)(GG)(BB) where 0x designates that it's hexadecimal, A=alpha, R=red, G=green, and B=blue, and the parentheses aren't actually there. In case you're wondering, the color value visible in my screenshot (and that should be applied to the window, but isn't) is pure black with about 80% opacity. Explaining hexadecimal is beyond the scope of this post.

Built-in wallpaper rotator!

While we're in the Personalization control panel (that's what it's called), I noticed there's a built-in wallpaper rotator, which is nice. It will resample while respecting aspect ratio if you set it to "Fit", but annoyingly converts everything to a jpeg (including any animated gif wallpapers you may have, which strips the animation).

UAC only seems to ever happen when I go to install something or when a program needs to change system settings (like when I was associating Media Player Classic with various file formats). So it's not that annoying. I dunno what UAC was like in VistAIDS, but generally everyone complained about it. UAC is strangely absent on control panel applets, I thought that all system changes made by all programs would have to go through it instead of just anything that isn't Windows itself.

Also, a side effect of UAC being required for file association changes means that if your browser isn't aware of this and tries to set itself as the default it won't work. This happened with Iron. I had to run Iron as an administrator (which is weird because of the next paragraph) to set it. Firefox prompted to set as default during its install, after I'd already given UAC the okay, so it set itself as default without a hitch.

The user created during install is an administrator by default. I'm not sure about the default for new accounts beyond that. Even then, I get told "Access Denied" when trying to browse some system folders with my supposedly administrator-level account.

I think this may have been a VistAIDS feature, but the start menu is actually fucking sorted by name all the fucking time. As opposed to XP's behavior of "lol wut always sort by name why would you want that?"

Multiple time zones!	Larger display with calendar.

The system clock has an interesting addition that I've been informed was also in VistAIDS: you can set it to show up to two extra time zones besides your system default. So if you want to know what time it is in some other time zone, this is built into windows and accessible by getting it to show the taskbar clock's tooltip. In addition, if you click the clock, it brings up a larger display with a calendar.

Next to the taskbar clock there's a button that when clicked instantly minimizes everything and if clicked again restores what you had up. So if you need quick access to the desktop (i.e. you actually have desktop icons or something) then there you go.

Fucking excess.

I've been mentioning the control panel for a while now, but not actually talking specifically about the control panel. There are a shitton of control panel applets. Seriously, there's 57 of them. 57. FIFTY FUCKING SEVEN CONTROL PANEL APPLETS. Maybe it's just because the beta is Windows 7 Ultimate, but still, couldn't they consolidate some of that? This is a default install!

This screen is cluttered!	Fixed. With weird graphical glitches for good measure.
Here's what you do.

A feature that might be useful is the way you can easily maximize or tile windows. To maximize a window, nope, you don't even need to click the maximize button. Just drag the window to the top of the screen. If you drag a maximized window away from the top of the screen, it restores it to its previous size. If you drag a window to either side of the screen, it makes it fill that half of the screen. In addition, if you right click the taskbar, it will allow you to tile everything you have open. This only operates on windows that aren't minimized, so it's fairly intuitive.

The Snipping Tool.	MSPaint!

It's also got a tool that I've been using all along but haven't mentioned yet: the Snipping Tool. It allows you to select an area of the screen with your mouse to save as an image file. It made making most of these screenshots pretty simple. It has the ability to do a freeform selection and a rectangular selection in addition to grabbing the full screen or just a single window. Though you can do the full screen snips and window snips with PrintScrn and Alt + PrintScrn, respectively; the Snipping Tool streamlines the process by allowing you to save the image to your hard drive without having to go to your favorite image editor, make a new image, and hit Paste first. Also, since I did a few of the shots the old-fashioned way with PrintScrn and MSPaint (the one with the Snipping Tool I had to do that way, the Snipping Tool won't let you take a picture of the Snipping Tool), I noticed that MSPaint had been enhanced somewhat, so I screencapped that too.

The verdict: I have a fairly mixed opinion of Windows 7 thus far. I like some of its stuff but think other parts need improvement.

DOSBox is wonderful

I've been using DOSBox for a while to run old DOS-based games on Windows. DOSBox emulates the old DOS environment, allowing games written for that environment to be run. In addition, it abstracts your computer's hardware from its emulated environment, basically allowing you to define the drive letters and what paths they refer to on your computer. It will even let you define a drive letter that points to a .iso, so if you're like me and make isos of all your games so you don't have to track down the disc and risk getting the disc damaged, you can still do that.

It creates a window, and lets you run your games windowed, or even fullscreen if you hit Alt + Enter. It will capture the mouse pointer if you click, so if you want to get it back you'll have to remember to press Ctrl + F10. There are other keyboard shortcuts that do different things, you can read about them in the readme.

DOSBox only has a few minor issues I've seen with the games I've run in it. Descent 1 and Duke Nukem 3D both have weird graphical glitches, usually when there's a fullscreen color flash (i.e. you're getting hit). Bits of that color will get "stuck" on the rest of the game's UI (typically the parts that don't get painted very often). The only way to fix this is to force it to repaint. In Descent, this means bringing up the automap. In Duke Nukem 3D, I believe the only way to fix it is to toggle fullscreen. The 7th Guest runs better in windowed mode than fullscreen, though this may be solvable by tweaking some config options.

DOSBox creates within its environment a special Z: drive. This drive contains various system-critical things like the drive mounting program, and the all-important autoexec.bat. If you look in DOSBox's config file (dosbox.conf, open it in your favorite text editor), all the way at the bottom, you can define what goes into autoexec.bat.

You can also create multiple config files and tell DOSBox which one to use when you start it. This makes it fairly easy to have a general config (dosbox.conf) that you work with to get games installed. Once you get a game installed, you can then copy your general config to a separate file, play around with settings, and set up a specific autoexec.bat to set up a proper environment, start the game, and exit when it ends.

For instance, my autoexec.bat in for The 7th Guest (in my config file t7g.conf) looks like this:

@echo off
mount c e:\games
imgmount d "d:\cd images\t7g-disc1.iso" "d:\cd images\t7g-disc2.iso" -t cdrom
c:
cd id\t7g
v !
exit

In case you're wondering why I run v ! instead of t7g (which is simply a .bat file that runs v !), it's because the exit command didn't seem to take effect when I ran t7g, and it does with v !. I specify both .iso files on one line because that way, I can tell DOSBox to swap between the discs by hitting Ctrl + F4 (and The 7th Guest does require this, once you go through the door to the attic it prompts for disc 2, and after beating the game it prompts for disc 1).

Then to wrap it all up and make it seamless, I made a shortcut and set the target like such:
"C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72\dosbox.exe" -noconsole -conf="C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72\t7g.conf"

The -noconsole option makes it not pop up a regular command line window (that it normally dumps error information to), and the -conf option tells it to use the config file I specify.

Now, whenever I click this shortcut, it starts The 7th Guest, and when I exit The 7th Guest, the window goes away. Pretty nice.

One thing DOSBox lacks (that's easy enough to fix yourself) is a copy of edit.com, the DOS-based text file editor. Having it around would be really handy for reading readmes and such within DOSBox's environment. Since it's so easy to fix, I might as well tell you my fix for it:

1. Open up a Windows Explorer window.
2. Browse to C:\WINDOWS\System32.
3. Scroll down until you find edit.com and edit.hlp.
4. Select both of them and press Ctrl + C to copy them.
5. Navigate back to where you installed DOSBox. (by default, in Program Files)
6. Make a subdirectory in DOSBox's directory. I called mine 'edit'.
7. Go into that subdirectory and press Ctrl + V to paste the files.
8. Go back to DOSBox's directory.
9. Open dosbox.conf in your favorite text editor.
10. Scroll all the way down to the bottom.
11. Add the following lines to the autoexec.bat: (if your install directory is different, substitute that in place of this one)
    
    mount y "C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.72\edit\"
    PATH=Z:\;Y:\
12. Save your changes.
    

And you're set. Now you can edit text files from within DOSBox just by typing edit textfile.txt.

Whoops, got kinda carried away there. Time to end this post.

The verdict: Awesome. Brag about it to your friends.