Recent Posts

9601

General Software Discussion / Re: I want a Freeware Utility to ... 300+ common problems solved.

« Last post by Deozaan on April 18, 2006, 06:44 PM »

I noticed a couple of Mouser's Robot programs from this site on that list!

9602

Living Room / Re: Firefox CPU usage

« Last post by Deozaan on April 18, 2006, 06:15 PM »

I think it does send it to the hard drive but I haven't noticed any slowdown when restoring the window and I often have 7+ tabs going.

I also like to multitask, so I use up a lot of RAM by having lots of processes open. Anything that can reduce the RAM usage (especially while I'm not using it) is good in my book.

9603

Living Room / Re: Is it safe to try new freeware?

« Last post by Deozaan on April 18, 2006, 06:07 PM »

our virtual machine review ->
https://www.donation...alMachine/index.html

-mouser (April 18, 2006, 12:49 AM)

Thanks, Mouser!

The link to QEMU is broken at the bottom of the article. It links to freeoszoo but it should just be oszoo.org. Does anyone else use QEMU that would like to answer some questions for me? For instance, could a 32-bit machine create a 64-bit vm to try out a 64bit OS? Or vice versa? Could it emulate a Mac?

9604

Living Room / Re: Is it safe to try new freeware?

« Last post by Deozaan on April 17, 2006, 11:04 PM »

How would one go about setting up a virtual machine?

9605

Living Room / Re: Firefox CPU usage

« Last post by Deozaan on April 17, 2006, 10:55 PM »

Sorry I can't help with the CPU usage problem, but Mark sent me this link the other day from LifeHacker showing you how you can reduce the RAM that Firefox uses up. It's pretty neat to see it go from 150MB down to 6-8MB just by minimizing it:

http://tech.cybernet...firefox-memory-leak/

9606

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: My new favorite pen

« Last post by Deozaan on April 17, 2006, 06:14 PM »

This is what I do most of my writing with:

9607

Living Room / Re: Hilarious spoof ...

« Last post by Deozaan on April 17, 2006, 05:58 PM »

It's funny but what is it spoofing? Is there a link to the original work?

9608

Older Newsletters / Re: DonationCoder.com Article - One Year Report on our Experiments with Donationware

« Last post by Deozaan on April 17, 2006, 02:40 AM »

Great article! I'm still fairly new here and it gives me a greater understanding of what this site is all about.

Good stuff.

9609

General Software Discussion / Re: What's your favorite computer game from when you were young?

« Last post by Deozaan on April 17, 2006, 01:59 AM »

When I was young we didn't have computers! I can still remember the first available pocket calculators which seemed pretty whizzo at the time - even if you did have to learn RPN to use them

-Carol Haynes (April 15, 2006, 05:56 AM)

Sorry for my ignorance, what's RPN?

Favorite computer games? Too many!

Our first computer we had was for my father's business. The monitors were just green and black. I don't even remember what kind of computers they were. There was a fun game on it called Ladder. Then my brother got a TI-87 or something computer and a book for programming games in BASIC. Plus we had the cartridge addons. The game I remember most from it was called Tunnels of Doom.

Then we got a computer that ran DOS and Windows 3.11. Tons of old DOS games -- Doom I & II, Wolfenstein 3D, Worms, Scorched Earth, Space Quest I-VI, Sim City, Star Control, Hugo's House of Horrors and the sequel Whodunit. Jill of the Jungle, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3D, Where in Space or the Universe is Carmen Sandiego, Monkey Island I & II, Full Throttle, Mario's Missing, Warcraft I & II, Diablo, Baldur's Gate, Starcraft, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Heroes, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Commander Keen 1-IV, Moraff's World, Stars!, Rise of the Triad, Descent I & II, and a gem called Castle of the Winds.

We eventually got two computers and networked them so we could play games multiplayer. I spent countless hours fragging my friend or brother in FPSs and destroying or being destroyed in RTSs.

I used to really like the competitive games but nowadays I prefer cooperative over competitive. Probably because I spent so much time on those games that I could beat my brother and friend almost everytime--and by a landslide--that they got sick of playing with me.

That's all I can think of right now. There's actually another but I can't remember the name of it. Something like Fantasy Empires.

I also had a fun time with an Intellivision and a Nintendo but those aren't computer games so I won't go into the long lists for those systems.

EDIT: Fixed name and added link for Tunnels of Doom. (I previously referred to it as Dungeons of Doom.)

9610

Living Room / Re: Unread Posts not working entirely

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 05:46 PM »

I did just delete my cookies earlier today. . .

9611

Living Room / Unread Posts not working entirely

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 05:31 PM »

Hello, remember when the new forums were released and I said it didn't list any unread posts for me? Well I just finished reading all the unread posts that are listed on that page yet when I go to any forum board it lists several posts that have the "New" image next to them.

I thought it was kind of strange that after not visiting this site for a few days there were only ten new posts. . .

9612

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 05:20 PM »

Btw, for the up/downstream issue, it's worth looking into cFosSpeed. Rather than just "choking" applications to throttle your upstream (and thus maintain downstream), it can also do some packet reordering ("deep stuff") that will make everything flow smoother. The result is download speeds somewhat below your theoretical maximum, but still with a good upload speed at the same time.

-f0dder (April 05, 2006, 04:25 PM)

Is cFosSpeed built into Azureus or is it one of the plugins? If it's a plugin, where can I find it?

I went to the Azureus wiki and changed my settings according to their Good Settings wiki page. It suggested I put my upload throttle at about 19k, which immediately destroyed my browsing. Downloading torrents doesn't seem to be affected by my upload speed, but browsing the internet does. So I've got it reduced to 10k and it seems to be working well. I'm not downloading anything right now, so I can't tell if my download rates have improved, but at least my upload is twice as much as before. That should help keep my share ratio higher.

9613

Living Room / Re: BitTorrent - why bother?

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 02:35 PM »

I used uTorrent before Azureus and uTorrent would break my connection to webpages (hogging all the bandwidth, I suppose). That was unnacceptable to me (I had used BitLord previous with no throttle and did not have that problem) so I looked for somethign else and found Azureus, which is practically identical to uTorrent, at least in appearance. Occassionally I get good download rates of about 30Kbps, and rarely I get higher rates, but most of the time it is between 5-20KBps. I've set my router and firewall, DHT is enabled (whatever that is) and my NAT is okay. And still if I don't have a global throttle of about 5k upload speed my internet browsing is basically dead.

I never throttle my download speed as it has never affecting my browsing.

I would much prefer to download via http, so I can get at least 80KBps+, but files are much easier to find using a BitTorrent search site and for those truly big files, it's a major plus that it can resume right where you left off with no extra software (that doesn't always work) necessary.

When I made the switch to Azureus from uTorrent I found that I liked Azureus better. Still my download rates are usually much slower than anyone using 1.5mbps broadband should get.

I also heard about a tit-for-tat thing. Where if you don't upload as much as you download you get slower download rates. I only skimmed over the messages after reading so many of them, but did anybody else mention that? I try to keep my share ratio at about 1, but with having to throttle my upload to 5k all the time it doesn't work out so well.

9614

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Maya for Free

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 02:07 PM »

Yes, you do get a watermark over your images.

It is for personal learning and the EULA or ToS or whatever specifically say you can't use it for anything commercially, so a watermark isn't so bad if you follow along with their original plan for this: Simply to learn how to use the program.

9615

General Software Discussion / Re: where's the audio url?

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 01:11 PM »

It's being pulled in through a Flash applet.

http://www.q92fm.com/radioflash/radioplayer.swf

You can right-click that link and choose Save As. . . and play it from your desktop (maybe) if you have the Standalone Flash Player, which I think you can download from Macromedia.com.

Other than that, I can't provide more help to the audio.

9616

Found Deals and Discounts / Maya for Free

« Last post by Deozaan on April 05, 2006, 12:56 PM »

Autodesk is offering a free Personal Learning Edition of it's 2D & 3D modeling/animation/rendering program called Maya. Go here for details:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=6902573

This company also owns 3DS Max and AutoCAD, so they've some experience with these types of programs. I haven't used it myself, but I've always liked dabbling in art programs. Hopefully it comes with some good tutorials.

9617

Official Announcements / Re: MARCH SOFTWARE DRAWING RESULTS - POSTED!

« Last post by Deozaan on March 30, 2006, 09:57 PM »

Congrats to all the winners, especially Deozaan who I know had wonderful things to say about subliminal flash

-allen (March 30, 2006, 10:09 AM)

Subliminal Flash FTW!

9618

General Software Discussion / Re: Gabbly!

« Last post by Deozaan on March 24, 2006, 10:31 PM »

Is there a reason you linked us to the Terms of Service?

How about just http://www.mobber.com/ for everyone as lazy as I am.

9619

Developer's Corner / Re: Do you use a good office chair when programming?

« Last post by Deozaan on March 22, 2006, 09:17 PM »

My wireless card keeps giving me a blue screen of death, so I'm in the living room on my flatmate's "bean bag" chair that was $100 with a direct ethernet connection to the router.  The chair is four feet in diameter, so it's fairly large, but I don't like it very much because it isn't really filled with beans or bean-like things. Just giant chunks of foam so it's hard to shape the way you want it to. It encourages a reclining position which is kind of hard on my neck sometimes.

But for a standard office chair I recommend leg rests, and if you get one with arm rests I suggest one that has some sort of material/padding on them. My elbows get rubbed to soreness on the plastic/hard ones. It's also great if they are at about the same height as your desk.

If I had the money I would definitely be willing to spend up to a few hundred dollars for a chair, considering how much time I spend using the computer.

9620

Older Newsletters / Re: VRGRRL Blogs In Live from the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose

« Last post by Deozaan on March 22, 2006, 08:25 PM »

Pay special attention to Nintendo tomorrow, and try to get me a 5 finger discount on a prototype revolution, will you?

-allen (March 22, 2006, 07:25 PM)

Oh, um, that was me, posting under Allen's account. . . Yeah. I meant get the prototype for me.

9621

General Software Discussion / Re: Some great browsing keyboard shortcut suggestions

« Last post by Deozaan on March 22, 2006, 08:06 PM »

Every browser that I know of already lets you use the Backspace key to navigate back. Also ctrl-w seems to be the default for closing the current tab (among other things in other programs).

I've never really had a use to navigate forward, but my All In One Mouse Gestures for Firefox makes that easy, allowing to merely right-click and drag to the right to go forward. Of course, that kind of defeats the purpose of not using a mouse at all, but it still makes it easier on laptop users having to use that stupid touchpad.

9622

Living Room / Re: Free landline calls?

« Last post by Deozaan on March 22, 2006, 07:09 PM »

I downloaded a program in 2001 in which the trial version let you call anywhere in the US (from the US) for free and talk five minutes. The purchased version didn't limit you on your time.

I haven't checked out your InternetCalls program/website, but the one I used let you use your internet connection to call other people. When I used it I talked into my microphone and heard the other person from my speakers. The person I called just used their phone like normal.

I can't remember what it was called anymore. I only used it to call one person a couple of times.

9623

Living Room / Re: How long will it take you to adopt Windows Vista as your OS?

« Last post by Deozaan on March 22, 2006, 06:56 PM »

It's the difference between a real woman and a slattern, I'd much rather look at an attractive woman than be repelled by a skank.

I prefer women that are beatiful WITHOUT makeup, but are drop-dead gorgeous with. Vista is a case of "I can live with this skank when she has a couple of pounds of makeup on".

-f0dder (March 18, 2006, 11:31 PM)

Is it just me that finds these comments slightly offensive? Some of us may not be much to look at but we are human beings with the same emotions as everyone else (and perhaps a little more grey matter than women who spend 90% of the time in beauty parlours, in front of the mirror or having surgery).

-Carol Haynes (March 19, 2006, 05:04 AM)

You are not alone, Carol.

P.S. That's a lot of quotes.

9624

Living Room / Re: clever samarost-style game

« Last post by Deozaan on March 22, 2006, 06:46 PM »

Deo is an imposter! I told him how to do that (after googling for the answer myself <grin>).

-Mark007 (March 21, 2006, 11:01 AM)

This is true. But the way you told me was so confusing I practically had to figure it out myself, so I will still claim some of the credit.

9625

General Software Discussion / Re: software for colorblind

« Last post by Deozaan on March 13, 2006, 11:29 PM »

Hooray, I was able to easily see all that I should have been able to.