fr3aky's Musings

PEONS! I HATH COME TO CLAIM THIS BLOG TO BE MINE.

FR3AKY’S REIGN OF TERROR HAS ENDED, MINE HAS JUST BEGUN.

-insert customary maniacal laughter-

That is all.

Part 2 of my expose on invaluable applications will focus on customising the Windows desktop. Everyone knows I’m style over substance so lets take a look at how I extend that philosophy to to making my windows desktop a sleek, attractive and clutter free environment.

Desktop

To give an idea of what can be achieved with a few free applications here is a screenshot of my current desktop.

No messy scattered icons!

A few things worth noting here. The screenshot is taken on a machine running the Windows 7 beta. I have my taskbar on a secondary monitor allowing me to achieve this look. Where only one monitor is available one can easily discard the dock and have the task bar at the bottom or keep both and place the task bar along the top of the screen – it is my opinion that auto hiding defeats the purpose of the taskbar some what. I would not sacrifice the task bar completely even in Windows Vista or XP. The start menu and notifications area is too invaluable and in Windows 7 the task bar icons are better than any dock.

The design paradigm here is to show off an aesthetically striking wallpaper by keeping desktop icons out of way and well organised so they may still be located and launched with ease. Only three utilities are used:

ObjectDock is one of the better known Windows dock solutions. The free version has most of the features that you’ll need if simply want to use it as a docking bay for frequently used desktop shortcuts. A paid Plus version is available if you want to use it as a whole taskbar replacement allowing you to have multiple docks, more effects and even show system tray icons in your dock. A Windows 7 user with a single monitor set up would probably be better off just keeping their taskbar, I simply liked having a dock for easy access to frequently used applications on the primary monitor. If you are on an earlier version of windows or have too much programs to pin to the task bar like me then ObjectDock is a nice place to park stray icons.

Fences is responsible for those grouped up game and benchmark icons you see on the right of my desktop. When you have too many shortcuts they have a tendancy to rearrange/reorder themselves making it difficult to find what you want at a glance. The solution is to either delete most of them and access prgrams front the start menu or use fences to keep them organised and still on the desktop for easy access. Fences is from Stardock – the same developers of ObjectDock above. It is currently still in beta but its working quite stably for me, giving an elegent solution to keeping my desktop icons organised, neatly arranged and consistently positioned.

A ‘fence’ is a container for desktop shortcuts, they can be moved around and resized easily. To create a new fence one simply needs to right click and drag a box around the shortcuts one wants it to contain. The contents can be modified easily by drag and drop mechanism after the fence is created so dont worry about getting everything in one go. Icons already in the container can be rearranged if desired and scrolled through if the ‘fence’ is too small to display all the icons in it.

Rainmeter is a highly customisable resource and performance meter that can be used to create desktop bound displays of nearly every conceivable system information. Rainmeter skins are simple .ini files containing descriptions of what metrics are displayed and how they are to be formatted. It is very light weight and for Windows XP users with no access to widgets a must have for customising desktops. Simply add it to your startup folder to make it run on windows launch.

I use it as a visual tweak to display the time and date overlay on the top left of my desktop. Its a skin called the 10-Foot HUD brought to us through lifehacker. The problem with using rainmeter on Aero enabled Windows Vista/7 is that skins cannot be properly stuck to the desktop. Setting a skin to the desktop level will only make it dissapear. If anyone has a fix for this I would be very grateful for it. For the time being just setting it to normal position and click through will make it function as if it were part of your wallpaper with the exception of using the win+D command to show desktop.

All Gadgets has some nice and simple stat monitoring widgets for those that want something a little more elaborate than rainmeter. If you got a wide screen monitor with lots of desktop realestate they make an effective addition for bonus geek points. You also get to see when how your system is coping with the work load, but who cares about that when your desktop looks as cool as mine

Right, so I was looking for an excuse to write an article in order to help me figure out how to embed videos again. Anyway, this is another old news, but StarCraft2 will be available in different languages other than english. So far the non-english speaking SC communities (mostly the Koreans) didn’t like the sudden change in unit names, since they grew up knowing the names in english. This is not helped by the apparently horrible name translations, for example in the Korean version of SC2 protoss carriers are translated to “big spaceships”, colossus is translated to “big things” and lurkers are translated to “underground conquorers”. Hilarious, yes, however I sincerely hope that Blizzard would just use hangulised english names in the Korean version since it sound so much cooler. Not to mention for us non-korean foreign spectators watching the Korean professional scene, the hangulised english names in SC1 were much needed distractions from the fact that we don’t know what the hell the commentators are talking about 99% of the time. However I have a feeling that Blizzard is not going to budge on the issue, so I guess moments like these are going to be missed in SC2:

Lists of awesome/must have/top 10,15 or 25 applications are a dime a dozen on the internet. Whats more most of them are the same. So one more cant hurt right? I havent done any technically orientated articles in a while and this is probably the best, most useful and most accessible topic I can think of. I shall be cataloging a list of my favourite light weight – small and non resource intensive – applications that I install everytime I build/reformat a system. Part one will focus on that series of tubes that plays a part in virtually everyone’s daily lives.

Internet

Firefox is the first step to earning your geek cred. As much as Internet Explorer has improved over the last couple of years, Firefox is still the faster, smarter and more secure browser. That it has captured 22.51% of the web browser market against the marketing and propaganda machine that is Microsoft’s marketing team is a testament to its quality. With the recent major update to 3.5, Firefox is sleeker than ever and there is no better time to make the swtich. Make sure you install adblock plus and sage if you read rss feeds and you wont be looking back for a while. The open source poster child browser is infinitely customizable through extensions and in no time you will have a must have list of your own.

µTorrent is small, simple to use and does everything a bit torrent client is suppose to do. No fluff, no ads, no wasted system resources. Advanced settings are plentiful for the tinkerers among us and the scheduler function is invaluable for bandwidth deprived Aussies like myself. Other than making every other bit torrent client look like bloatware, its a little known fact that µTorrent is also now the official BT client from BitTorrent Inc. who purchased the program back in 2006 and rebranded it for their own BitTorrent 6.0 release while still developing and distributing under the µTorrent website and branding.

Postbox is currently in late beta, but already it is shaping up to set the standards for desktop email clients. I only recently discovered Postbox after building a new Windows 7 (also in beta) machine, having been a long time fan of Mozilla’s Thunderbird. Indeed Postbox is an evolution of Thunderbird’s open source roots from which it was obviously developed. It has several killer features thats bound to win over users of outlook and microsoft’s live mail. The first is Postbox’s searching and sorting powers, allowing users to collect and browse attachments and links from all mail meeting a search query. Additionally it implements a tabbed interface allowing multiple folder and searches to take place across several tabs. Lastly support has just been added for extensions, much like those for Thunderbird and Firefox they are set to redefine the application and make it even more robust at meeting the needs of email junkies everywhere. Fingers crossed they will keep it free after the beta.

Filezilla takes care of all my FTP needs. Admittedly limited to managing the blog and occassionally fetching files from university servers from home. Its open source, free and straightforward to use. Could use a better icon though

Dropbox is online storage implemented right. The key feature of dropbox is that it can be installed on your computer as a directory, mounted where ever you wish. This allows you to access it as it were a local storage directory, any changes you make are seemlessly synchronised with the Dropbox servers. The best part is its non-intrusive – just install and forget, until you want to access a file from anywhere then just place it in the dropbox folder and in moments it will be backed up on the internet. The client software is cross platform allowing you to mount your dropbox in your Windows, Linux and Mac machines simultaneously. If you can’t install anything where you are working the usual browser based interface is available for uploading and downloading your files. The free service even backs up all your files for 30 days in case you want to undelete anything. One more cool feature, you can set up public folders to share files with anyone and even public galleries – like my wallpaper collection (mostly from InterfaceLIFT, deviantArt and a few others.)

Shameless self plugging time. If you do sign up for dropbox please use my referral link: https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTEyNTM1ODQ5 getting a friend to sign up nets you a bonus 250mb of free storage for up to a total of 5GB on a free account. Standard free accounts are 2GBs, paying a annual subscription will get you much bigger storage space and some advance features, including perpetual undelete of any files you had in your dropbox.

Too little too late I know. But a promise is a promise.

The fourth installment in the ever popular The Fast and Furious franchise is as expected a return to form. Recapturing most of the elements that made the first movie a hit and in their absence the previous two sequels subpar. The biggest (pun!) among these is Vin Diesel who returns as Dominic Toretto, the bold American muscle and muscle car driver who single handedly carried The Fast and the Furious into classic car racing movie territory. Of the course the francise is about more than just Vin, it’s the teenage audience winning formula of good looking cars, even better looking babes and a booming soundtrack that gave us a forth a movie after the cheese that were Tokyo Drift and 2 Fast 2 Furious. Teenagers would be happy to know thats all back. As are most of the original cast including Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster and Paul Walker (has this guy played anything else notable other than the cop with an attitude in Fast and Furious movies?) His return is still a good addition to the film as it brings back the contrast between his bad cop and Vin Diesel’s good criminal, not to mention the rivalry between their cars – American Muscle vs Imports.

The plot is not this movie’s strength and any extensive discussion will only ruin its paper thin structure, which already has enough holes without me over exposing it. I will simply sum it up as Dominic returns to the States after going on the run post The Fast and the Furious in order to exact revenge oh a cardboard movie drug dealing villian. Paul Walker also tags along. It does however suffice as an excuse to jump to the next car chase, race, gun fight, explosion, skimpy dancing/pouting babes or Vin Diesel doing something bad ass. And thats enough to make it heads and shoulders above the scripts that let down the last two sequels.

What Taiwanise director Justin Lin(LOL sounds like someone I know) did right was structure. He learned his lesson from Tokyo Drift (that style is not enough) and delivers a film that is consistently entertaining for the 100 minute running time. Starting with one of the best openning sequences to an action any movie I’ve seen, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez and cohorts jacking a oil tanker in South American Desert highways. This immediately transfers us to back to the iconic scenes in the first film where Dominic’s crew attacts an electronics transit truck and sets the tone for the rest of the movie – this is what fans of the original have been waiting for. The action and energy is sustained through the remainder of the movie, with enough plot and character intermissions to give the audience a break and advance the plot without getting carried away and boring the viewer. If there is anything for me to complain about its that the ending isn’t as spectacular or memorable. Nevertheless its satisfying and it opens the way for more sequels to come, and to me at least thats not a bad idea now that they found the winning formula again.

This is a Fast and Furious movie, and as with all the others that came before it. There will be those that love it and those that hate it. My suggestion is if you didn’t like the first, this ain’t for you. If you did though and even if the middle bastard childs in the franchise left your taste for fast cars tarnished you should check this out, its definitely a return to form. I personally loved the movie, admittedly I could be a little biased. Seeing it with someone I loved could well have influenced my opinion.

Came across DogHouse on Digg today, and their stuff is hilarious

Seems to be xkcd (down to the mouse over text)  but less geeky and more chasing after girls with a capital ‘S’ for hairdos.

(When will they learn, males dont have feelings! …unless you count hunger )

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Due to the apparent lack of updates, I’m gonna write something random, before this blog is declared legally dead.

This is probably old news, but for those of you who has been living under the rock longer than me, Starcraft II beta will be coming out this winter whether we like it or not. Alas, some of the more influential starcraft community members have already recieved thier beta keys (apparently getting e-famous does pay off).  Currently there are several ways for peons from the unsuspecting masses (such as myself) to get a beta key: a) register on the official blizzard website  and pray to your god every day that you’ll get picked, b) attend blizzcon09, and c) enter online community contests, which is a nice way of wasting your time and effort only to have someone else beating you because he has an asian girlfriend that knows how to bake cakes (http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=94469 if you are interested). As it is, I have neither god, money or a girlfriend, henceforth I would just have to wait for when the actual game comes out.

Click to make life size!

Heres an entry from the aforementioned baking contest that I really liked, not exactly appetising, unless you are a zerg player like me.

More to come on starcraft related topics if fr3aky refuses make further updates

Okay I’ve only seen Watchmen once so far and let me tell you if I were to watch it thrice more it would not be enough to absorb all of of the details that Snyder and his team infused within the plot, art and action. This is The Godfather of comic book movies. That is not to say the film is flawless, in fact it has recieved somewhat a flogging from critics mostly citing that was too derivative of the comic it was based on both in terms of visual style and dialogue.

To me however Watchmen was a thoroughly enjoyable affair and the 2 hour and 40 minutes run time still left me wishing they had not cut out some notable subplots and explore the characters even more. In my opinion this was  a filmographical tribute to the holy grail of comic books and it was made for the fans. I saw it as someone who greatly admired the comic and having recently reread it has a fairly clear understanding of the immense backstory and plot layers that Alan Moore had written – as such I can only evaluate this film as a fan of the source material. I should imagine that the abrupt change in scenes and multitude of characters that lend themselves out so well across multiple comic book issues would seem quite discordant and overwhelming for those who have not been exposed to the books.

Initial figures indicate the film was a financial hit, however I would attribute the high ticket sales more to fandome earned through the extravagently successful 300 than the appeal of Watchmen to the average viewer alone. Taken as an action movie the film still carries itself well. Snyder’s flare for stylizing violence and everything else that moves is well suited to the brutal hand for hand fighting that Watchmen’s heroes engage in. His signiture slow motion sequences are back looking as slick as ever not as overused as it was in his last hit. The juxaposition of graceful slow downed view of key moments and motions with the frantic and visceral full speed melee fighting sequences that follow gives the feeling of  still comic book frames being brought to life.

The story is slightly altered but this is as faithful an production of the comic as can be filmed. The movie was originally deemed unfilmable by the great Terry Gilliam himself. Efforts have also been made to push for a modern version with our heroes fighting in Iraq as well alternate – happier – endings to the movie that we did get. Snyder resisted these asinine directives and instead choose to make the movie that so close to the comic he probably just spliced up the frames abit and used it as a story board. What we have is the story as much about the characters as the it is about the world them inhabit. The themes of nuclear anihilation, errosion of social decency and antagonism between east and west might not resonate as well today but still makes for an engaging carricature of human nature nontheless.

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I can’t believe I have such little persistence, nearly reaching 2 months between posts now. Cause that no one reads this is a bit disheartening but it was only meant to be an exercise to keep up my writing skills and as with my other exercising resolutions I failed to follow through.

Still playing lots of games and watching every movie/tv show under the sun though, I think its only a matter of time before the inspiration strikes me to start reviewing them again.

Currently I’m in Dawn of War II which just arrived in the mail, i gotta say Relic has once again outdone themselves in refining the squad based RTS experience that they pioneered with the original DoW and Company of Heroes. Also on my play list is FEAR 2 which should be in the mail.

No idea how I will find time to keep up with all my TV shows too with uni kicking off next week. I write from the USYD scitech library which was newly finished and unveiled middle of the 2008 academic year yet I’ve not taken upon myself to visit once even. Yet here I am in the middle of O-Week (orientation week for university students new and old) running a tent no less as a contributor to the university’s investment and trading society. Hopefully this will be a year for new things and broadening experiences on all fronts.

Will report back again. Hopefully in less than 6 weeks.

Disney returns to form with their latest attempt at an animated feature, Bolt. The titular character voiced by John Travolta is a Hollywood canine staring with his teen owner Penny (Miley Cyrus) in an TV show in the vein your typical over the top action movie. The catch is Bolt thinks its all real and he has been bestowed super powers to protect his Spy Kids academy graduate human. Inevitably things come unstuck for him as he breaks free from his set to rescue the kidnapped Penny – as he would believe from his last session of filming. A few misdirected steps later, Bolt manages to ship himself to the other side of the country and the movie takes off from there. Forced to make new friends and learn survival in the real world our hero embarks on a long and heartwarming journey home to his person.

A good deal of this movie’s charm comes from the lively and expressive animation. Of course with Pixar brought in to contribute on the project since their merger with Disney this comes as no surprise. Nevertheless it is good to see characters that feel truly lively and well ‘human’. The voice work is solid though nothing spectacular, Mark Walton as hyperactive hamster Rhino steals both the laughs and the story. The plot does get tired and predictable towards the second half, although I am happy to forgive it seeing how this is after all a kids movie and there is enough substance there to keep adults following.

In an unusual turn from the norm this is a talking animals movie with humans, in fact one of my favourite characters will have to be the unabashedly sly caricature of a Hollywood agent voiced by Greg Germann. The rest of the human cast serves as either emotional or more often slapstik fodder. This is kids movie with a simple plot containing a time honoured moral and a string of spectacles to the keep the littlies laughing. There is little depth to explore and it will not linger with you after you see it – not quite on par with for example Pixar’s Wall-E. It’s here to entertain and it pull that off with such fluidity and class that no animation fans should miss it. Rhino would approve.