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Archive for January, 2009

Disaster!

Jan 28

Posted by admin in none | No Comments

Well, the good news is iRex got back to me. The bad news is that they want €275 to fix the iliad.I’m torn. On the one hand, I’d love to have my ebook back, and getting it repaired will mean a screen upgrade to a sharper, faster display.

On the other, it cost me €400 on ebay, and I can’t really justify spending another €275 on it when I could pick up a Sony PRS-505 for €249

In any case, I’ll be posting the remainder of my scribblings here in the months to come, but I think I’ll also be turning this into a general blog about e-book readers.

-Rory

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ProcessTamer

Jan 7

Posted by admin in freeware, none | No Comments

http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Mouser/proctamer/index.html

I used to use this app all the time a few years back, and I thought I no longer needed it until yesterday.

Picture the scene: You have a pile of windows open, working on lots of stuff, some saved, some not. Suddenly, your PC locks up. nothing will respond. The mouse barely moves. Windows will not redraw. CTRL + ALT + DEL seems to offer help, but once you click on 'Task Manager' the whole process just repeats, and we lock up again.  So what do you do? Sit there and hope for the best? Restart?

Well if you've already installed ProcessTamer, this might not happen at all in the first place. Process Tamer simply watches for system processes (programs) which are hogging too much of the CPU and reduces their priority.

In the early days of Firefox memory leaks, I found this hugely useful. Ever since firefox 3, I haven't had a need for it. But yesterday, I downloaded a piece of software to interface with my Sony Ericsson phone which completely crapped out and hung my system. Only through patient clicking and waiting did I manage to kill the process, and even then it took over 10 minutes to do.

Process Tamer is a tiny piece of software, with a tiny memory footprint, which you may never have to use in your entire computing life. However, if you ever do need it, you'll be very thankful for it.

PS: Just an additional tip here, on the same subject. I've seen a lot of people complain that their system is running slow because something called 'System Idle Process' is at 99%. People wrongly assume that these are background windows tasks hogging all the resources. In fact, System Idle Process is a process who's only job is to keep the CPU running when nothing else needs it. I don't know the exact technical reasons, but the CPU needs to be kept working constantly, if not intensely. If you ever see System Idle Process running at close to 99%,
it means that your system resources are almost 100% available, and nothing else is using them.

Update:

Looks like I already posted about ProcessTamer back when I started this blog! Whoops…

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Far Cry 2 – the inconvenient truth

Jan 5

Posted by admin in games, none | No Comments

yeah I used the same inconvenient truth joke everyone keeps using, get over it.

Far Cry 2 is starting to piss me off, because I can't go anywhere on the map without being attacked about 6 times by the guys at checkpoints.

A (very) simple mod would fix this problem. Either the checkpoint spawn points could be removed, or more ideally the guys manning them could be replaced with those faction type guys from Pala. This would be ideal. You'd pass through the majority of checkpoints unharmed, or you might go through too fast and run over a guy, incurring the wrath of the other soldiers.

Unfortunately, Ubisoft didn't see fit to release a Dunia SDK, and therefore no mods can be created. There is a map editor, so its possible someone could edit the game files and remove all the spawn points, but this wouldnt be distributable since it would a) be huge, and b) consititute a pirated copy of the game.

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Uh Oh

Jan 2

Posted by admin in none | No Comments

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