So here’s another one of my favourite classics. Getting this to run on Windows 7 takes a little trick, but asside from that works like a charm.

1. First install the game as normal.
2. Second replace Oni.exe in the games directory with this patch: Oni Patch for Vista/Windows 7
3. Right click the exe, edit compatability:

• • run as win2000 compatability
  • with visial themes disabled
  • and as administrator.

Click OK and run the game.

Yeah, Even though I’m not in Australia i figured i’d help spread the word.

I think Australia might be a little bit too close to china since they are thinking censorship is a good idea.

Won’t work (as you might have guessed since your reading this).

Basically Google calendar sync is hardcoded not to support versions about 12 (2012 is version 14).
Anyways. If your using the 32bit version of Outlook 2012 your in luck. All you need to do is to open up Outlook.exe with a hex editor of choice and change the version from 14.0.0 to 12.0.0. For me this was at memory address 0×000c09b2 however this might not always be the case. If you cant find it, search for the string (very important that you don’t search hex) for “14.0.0″. The first result should be the hit your after.

This is a fairly simple process that takes a whole 2 minutes, but if your using the 64bit of Office 2012 then your….well….to put it gently….your fucked. The simple reason is that Google calendar sync is 32bit and hence even though the version is now correct and it will run, it will throw an exception (since memory addresses are not where they are supposed to be).

So thats it. Until Google releases a new version (which is probably when Office 2012 comes out and then a little bit on top of that) I’m going to have to drop back to 2007 (since I’m forced to use crappy outlook because my phone wont sync with anything else).

Quick post. Basically I’m getting tired of all the ‘nice post’, ‘interesting read’ yada yada posts that link back to pharmaceutical companies and people trying to sell placebo medication to people stupid and desperate enough to buy into that shit.

Even though akismet does a fantastic job, I still have to sift through this crap. So I’ve implemented a reCaptcha system on all comments and also all emails (both in posts and in comments) have been hidden via reCaptcha. If you don’t know how this works, it basically transforms exam...@example.com into ex….@example.com and you have to click on the dots and answer a quick reCaptcha in order to reveal the email.

It’s a small inconvenience (mostly because some times it’s hard to read the captcha and you have to keep clicking the little refresh button) but due to 90% of the worlds computer users being pretty stupid about stuff like security (and hence their machines are zombies in some botnet) i cant simply block all traffic from Nigeria, china and Russia (and it wouldn’t be nice for the 0.000001% of this sites viewers that are from those regions and are not spammers or bots). Plus the reCaptcha system actually is useful since it takes your responses and uses them to aid in recognition of unknown words that occur during the digitisation process of books (see http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html)

Still life is a pretty decent, albit a bit dark, adventure game from 2005. As all games it runs fine on XP and like most games it fails to run on Vista (who cares) and Windows 7.

NOTE: I’m running Win7 64bit. With any luck this will not matter for 32bit users.

Googling around will give you a bunch of forum posts, but the general consensus is that you should try the 98 compatibility mode and if not then run it in XP. The problem is that the game either wont start, start and never progress past a black screen, will throw and error or else will hang after you start talking to the cop in the first scene. Turns out there is a simple way to make the game run perfectly (I’ve finished it and it ran nice and smooth, without a hitch).

As windows still hasn’t fixed some of the issues with compatibility mode, you cant just right click stilllife.exe and change the settings there. For some retarded reason you need to create a shortcut first (nice Microsoft, real nice). After this you need to do the following:

• Right click the shortcut, select the compatibility tab.
• Change the program to run as WinNT 4.0 (not 98 or xp as these WON’T work).
• Then check the box ‘disable visual themes’.
• (Unnecessary?) Check the box ‘disable desktop composition’ (to ward off evil spirits).
• Lastly check the box to run this program as an admin (since windows still doesn’t and probably never can have a decent security infrastructure that would allow you to run programs and games without running them with admin rights).
• Apply and OK. Now you can run the game.

Have fun I’ll post an update if the same settings apply for Post Mortem (prequel) and Still Life 2.

Just a quick post. Basically the free version of avira comes with a splash screen and an annoying nag screen that’s basically a popup ad that opens up every few hours telling you to go premium. Disabling the nag is easy (same as on vista):

1. Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Avira\AntiVir PersonalEdition Classic\avnotify.exe
2. Right-click avnotify.exe-> properties-> security->
3. Under the group or username SYSTEM click edit
4. Put a checkmark under the DENY column for “read and execute”

It’s also possible to do this via the security policy app. For more info check this helpfull site.

Now to disable the splash is a little different – since avgnt is no longer in the registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run on Windows 7 64bit. Instead you have to look for it in:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

FYI this seems to be the currentversion\run for 32bit apps on a 64bit OS.

Now you just find avgnt and add /ns at the end (i.e: avgnt.exe” /min /ns). For avira versions before 9 (update!! Outdated virus scanners are bad. It’s free. You have no excuse!) use /nosplash instead.

Hope this helps people

UPDATE: As MisterAV pointed out, avnotify is also used for browsing virus info. An alternative is to use VirusList which will cover you on the virus info side and leave you able to block avnotify and enjoy a nag free antivirus

Quick post. I should probably do this more often

Yeah clubbing last night at our SU. I took a video so you knew I wasn’t making this shit up.

Just a quick post.

Ok an annoying thing that’s plagued me is that with mediamonkey (best media player ever!) when I’ auto tagging stuff from amazon is that I don’t get any leading zeros. When i then auto organise the files on my hdd they get named with no leading zeros. Stupidly this causes sorting algorithms (without application of logic) to fail (because in the computer world 10 onwards comes after 1 and then it will list track 2 – 9). Pretty much EVERYONE who handles files and media playback has fixed this issue (try it in your file manager). My E71’s music played deals with it correctly. However the guys at rockbox seem to think it’s not a bug but a feature and (in their slightly arrogant ways) dismissed this as a bug (i quote: it’s the users job to tag files correctly). Regardless of whether the rockbox team can be bothered to actually apply logic to sorting i’ve found a quick easy way to fix the problem in my library.

First:
You can autosort files by using track#:2 instead of plain old track#. This will make all track numbers 2 digits (adding a leading zero to single digit track numbers accordingly). You can replace 2 with any number you like.

But you might also want to fix this in the DB itself. So….

Second:
A cool script by Bex http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14822
This script is awesome in that it’s not just for fixing the leading zero problem, but it can correct cases and all kinds of other cool stuff. You can apply it on a selection of tracks via right-click or if you open the script options you have a nice big button to fix all tracks in the library

Shame my old Iriver 320 has finally died on me (in terms of the hdd) and until i have the cash to buy a new one (perhaps a 100GB one or i might just go SSD) I’m not using rockbox anyway (unless they port it to Symbian ). I kinda like having all my gadgets in one though….it’s really convenient.

Well I’m a Boxee alpha tester so i have Boxee on Windows and what i really wanted was a remote control.

Since i love and use Salling Clicker, naturally i decided to write a script so i can enjoy Boxee heaven

I used Boxee on Florian’s MacBook with his iRemote so i wanted something exactly like that. Mine is better – it’s not IR (but bluetooth and wifi)

This is a very simple script that emulates the basic navigation keys in Boxee (cursor keys, enter key, escape key and backspace key).

My primary phone is the brilliant Nokia E71 so naturally this is what i used to develop it. I dont know if it will work out of the box on other phones, but in theory anything with a joypad or center pad thingy should be compatible. You can always adjust the script to your liking. I’ll probably end up turning one of my pda’s or my old phones into a full time remote. I’ll update the script should need be in the future.

Below is a link to the file. Just unpack it into your “My Documents\My Clicker Scripts” directory.

Boxee script for Salling Clicker Download

Right, finally got a blog and a site and domain (although i might get a few more, cooler domains). This site is going to need A LOT of time and love before i can call it usable. In the mean time there isn’t going to be much here.