So….How shall i start this one off heh.

Well we all like to pretend we DON’T know AOL. They represent pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to internet companies. For some reason they cant seem to realise that we are no longer living in the 90′s and just quietly crawl into some deep hole in the ground and die. Instead all they seem to do is spam the internet with ads (and if your unfortunate enough to be living in a country that still recognises AOL as an ISP then they will serve you pretend “internet”).

One of my main annoyances is that they own shoutcast. I love online radio. I love shoutcast. I hate the utterly useless adverts that AOL seems to think someone out there in the world actually gives a shit about. Normally i can think of better things to care about than AOL, but i use shoutcast (since it’s integrated into quite a few media players)  so it’s intruding on my chi.

Perfect solution: Build a media player that doesnt use internet explorer as it’s web rendering engine (really? You guys seriously have never heard of like webkit?). MediaMonkey with a gecko engine (i think thats called songbird – but i want a stable player) where i can simply install adblock and be good to go.

Initial solution: Determine the servers used for ads on shoutcast, add entries to the hosts file. For some strange reason, didnt seem to do shit.

Real world solution: For MediaMonkey and Winamp (and others coded by people who are crappy enough programmers to use IE as their web engine) use the spawn of satan to your advantage – Internet Explorer. Since everything in windows seems to be intermingled like some basterdised creation out of a psychopaths twisted fettish nightmare, there is 1 place to go to control everything “internet” related from redmond land.

1) Open internet explorer (yes, i know. Just trust me on this one).

2) Open Internet Options (Tools>Internet Options).

3) Select “Security” tab, “Restricted Sites” zone, “Sites” button just below the zone box.

4) Add the following 1 by one, clicking add after each one:

• *.2mdn.net
• *.adsonar.com
• *.adtech.de
• *.advertising.com
• *.alexa.com (threw this one in for good measure – dont want people tracking my browsing habits).
• *.aolcdn.com (This one will remove the text ads below the channel list, but also seems to be used for static content. Unfortunately there is no way to restrict directories – 0.aolcdn.com/ads/ is what we dont want. If you start seeing missing content you actually care about, try removing this from the restricted sites list).
• *.atwola.com (Seems to be a biggie in the AOL ad world – from what i gather it’s their first port of call for ads. They also own it).
• *.doubleclick.net (Ahh. If Satan owned websites, this would be one of them – most of the ad’s on the internet originate from here).
• *.scorecardresearch.com

5) Click “Close”, “OK” and we’re walking Close/Reopen your media player and you should see big white boxes where the ads are supposed to be.

For now those are all the servers that seem to matter. If you start seeing ads again, right click on the ad->properties. You should see a url for the ad. You interested in the first two levels of the domain (i.e for url:  blahblah.eviladserver.com/malwaretodeliver/cutebunny.gif the server to add to the restricted list would be *.eviladserver.com)

As an added bonus, this will block ads from the above servers for any program using the IE engine – including the bloatware frontend itself.

Feel free to leave comments with new ad servers as they get added and i will try to update the list above.

Have fun And remember – Donate DIRECTLY to the stations you listen to – never to shoutcast itself

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 0x000c09b2 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).

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