optykal

My main machine: AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 4800+ XFX nVidia 7800GTX 256Mb PCI-EAsus A8N-SLI deluxeAntec p180 caseAntec TruePower2 550w PSUPioneer Dual Layer DVDRWTwo Western Digital 200Gb SATA II drivesTwo Western Digital Raptor 36gig HDD (raid-0) - for system files2gig (2x1gig sticks) Corsair TwinX RAMWindows XP w/SP2 and Vista skinSuSE Linux 9.3 Pro (KDE 3.4)My Monitors:24inch Dell 2405fpw LCD Monitor 19inch Samsung 193p I was running two of the 19inch samsung displays but i just recently picked up one of the 24inch dell displays. I have to say, that it is unbelieveable. The size and the color reproduction on it just blows me away. A few of my friends bag LCDs because most cannot compete with CRTs, seeing my dell really shut them up. So I use the big display for generally everything and the 19inch is purely for graphic design and is used mainly to hold all my extra pallets in photoshop, etc.. I would like to buy another one, I think that might be the next thing I save up for. With the addition of the big screen, I thought the machine would take a large performance hit, but its not really the case, its still capable of running everything quite well. Even with the high resolution of the display, everything runs really smoothly. I dont think I will be upgrading for quite some time. I also have a laptop, its good for what it does. I use it mainly as an internet slave, it just sits there downloading and when its not, I have it with me on the train or out and about. I also have another computer that I am setting up, I still have my other 19inch display and a few parts that I have upgraded from, and so eventually I will have a full machine that may take over as my internet slave, or I may just sell it, who knows...

Well yeah, that is very true, but the same goes with alcohol. Kids can get others to buy it for them. I have heard minors being asked for ID when purchasing games, but I'm not sure if this is the same with all retailers. Here in Australia, the ratings system sucks. The thing that really annoys me, is that if a game all of a sudden gets an 18+ rating, then it is taken off the shelves. Effectively it becomes banned and you can no longer purchase the game in Australia. In my opinion, this is ridiculous. This same thing happened recently with the latest GTA:San Andreas game. It had been on sale for at least a year for the PS2 and was available on the PC for quite some time. Then all of a sudden it becomes 18+ and you can't buy it in Australia. Considering that most people want to play the game, and the fact that a lot of people were going to wait until the price for the PC version went down before buying. Its almost as though they are trying to promote piracy. Lets face it, they have now made this the easiest way that you can get your hands on a copy of the game without having to order one from offshore.I really don't know about this ratings system. Over here it is screwed but I can't speak for other places. The idea of having ratings for games is good, but banning games is plain stupid. We should be at least given a choice on what we want to purchase, banning a game is not going to help anyone.

Hey that looks really good. I'm just not sure about the chin area, I can't pick what it is, but it just doesn't look perfect. It could be just coz of the angle of her face and the fact that it should be drawn the way it is and I am completely stupid. That aside, this looks really really good! I can't fault anything on it. Well done!

That guide to htaccess was a good read. I picked up a lot of interesting things that I was unaware of. I had only used .htaccess files to block off sections of my sites so that people couldn't access them without typing in a password. After reading that, it seems that there are a lot of ways that you can use htaccess to your advantage. The topics on hotlinking and blocking bots were very interesting. Thanks for the links Nate.

Wow! This is really cool. This should almost be put in the hacker challenges. Its similar to the likes of mod-x (although not as full on). It requires a lot of similar techniques that you would use in typical simple hacker challenges. Everyone should check this out, it is quite fun if you like puzzles. I can see myself wasting more than a few hours on this.

Thank-you very much for this link sparx. I have tried opera on a few occasions and been annoyed with the ad bar too much to continue using it. This is a great thing that they are giving away free registration codes. Does anyone know how long these codes last? Do you have to register your copy of opera within the 24hours? I do want to take advantage of this, but I dont really wish to install opera on my computer today.

Its nice, not really my style, but its good for a first time. I think the head may be a tad bit to the right too much. I also think that as a result of this, it makes the chest area of body look like it is a little bit too square on. It makes him look a little awkwardly placed. Other than that, the rest of it seems fine. I would work on the upper chest area. I'm thinking that the lines of the tie and the jacket are too flat, and would maybe look better if they were curved ")" slightly. The head is fine, but if it were mine, I would move it to the left just a smidgen. Hey thats my opinion, nobody else has said anything, you have done a really good job for a first time job! Keep up the good work!

I had a play around with google talk last night. I have already uninstalled it. I kept dropping out every 20seconds without fail, I'm not really sure what the problem was there. I had a conversation with one of my friends using the "talk" function and it worked pretty well. No delays and it sounded ok. The main problem that I had with it was the fact that it kept trying to add itself to my startup list. And I dont mean every once in a while, it was almost as if every time I did anything it tried to add itself. My startup blocker was having a field day and kept alerting me. So that was it for Google Talk. Gone! I'm going to try out one of the other compatible IM clients with it. I'm sure that will be the best way to go, but we'll have to wait and see.

Myspace is an awesome place for promoting a band. I set-up a myspace account for my band about 5 months ago. I had about 57 people add my band as a friend. Then all of a sudden, in the past 4 weeks, my band has gained 2300 fans. Now we have people out there promoting the band for us. Check out ONEYEARPAST. I also have my own personal accounts, and I like to play around with the layout of myspace. An example of this can be found here: OPTYKAL. There are a lot of annoying people on myspace, but you dont have to add them as friends if you dont want. Its as easy as that!

If you are after CSS style codes for making your page look nicer, just check out "thomas myspace editor" or "pimp webpage" or any similar editors. They let you just plug in values for each section, chose your colors and set your fonts. They are really easy to use if you aren't familiar to using css/html. A lot of people ask me about how I do my myspace pages, and I either direct them there or tell them its all in the <div>'s. By using div tags, you can cover up everything on your page and then create your own page however you want. If you want to see an example of how div tags can be used simply, then check out this page (I use it for testing purposes only) MY MYSPACE TESTING PAGE.

Wow, thats dedication. I kinda went through the same thing, except I didn't go out and buy a serial-modem. I have not checked out LinModem, I dont need to anymore since I'm on ADSL now, but I remember the pain and suffering caused by trying to get my Winmodem in my laptop to work under linux. If I can remember correctly, I ended up finding a driver, that after a lot of tweaking was able to connect to the internet. In the process I'm pretty sure I messed around with some settings that I should not have, and so I decided on a re-install. I didn't bother trying to install the driver again, it was ok, I just went back to surfing the net with Windows until I got the ADSL hooked up. I'm very happy now, broadband is so incredibly fast.

Linux is good and I could go on about that, but I think this topic is about Windows. I prefer xp over any of the other versions. Its so much faster to boot up, most of my hardware installs simply without a fuss and I'm so used to it now, its become almost second nature. One major gripe that I do have with it is service pack 2. It has to be one of the most annoying things! Installing drivers for software such as blue-tooth dongles requires hacking into the registry and removing entries just so that Windows doesn't configure its own bluetooth control, that doesn't even work! Well apart from those things, its not bad, you do have to work a little harder to access all the hidden settings, but once you know where to look its ok. Oh and for curiousities sake, what is the deal with Linus trademarking the 'Linux' name and forcing companies to pay $5000 to use it? I really dont think its a good step forward, but that remains to be seen.

Yeah, I'm not sure if anyone really knows exactly what date, but a lot of people have been saying that it will be released on the 4th of November. Either way, it should be out in November and since the month of November has only 30 days, its not going to make a great deal of difference. Any one of those days would be nice. At least it will be out before Christmas!

Well for my desktop setup I have 4 hard drives installed. Two of these are running in Raid-0 and they are both 36 GB Western Digital Raptor drives. These are super fast 10k-rpm drives. I have all my system files on these, such as windows/linux OS and also all my program files. They do a very good job of keeping everything nice and quick. Then I also have two 200 GB Seagate 7.2k-rpm drives. I originally had these drives before I got the raptors, so now with the raptors, my setup is complete. These two drives I mainly use for video storage and any image files (ISO's) that I have and would like easy access to. I also have about 80 GB of it set aside for music recordings of my band. For me, 400 GB is more than enough space at the moment. I mean, who would need to use more than 400 GB worth of files on a daily basis? My laptop has one 80 GB hard drive and that (just barely) is enough for me. I suppose that once you get bigger hard drive space, you tend to use more. I remember having a 20 GB drive in my old desktop and then when I got my 80 GB I couldn't believe that I had been using a 20 GB drive. It just seems so small!

Yes I have done that type of thing before, you can do that with certain files that msn doesn't like you to be able send. I'm not sure why, but it doesn't let u send those html help files. You know the ones in the form of .chm (i think?). So you change the extension to .txt and the person on the other end will be able to accept it and then they just have to change the extension back to what it was originally. It works a treat. There are, of course, other ways to hide files. It is actually possible to hide files within other files. This may sound a little bit silly, but it does work. You can do this by using Alternate Data Streams (ADS). Bear in mind that this only works (to the best of my knowledge) with NTFS file systems. The basic idea behind ADS was for it to used as a way for storing extra data within a file. The most common use of this can be seen by right-clicking a file and going into the properties section. Here the comments and other bits that you might see have been included with ADS. One of the really cool features of this ADS is that you can use it to hide whole files within other files. To show how this works, you just need to either go to the DOS prompt or "run" from the start menu and type something like this:type c:\file_one.txt > c:\file_two.txt:file_one.txtNow what this does is it hides file_one.txt in file_two.txt. Ahh so this is good but how do u access file1.txt if it is hidden? Well all you have to do is type this (same as before):notepad c:\file_two.txt:file_one.txt And then this opens the file in notepad. This is just an example of how i use this feature, but you can hide any type of file within another file. The best thing about this is that the hidden file is undetectable to the average user, when you use DOS or explorer, the filesize shown is the size of the non-hidden file, the only thing that changes is the size on disk, not the actual shown filesize. The other thing is that you can edit the file and then save it again and it doesn't affect the file that is hosting it. So give it a go, and check up on google if you want to know more about Advanced Data Streams. I have found it to be quite useful and there are a few programs designed specifically for searching for ADS files within your computer. By the way, should this be a new topic? I guessed that this was still about hidding files so its basically the same.