Sorry!

Ok, sorry I haven’t written in such a long time…

One of the keys on the keyboard fell off. (?!?) and I can’t use the mouse since it is being used on dads laptop. All I have is the whimpy ‘Numpad pointer’. It’s not a virus; both are physical reasons.

Ummmmm….. Not much is really going on blogwise, other than wiping my name off the ‘net so not much is to be expected here.

Also, I think the port forwarding thing is FINALLY *almost* figured out. All I have to do is gain access to the router (not modem) ,bypassing the ‘modem setup page’ and allowing port forwarding or UPnP or something on it. Words fail me right now.

The ‘fakeplants’ howto seems to be going rather slowly, as I have abandoned my endless search for the hot glue gun. I think I’m gonna use this howto for the stems and leaves and stuff.

Also,  I’m trying to use inkscape to make a logo for the Firefox  3 t-shirt contest TO BECOME RICH AND DOMINATE THE WORLD!!! HAHAHAHAHAA!!!  To recieve a $250 ($50 runner up) amazon gift certificate of which I will use to buy educational books to become an  educated, wholesome young man.

I’m learning alot about inkscape. Working with it seems like working with Synfig, but without the animation timeline. It’s really cool.

P.S. Do you know how hard it is to navigate windows with just shortcuts and ‘numcursor’? :barf:   

Trashing giveawayoftheday howto

All giveaways have a different way of unlocking the software, and as the name suggests, it only works [the unlock] for one day. Writing this howto would be like copying the magnacarta on a 6 inch long stick.

In 3 different languages.

I’m gonna put all my concentration onto my claymation and the fakeplants howto. Meanwhile, more links and ‘fun stuff’ will be added.

Adding to 'fun stuff'

Easier way to get to Add/remove programs:

Delete a shortcut of a thirdparty application (like firefox) on your desktop and on the prompt click the link to ‘add or remove programs’

Scorched Earth Talkfile

Wow. I just finished playing a round of ’scorched 3d’. The talk file seems pretty harsh. Here is a new version that is more ‘kid friendly’. I’m adding tons of tags so that people can find it more easily.

Right click on each of these and save them:

Winner Retorts

Loser Retorts

DO NOT RENAME THESE FILES!!!

Just in case, the winner retorts file should be ‘talk1′ and the loser retorts file should be ‘talk2′

Take both of these files and put them into C:/Program Files/Scorched3D/Data/Talk

Adding to 'essential free software' : Xsane

Xsane is an image scanner that is really easy to use but has a lot of proffesional tools also. Plus its almostalmostalmost out of beta. ( Version o.995 as of writing )

Just select your printer on the splash screen, (The image above is not the splashscreen) and set the little dropdown box to grayscale or color or lineart or whatever, and drag the slider with the dots icon beside it for the quality you want. (Higher is better but makes for a bigger image. 300 dpi is perfect) Hit scan and you are done! The image will appear in a preview box, where you can make some minor modifications such as ‘rotation’. Save that and exit out of it and you have the image safely stored on your computer!

The normal settings are perfect for me. For drawn avatars, use ‘grayscale’ so you don’t have to desaturate it later in gimp.

Instructable updates…

Ok; the fakeplants howto is yet again delayed because I still can’t find the hot glue gun.

Todays giveaway is relatively useless to me (and really small) , so I’m gonna experiment with it and hopefully find a way for my ‘reinstalling giveaways’ instructable to be written.

'Essential' Freeware Games

Ok, as a followup on my essential free software list, here is the game thing I was talking about:

also, these are not in any particular order,

Strategy games

Freeciv – Freeware civilization 2 clone. It’s got a few extra features, though.

Scorched 3D – Good 3d ScorchedEarth artillery game clone. However, replace the ‘chat’ files in C/ with the ones on my website.

Glest – A free Realtime Strategy Medieval-Fantasy game. Grrr! It doesn’t have save or multiplayer, though!

Lincity – Free SimCity clone.

-Battle for Wensoth

I forgot about this totally when I was writing the list. It was selected as one of the top10 linux games, but it runs on windows also.

Action / Arcade

SuperMario War – Really fun and addicting supermario clone. The maps don’t scroll, so you play in an arena against other computer players.

Icy Tower – You play as a little kid that has to jump to the top of *the icy tower* to impress his friends. It’s really fun if the Startmenu music doesn’t scare you away. (wow its really loud) The graphics are 2d but that doesn’t mean that the physics engine is bad.

MarioForever – Mario clone. I thought it was dead because of the website remake, but evidently they are still going after a year of work on it…

FlOw – Flash game that turns you into a microscopic organism. You eat other organisms (or other organisms eat you!) to grow bigger to try to eat the boss at the end of each (really big) level. The red and blue organisms just take you to the next / previous SECTOR not level.

- Jumper

This game is way. too. hard. It’s graphics are aweful, but its not your average ‘ just another platformer’. These things are IMPOSSIBLE! You die like 50 times on the EASY levels. Also, its kinda hard to find now. Just go to acidplay and search for it.

N- Another ninja platformed. Many people say it’s the best one ever made because of the almost unique physics engine. It’s just a great platformer.

Gl-117 – Really cool 3d Flightsimulator game. Since they hit the final version, however, they moved onto a submarine simulator and abandoned it. ( Rats. )

ThrustBurst- A hyped up version of the classic ‘fly-through-the-cave’ arcade game. Don’t let that scare you away from playing it though! It’s got a few tricks up its sleeve….

MMOG / Multiplayer

Clubpenguin – Really simple (and really filtered) Penguin-style avatar MMORPG based for kids. It works around a pay-for membership, though, so you cant decorate your ‘igloo’ for free.

NavyField – A really big (Download size and game size big) MMORPG. Fun if you take the time to learn how to play it. I usually just turn off the ‘chat’ feature. The filter isn’t strong enough yet, but it’s getting there.

Role Playing Games

Nethack – A turnbased roguelike game where you run around in a dungeon and kill monsters (Don’t worry, it doesn’t have nearly enough graphics to be gory ) to get the amulet of yendor. The free game longest to be in development (20 years) and still going. The original version had just ascii graphics, but now there is also a tiles version.

Kings Quest Remakes – Yay! They’re all free! They follow very closely to the originals, because I can use the Universal Hint System entries for the classic version. Just the graphics have changed, and that was hands down for the better.

Giveaway Registration Keys

 Ok maybe I was overdoing it on the background. Here is a smaller one without the ugly loss at the top and the ‘bumpy’ grass:

Giveaway of the day is a really cool website, and sometimes it gives away pretty good stuff. Other times, however, it gives away stuff for specialized use, which I might need later, but not now. If I keep it,  it sits there eating disk space to kingdom come until I have to reinstall windows or decide to wipe everything out on the computer. If I uninstall it, and find out that I do need it, I can’t activate it again because of GAOtD’s one-day policy.

Because of that, I’m gonna try to figure out how to keep the activation key on  the computer after an uninstalation of a giveaway. I can keep a trialware version of the program elsewhere until I need it again, and then just install it when I need it.

I assume that this is perfectly legal, since the activation key is only on one computer and the software won’t work without the correct computer-specific unlock code.

Header Fixed^

After searching for a while, I still couldn’t figure out how to make an uploaded image a header. Owell. It’s still possible to do it manually.

Also, a few days after downloading SWFmax and RESHADEs imageresizer from giveawayoftheday, I downloaded the evil badger song. If you don’t know what it is, don’t bother. (if you get what I mean ) and set it for my background to test the active desktop feature.

I realized that the mushroom actually was a pretty nice background for an un-cluttered desktop:

Yes, I know, its huge. Some people have really big monitors, so I decided to take advantage of the image resizer. It works really well and well deserves the seven-hundred eighty-something thumbs up that the people gave it.

I take no credit for the badgerbadgerbadger animation (yuk; why would I want to? ) or any of the programs listed above.

It was installed with a giveawayoftheday license, which means strictly NON-COMMERCIAL USAGE. So I can’t accept any donations or tribute for this background.

Essential Free software list

Here is a list of all of the free software I like to have on all of the computers.

The list will be updated. It doesn’t include any games. That’s gonna be in another list.

Bare essentials

-AIM

AOL instant messenger. Most of our friends use it, and pidgin doesn’t recieve some of the things that AIM sends (like games, backgrounds etc.) so I get both of them on one computer.

-CCleaner

Good disk cleanup application better than the windows built-in. Makes your computer run smoother and faster. Usually I run this before a defrag.

-Defraggler

Great Computer defragmentation tool. It seems more powerful than the built-in windows defragger, because it does it all in one blow, so after you finish defragging once with defraggler, it’s totally defragmented.Unlike the built in one, where it just does a few files than says 100 percent while there is clearly some left.

-E-sword

Biblereading software with tons of downloadable addons. The only problem is that it takes a while (5 maybe 10 seconds) to pop up on a slow computer.

-Firefox

Really cool web browser with literal hundreds of customizable addons and skins. More added all the time. It is so cool, that, in fact, I am using it right now!

-GIMP

Gnu Image Manipulation Program works on windows. Photoshop-like editing tool. Wow, its really powerful. I will frequently use this in my ‘image manipulation’ howtos.

- Launchy

I saw this on the front page of Cnet. It’s an opensource background applet that you can *wait for it* launch things with! It’s not in the form of an annoying window, either, so it can’t get in the way. You push Alt+Space and a nice looking gloss-black window with a rounded square and a text box fades into the screen. You type into the text box which application you wanna launch and hit enter. Usually you only have to type in the first few characters before it realizes what you want to do, so its cool in that sense also. The app launches and the window fades away.

-Microsoft Zunetheme

A theme for WindowsXP that makes everything glossy black. It’s really nice. Kind of like the ‘original’ hidden windows theme, except black. The original has a glossy blue theme that looks nice, and they dropped that.

-Openoffice.org Suite

A really good MSoffice clone. The word processor is the biggie, but it also has many other things like Draw, spreadsheet, math, and more…

-Pidgin

Universal Instant Messaging software. It works good, but it doesn’t recieve some things like flash or backgrounds. Of course, it’s all in one feature disables it from specializing in ONE particular client, so you can’t blame it.

-Skype

VoIP application that does free comp-comp connections and $0.02 a minute around the world for comp-phone calls. It’s also faster than yahoo IM ‘talk’ or ‘video’ or ‘videotalk’ or any of that stuff. (;

-TheSage

A dictionary / thesaurus application with lotsandlots of entrys. It’s really nice if you need it. Just pops right up and can minimize to the taskbar if you want.

Malware Protection

-AdAware free

Spyware removal and protection. It’s the free edition, so when you open up the window, a little add on the right hand corner of it will read (not in exact words ) : Omg u dnt hve d ful vrshzun? Omgomgomg hw cn u liv? u r nt prtektd enuff. The usual. Just ignore it. It’s easy to. Also, this is for SPYWARE not viruses. Doesn’t make it any less good to have around, though.

-Avira Antivir Free

Another virus protection tool. Grr so ANNOYING! Pops up an add twice a day! Nevertheless, it catches some things that AVG didn’t. Pah I don’t care. I still think it was a false positive AND I hadn’t updated recently.

-Avira UnErase Personal

Your usual unerase program. If you already have one you like, don’t bother. Actually, now that I found out about RECUVA, don’t bother anyway and scroll down to the ‘filemanagement’ section. Hands down better even in looks and ’sort’ speed.

-Grisoft AVG free

Virus protection and removal. Waaay better than avira even if it didn’t find a *false positive* that avira happened to come upon. It has an update schedulder, so be sure to turn that on I forgot to once as *explained* in ‘antivir’ up above . There is an update practically every day.

-Grisoft AVG antiRootkit

Rootkit killer. I don’t know exactly what a rootkit is, but it sounds dangerous to my computer, so I download it anyway. Grisoft is pretty good in general, so I keep it on my comp.

-Grisoft AVG antiSpyware

Another spyware removal / protection app. Note that I wouldn’t rely on this to catch my spyware, but still, it might find stuff that Adaware didn’t another cool little feature that it has is that it teams up with Antirootkit and AVG free and it tells you how many threats it protects you against everytime you update. (1,000,000+ moves north every time you update)

-Tor

I installed it, and then I forgot about it. ( HAHA, TAKE THAT TOR HELPFILE [insidejoke] ) Internet anonymity that doesn’t sell information and is better than anything else out there.

About all of these Malware protection apps up above, they don’t counterreact, so I usually just leave them all on one computer.

Animation and Video

-Blender

Really powerful 3d modeling / animation program. Huge community and lots of tutorials to get you started with it.

-Blender: Noob to Pro Tutorials

A huge wiki-based complete-course on everything Blender. The tutorials are also available on PDF in one big file. I have tried to go through them but the furthest I have gotten is halfway. It is kept up to date and being edited all the time, so thats good. It’s also easy to understand.

-Camstudio

Opensource screen capture / screen video capture utility. I haven’t gotten a chance to use this much mostly because I dont’ have to but for my instructables, it might come in handy pretty often…

-GIMP Gif animation suite

Usually included in the installer. Just a little addon that you can learn how to use in my big ‘avatar’ tutorial. You won’t even notice that it’s there. I don’t even know if they even offer a chance to UN install it. Who cares its probably just a few kbits.

-Synfig

2d Vector based animation. Yes, their new website is uglier than their old one, but it has lots of good tutorials on using it. It’s still in it’s alpha stage, so its still kind of buggy.

-Squirlz Morph

Image morphing tool. Takes one image and morphs it into another one in an animated gif. It’s not that useful, but its still fun. (c:

-Xsane

Good image scanner software with lots of tools and functionality.

Multimedia

-FairUse Light / Fairuse full

Get fairuse full while you can, cuz its free for a limited time. Fairuse is a video compression/ extraction tool that you can use to make mobile videos or just make dvd copies.

-Itunes

I know, its from apple. I just like it because the podcast feature lets me listen to ScientificAmerican. Sue me (ha. ha. ha.)

-SUPER

Gaa! &%# worst site download format ever! After you take the pains to get the installer downloaded (buried in the ‘dont pay for this free application’ adds) You get a nice universal Video Converter. I personally think the output is a little too big. I’m looking for another one. It works for now, though.

-VLC media player

This is a great universal media player. If the file is corrupt, it tries to fix it. Who knows why it’s still a beta. Stable est application I’ve ever seen.

File management

-Adobe Reader

PDF reader. I had previously THOUGHT that I had had it. Only when I took the time to install it was when I realized that all I had had to view PDFs was a built-in cheezy Browserplugin.

-Anything on GiveAwayOfTheDay

Giveawayoftheday frequently offers very good file management and cleanup software. Some have been good (Glary utilities) Some have been bad (SmartPC) Read the comments. They are helpful.

-Recuva

Really good undelete software. Beats ‘unerase’ any day for speed, looks and capabilities. It once helped me get back a file I deleted a week ago, so I imagine it’s pretty HI-q.

-7zip

Free file unzipper. Works well as far as I am concerned. I usually am just handling ZIPS, so I dont; use it much, but it really gets me out of a jam when I have to get something out of a .bz2 or a .rar .