life ends at 27
I am typing this on WLW Beta 3. I wrote about the first beta, which was already very usable at the time. This is the best of breed in blogging software on Windows.
Quite a lot of changes for beta 3, but the best thing for me is “Publish XHTML-style markup”.
In other news, CCleaner 2.0 is now RC and Spybot Search & Destroy has reached 1.5.1 final. I recommend both very highly.
I have been using QuickTime Alternative for a long time, but onegoodmove is crashing Firefox with the last available version of QT Alternative. And given the developers stopped any further development after Apple requested that they remove the package from their website, I needed an alternative.
Now, I am not keen about going back to the official QT Player, even though the developers of QT Alternative published a guide on configuring QT Player “for optimal performance and user satisfaction”.
I managed to find “QT Lite” (thanks, Google!) which is very well put together, with just the components I need. CoreAVC and CoreAAC are not longer included but that is not a huge issue.
Overall, very happy with this “update”, and Firefox is no longer crashing on onegoodmove. Thanks, whoever put this package together.
CCCP15 “Chiyo-chan’s Cute Player” is released. Whoo! Lots of smashing changes which you can read about on the release thread, but for me the best thing about this release is the new, custom MPC Chiyo-chan logo. Though I guess it would be pretty weird firing up pornos after seeing that face…
…*cough* not that I watch pornos or anything…
I’ve been putting this long overdue update off due to some ridiculous workloads and just plain laziness (which would explain the lack of posts too). But yes, That Stupid Club is now running on Community Server 2007, only with the same stupid theme. The new skinning engine is really nice, but unfortunately I am just not imaginative enough to do something nice with it.
I have not ported my blog skins over so this blog is not currently running on my favourite skin Barthelme. Soon, I hope…
Note (Jan 2011): this guide is pretty much outdated. I might write an update soon.
What is MAME? It is an emulator intended to document the hardware of arcade games systems. Of course, for most average users it is the side-effect of being able to play more than 3000 unique games that’s the important thing.
Well, that’s all well and good, you say, but how do I start? I’m glad you asked.
First, you will need to download MAME itself. If you run Windows, you can download the official release which is run off the command line, but I would recommend Mame32, which has a really nice GUI. For Mac OS X folks it’ll have to be MAME OS X (not very imaginative, yes) or SDLMAME, which is also the best option for Unix/Linux systems.
Next, you will need the ROM images*.
You can download some freely available ROMs to test. Place the downloaded ROM files into the roms folder where you unzipped MAME to.
To obtain more, Pleasuredome is the best way if you can work BitTorrent. The total size of the ROMs stand at almost 16 gigs currently, and so might take a while. The MAME ROM torrents are ratio-free but please do not abuse the ratio. Some games require CHDs which are compressed hard drive images, but these are generally not worth it as most PCs are too slow to emulate these games properly.
Or if you prefer, you can request for one of the Lazarus guys to burn you a copy. Read the instructions carefully, and note that I have never used their services.
That’s really all you need to start playing. You will probably want to grab the “Extras” torrent from Pleasuredome too. Lots of niceties such as screen captures and photos of the cabinets.
Additional stuff to grab:
* downloading of ROMs is illegal in most cases. You are downloading at your own risk.
Fantastic, been waiting for it. Features I have been looking forward to are message tagging and saved searches. What I consider the essential add-ons (Enigmail, Lightning and SmoothWheel) already work with 2.0, so no pain for me there.
The look and feel got an update too. The new theme is more refined, but perhaps a little duller compared to the previous version.
Without further ado, the links:
Woo! No protocol encryption yet, being dependent on libtorrent’s implementation, which I hope is underway. Can’t find a changelog, but 0.29 has got to be 0.01 better than 0.28, right?
Get it from the official Halite site, as usual.
 It was finally time for my beloved Sygate Personal Firewall to go.
As the pipes I have access to got fatter, Sygate’s CPU utilisation was getting unacceptable, up to 15% sometimes.
It was also getting long in the tooth (Symantec stopped development after taking over. Damn you Symantec!). Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but being a closed source application, the possibility of unpatched vulnerabilities is a concern.
And so, off on my quest. My criteria were simple.
Unfortunately effectiveness can only be judged by reviews and tests as I have neither the means nor the desire to see for myself.
The popular candidate would be Kerio, but I do not like that it does web filtering, or that it nags you to register when the full version trial is over.
Happily, I decided to give Comodo Personal Firewall another go.
I have tried it before, maybe a year ago. Back then it had the obnoxious “Comodo LaunchPad”, and was bloody “chatty” with the warnings. Glad to see the LaunchPad is gone, and the sensitivity maybe tuned down somewhat.
Very nice, Comodo. Thanks.
This is the 2007-02-22 “Anonymous does not forgive” build. CCCP is still the best codec pack as far as I am concerned. Coupled with the ffdshow speed ups for Vorbis and H264, this is really the only thing you need for video playback on Windows PCs*.
Also: Vista compatibility, and Zoomplayer 5.0.
* apart from Quicktime and Real content
I was planning to go on a major skinning exercise for That Stupid Club, but seeing this, and actually reading about it, I am salivating at The Power that will be available.
Eagerly waiting for the first beta…
Update: link to Ben Tiedt’s series of posts introducing Chameleon for own future reference.
