WuW, Teleportation, and Invisbility Cloaks

Now not many of you will have heard of this, but WuW is a new technology from some geeky dudes in a basement who need to get themselves a girlfriend, or a hobby...

Yep, those freaks at MIT have come up with Wear Ur World (hence WuW) in a freaky sci-fi move towards the future. It enables you to project a screen similar to Microsoft's Surface, but onto anything and then allows you to manipulate it, with your hands. but unlike the Surface, you don't have to carry around a 3 metre wide table, a large projector and some special paint. They have made it with simple stuff like a webcam, a mobile projector and a mobile phone. How cool is that? You can draw a circle on your wrist and it projects a clock. Bugger watches, i thought the belt-driven Tag Watch was geeky...

Second in our future-themed post is teleportation. This one i'm not so sure what actually happened cos it was all a bit too scientific for me. You should see these formulae. But i think they managed to like move an alpha particle in one piece or something without it looking like a charcoal-grilled turnip. Yay, i guess???

Last up, invisibility. No, i am not getting all Harry Potter on you. Someone rather actually manged to make a mirror with a lump in the middle, and then blast it with all kinds of freaky lights and rays, and it looked like it was flat. Awesome, now the world will be so much better now that we can make all those bloody bumpy mirrors look flat again. Hmmmmm...

Now wouldn't that be a new level of geekdom. Drawing pictures of bumpy mirrors on thin air, then teleporting them to the Bahamas...

If you are wondering why i used the Bahamas, its because i have just found out that i have visitors from the Bahamas!

Aero effects on Vista Basic, Home Premium... Yes, Again

Yes, this particular procedure has been documented so many times, i'm amazed its not in the Bible, but i have done it and am aiming to de-geek it a bit, and cover a couple of bits most of the others don't have.
If you want the original more complex procedure, go to My Digital Life and check out his posts on the topic.
To start, go to Control Panel -> Personalisation (Make Sure you are in 'Classic View' on the left), then Colour Scheme. Make sure you don't have a Windows Vista Aero option in the list. Next, check in Window Colour and Appearance; if you get a dialog box, you don't have Aero.
Next, click Start, then 'Run', and type in 'regedit'. The REgistry Editor will start, and you need to use the tree on the left to go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DWM
The two keys present should be Composition and CompositionPolicy. If there not there, create new 32-bit keys with these names. Next, give Composition a value of 1, and CompositionPolicy a value of 2. Next go to Control Panel, scroll down to and start Services, find Desktop Window Management and click Restart the Service. You may also need to change this service from Disabled to Automatic.
If you think you're pretty handy with a computer, you can ignore the previous step and instead, go to Run, type in cmd, then enter net stop uxsms, wait a second, then enter net start uxsms (uxsms is the code for the DWM service).
At this point, you may have to restart your machine but that should've done it.
IF it hasn't:
That aside, now go back to Control Panel and select 'Services'. Check you are in Extended View (at the bottom) and look for Desktop Window Management. If it's there and it says Disabled, then change it to Automatic, and click Start the Service.
That usually only happens when you're on a domain, and i don't expect it to apply to many of you.
If it has worked:
You can now add some modifiers to change it a bit. The keys (32-bit DWORD's) are:
Blur
Just that, blur. Set to 1 if you want it, 0 if your machine can't handle it.
Glass
As above. nice effect
Animations
Nice animations for just about everything. 1 for on, 0 for off
AnimationsShiftKey
Great Fun! Only works if you hav Animations set to 1. Create your key called AnimationsShiftKey, set it to 1, then restart the service as mentioned above. Now if you hold down Shift whenever you click Minimise, Restore, Maximise, Close, when a dialog opens, anything with an animation, the animations will go super-slow as long as you keep Shift held down. It even slows down Flip 3D! (Windows-Tab for the uneducated)

Now if it doesn't work check around or give us a yell, because there is a million different things that can stop it from working.
P.S. Now when you choose Window Colour and Appearance in Control Panel->Personalisation you can select colours, intensities and enable transparency.
As for running DreamScene on non-Ultimate Computers, you can find a series of files and even a .bat installer, but make sure you backup, before you try, cos it often pops up nasty errors...

Vista Goodies

For Christ sake, what is it with Microsoft and levels and extras and stages and more bloody money...

I say this because i have just spent some time looking at different levels of Vista (no, i'm not stupid enough to fork out my cash on Vista, are you insane!) and my god, there must be 7 different levels of Vista alone, and then there's Office. When XP came out, everyone was getting into a rage about the 'confusing' Pro and Home versions. Now there's Starter edition, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate and some random one they're trying to flog off to failing autocratic governments or something.

But more than this, every single one is different to every other one. There is one problem for Microsoft but... They didn't do a very good job of keeping them separated. See, as some others at school would vouch for, my (school-issued) Tablet PC appears to be an odd blend of Vista Ultimate, Third-Party Software and general customisation. As the logon screen betrays, it's actually Vista Business, but with Windows Aero, and all the premium games, and Windows DreamScene (unfortunately, whenever i try to change my background, say to DreamScene, it just says 'Page Failed to Load'... Still Fiddling, help would be appreciated), and i think i've found out how to get the supposedly Ultimate-only Bitlocker.

I'm pretty much just missing Media Center, something i don't really have a need for, but i've certainly compensated with all the third-party crap I've put on this thing. The fact that i'm writing this using FireScribe, a Firefox extension is enough, but the fact i have another 37 extensions is more, hell, the fact i'm using Firefox 3.0.3 means i've been fiddling with this thing. you name it, i've probably got it, or something to do its role: Winamp, VLC Player, Webshots, Graph, Motorola Phone Tools, the entire Office 97, CyberLink DVD Suite, PowerProducer, Google Calendar Sync, Mozilla Thunderbird (with extensions), a couple extra PIM Managers, Nero Suite, Palm Reader, RealPlayer (*shudder*), TrueSuite, Fingerprint Software, WinRAR (*ugh*, what's wrong with zip files), YouTube Downloader, Google Chrome and IrfanView...
I've also changed almost every setting in Control Panel, a couple of Registry Keys and anything else that can be changed.

While this may seem like overkill, i use most of them pretty regularly!

But to get back to the original topic (OMG! Topic creep on blogs!) my Vista is pretty different to the one they hand out at your local Hardly Normal (Harvey Norman) and it makes you think...

Why the f*** did you pay extra for Ultimate, sucker!!

PS. I'm fairly sure the Idiocy Department (IT Dept) aren't going to recognise this computer when i hand it back to them, especially now i've got my own custom skin on the inside and outside.


UPDATE!
I now have 41 other extensions, not 37 anymore... yay! i broke the 40-extension barrier!