Minor Overhaul

For those of you not using any RSS/Atom/Feed Readers, you may notice the site has undergone a minor facelift which is pretty much limited to shuffling the deckchairs (rearraging page elements) and some fiddling with the colours and fonts to make it a little more interesting.

Comment on the post if you have any suggestions/opinions, that is, if you have so little of a social life that you can be bothered (i'm looking at you Jackson)...

And don't say 'a new template' because i like this one, and unless you can find me another black, mostly minimalistic theme that looks as good as this one, i'm not changing it, so there...

PSP Game: SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Tactical Strike

SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs Tactical Strike, or SOCOM TacStrike, is a PSP Game released a little while ago that was at the time and still is a bit of a genre-buster. It's closest description would be a Third-Person Shooter, and don't worry, that doesn't mean its a side-scroller. This game has you commanding a squad of four Special Forces commandos, and getting them from absolutely unco dumbasses into the best crack team the world's ever seen. One of the great things about this game over some of the other SOCOM series is you can choose your team from a whole list of real-life commando units, from the French GIGN, the German KSK-9, the Aussie and British SAS, the SEALs, the Dutch, and even the Spanish, and two others i can't remember. It actually has an effect too. The names change, the uniforms change and even some of the weapons. But one of the funniest things is that it also changes the teams language, so rather than hearing "Tango down" or whatever in English, you hear your KSK-9 yelling in German. it's hilarious (and luckily there are English Subtitles)...

Some mission can be a bit linear, but almost all of them provide plenty of different ways to achieve a goal, or get to a place, and there is also plenty of little sideline routes that can give you heaps of hidden goodies, like Intel (which gives you points), and more baddies to shoot through the back of the head.

Which brings us to the gameplay and controls which is pretty novel to most people and even to SOCOM diehards. The camera angle is the standard above-and-behind, but the crosshair/reticule rather than controlling your commandos movements only changes which direction the camera looks. Movement is very different to any other game, and it's actually a two-step process. First you 'engage' your movement dropper, then you press circle again to
tell your men to go there. And it's that second press that changes everything. It allows you to get over there at a run, really stealthily, with your guns blazing, or you can even tell one half of
your squad to give covering fire while the other two make a run for it. It is possible to control each of your men individually, but that can be a bit clumsy, so unless you are setting up an
ambush, you should keep your squad in either twos or as a four.

The x button is also very important. As your reticule slides over something, it will change what the x button does with a subtle subtitle, telling you about it. Attacking then can be a simple thing of looking at your enemy and pressing x. But if you want to get past about the fourth
level, or get scores even resembling high, then you're going to need to master all your other attacks (which like all the other aspects of the game, is very easy to get the hang of). The controls are effectively press for simple, hold for detail. This means that whenever you focus on an enemy, you have the option of taking him out from a mile away, or you can tell your sniper to take him out, or chuck a grenade at his feet, which takes a bit of mastery to aim well, or you can creep up behind him and knife the shit out of him etc etc.Doors are also great fun as you can watch as your guys creep up, inch it open and silently glide their way in, or you can go in with all guns blazing (literally), or even get them all to line up on eith er side of the door, as one of them
chucks in a flash or a HE, wait for the tongue of light/flame to erupt out the door and then run in. Classic.

So there can be a sense of disembodiment in the real heat of battle, but that only really occurs if you take the fun out of it by just saying fire at will. If you issue your own orders, it can be an
addictive experience. It can also happen that whenever you die, the camera stays there, watching your wounded/dead men lie on the gorund moaning and complaining, just to make you feel bad, and give you an irresistible urge to try again, and get some revenge. (Fortunately for the retards in you, even after your men have run out of health or had a critical hit, they will only be incapacitated for a little while in which time you can heal them and they'll get up and keep fighting. Tough. As. Nails.)

The single player campaign is pretty long, and then there are the quicker, more intense Instant Action missions, and there are twice as many of them as there are normal missions, so that will take you some time to get through, and there is also online multiplayer, with some innovative modes, which i haven't had a chance to try out.

Finally, there are the weapons and training. Before each mission, the team will be armed with a suggested kit-out. I always ignore that. I have my own choice of guns and secondaries. (Secondary weapons with a higher rate of fire than primaries. Hell yeah!), with a nice sprinkling of grenades, sniper rifles, medkits, and a rocket launcher (fun, fun). After each mission you will also receive a rating, and this will give you cash to buy more and better guns, and training points, which if you put them to the right things will turn your dumbass first-level team into a killing machine of Teutonic efficiency.

Overall, this is a truly great game, and anyone with a PSP should buy it now.

10/10

PS. My kit-out always includes SFCR-HWs,
F90's all round, barrel-mounted grenade
launchers, one PSG1 Sniper, One Rocket
Launcher, two HEs each, two Flashes, a
smoke, a bunch of medkits, and some extra
ammo for the sniper and his SMG. Lethal.

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...

Digirtal Cameras, Cars and Cash

Now what would you expect to pay for a digital camera? You can get your dirty mitts on a real nice compact from Nikon (but who would buy a Nikon) with 14 megapixels for a cool 509 dollars, but then what if one wants to take it to the next level with an entry-level Digital SLR...Canon is the obvious place to look and they'll sell you a (not that old) 1000D with a lens for 950-odd bucks. I bet at this point you're wondering 'Where the F*** is he going with this?', but hang in there. My point is that a 1000D is a very potent weapon, and it only costs about a thousand bucks, so why on earth are they also selling 1D's for, sit down, 6,500 dollars, a neat 5 and a half grand more than a 1000d. But one might say, but one of them is the top and the other is the bottom, but they have another 5 cameras, as well as innumerable lens kits (actually 28 different combos to be vaguely accurate), spanning every possible price range.

I'm not saying any of this is bad. All of those cameras are still great bits of photographic machinery, and having a camera for every budget and every whim is a great business move, but...There still remains the problem that there must actually be people in our society blowing 6 and a half thousand dollars on a single camera body, i mean you could get a car with that kind of dough. But it actually gets worse, because Canon also has their Canon 1Ds MArk III (that's a mouthful),for the serious stalker. But you pay a smallish premium for that 's' on the end. Small, as in $5,500, bringing the 1Ds to a neat total of 12,000 dollars.

HOLY SH**!!

You can check my maths at http://www.canon.com.au/products/cameras/digital_slr.html

Part 2: The reasonFor those of you not even vaguely interested in Digital Photography, skip to the next post now!The biggest difference between the 1D and the 50D for example is in the sensor. In the 1D, it captures the scene in fornt of it exactly as it looks, with all the zoom, and effects coming from aperture, exposure and ISO settings and obviously your lens. However, the 50D (and everything below or before it) does not. It actually has a built in zoom factor of 1.6x. This is not going to seem like much except for when you take the fact that this occurs behind the lens. So when you start using 200mm telephoto lenses, you get the effect of using a 320mm lens, and that is noticeable.

There are obviously other things for 11 grand, like much faster start-ups, incredibly fast shutter speeds, better lenses, more settings, features and modes etc etc, but the 1:1 zoom is one of the big drawcards, and i'm not sure Nikon even has that at all, so its an achievement...

The Real Magic Disappearing Act

Magicians the world over should take a quick look at the gaming world. More specifically, they should take a look at what's not there ...... the magical disappearing PSP!

I could be the only one noticing this (it wouldn't be the first time), but i have to wonder what's going on. Just to clear things up, i'm not saying that all those true geniuses who put their hard-earned cash into one of these über-machines is going to spend the next 2 weeks wandering around the house thinking 'Where the f*** did i put that thing?!'. (<--Check that out for a punctuation string!) No, i'm saying that the shops and the retailers and probably Sony have completely forgotten about that shiny, little handheld. Among the PS3, Xbox 352 or whatever it is (yes, i'm a Sony man), the Nintendo DS (like that's a Spring Chicken!), or the Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii there's just no more space for the PSP. I opened a series of 4 different catalogues, Hardly Normal, Big V, L Mart, and Mick Smith Electronics. Each had a double page spread just for games and consoles, and yet 2 of them had no mention, one of them was advertising only a console, and the last had console, plus your choice of three games. My God! Three! That would be fine if on the same page there hadn't been 15 Singi'mnotreallymuchofaStar games, 12 Buzz! games, at least 10 other PS3 titles, probably 12 Xbox 127 games, 15 DS games, and 12-ish Wuuuuuuuuuuuuu games.

Yes, so the PSP is getting on and a replacement should be expected. (Rumours suggest a March 2009 replacement, but i don't think so), but the PSP 3000 facelift/butt-tuck has just been released and there's still plenty of people who are going to want UMD games. But even if you're going to say its too old. The Nintendo DS has been around for a full year longer than the PSP (February 2004 compared to March 2005) and there still trying to flog all those left-over flippy pieces of smoking turd to any idiot who walks into their store...

Shops may be rejecting it in favour of its high-powered big brother the PlayStation 3, but in case nobody had noticed, I don’t see any hugely capable, hugely successful, and incredibly popular Xbox 429 Portable variants…