Archive for the ‘PC’ Category

The New Stuff Chronicles #8

Other, PC, The new stuff chronicles | Posted by Zhooibaal
Jun 21 2008

This post might as well be called the new and old and damaged stuff chronicles instead of the new stuff chronicles. Anyway, there are two items I’d like to tell you about. The first one is a radio controlled car and the other one is a trackball. Let’s start off with the radio controlled car.

BMRacer

The model in the picture above is the one I have, it’s the BMW model. I don’t have any pics I’ve taken myself of this car, but this picture gives you a good impression of what it looks like. My car doesn’t look this smooth and clean anymore though. That’s why I stated that this episode of the new stuff chronicles might also be called the old and damaged stuff chronicles… I’s missing one of it’s side mirrors, the rear spoiler is badly damaged, one wheel looks a bit messed up and it has a huge crack in the front bumper near the left front fender. It got damaged like that when I was driving it around a bit recklessly, but it doesn’t matter, it was great fun to drive it like that and it’s all just visual damage. One other thing that got damaged another day was the left front suspension. This car is all plastic and when it ran into a concrete block the left front wheel was hanging loosly in it’s suspension. One of the plastic pins holding it in place had broken off and I replaced it with a metal screw and it’s all like new.

Anyway, for some info and specs take a look at the site by clicking here.

There are also two other models available. A Mercedes model and a Porsche model. I actually like the Porsche model better than the BMW model, but that one wasn’t available and I didn’t like the Mercedes model at all. I linked to the proper product pages through the images below.

PORacerMERacer

And then there was a trackball.

Trackball

It’s a Logitech Cordless Trackman Optical. I don’t know how they can call something cordless when it has a huge receiver with it which you connect to your computer with an equally huge cord, but it doesn’t matter, this thing is great. It takes a while to get used to it, but now I can play Command and Conquer with it just like I was playing it with a regular mouse. This trackball is very comfortable, responsive and it feels durable. I bought it to be able to switch pointing device every now and then to prevent me from getting RSI. If you’re looking for a great trackball, get this one.

It’s fun to talk at the I-M-V-U!!!

Other, PC | Posted by Zhooibaal
Jun 07 2008

Sing it along with me to the Vilage People rythm! “It’s fun to talk at the I-M-V-U! It’s fun to talk at the I-M-V-U!”

As you can see I have added a banner to the website of IMVU, which is somewhat a mix between instant messaging like MSN, AIM and Yahoo and sites like MySpace combined with pretty decent 3D graphics. Nothing high end, but for some reason it’s pretty heavy on your system, but that doesn’t make it less fun.

IMVU logo

On IMVU there are several things you can do: create your own 3D avatar, get stuff for you avatar like accessories (jewelry, gloves, hats and other stuff), get pets for your avatar ranging from little baby dragons to penguins and even bodyguards. You can also decorate your own rooms and design your own stuff if you have the expertise to do so and then you can sell the things you make for IMVU credits with which you can get new stuff again of give gifts to other people. And besides all that you can also chat.

Chatting doesn’t occur in just another flat window, but in the 3D scene you, or your chat partner choose. You can also enter public rooms with lots of people and chat away. If you have no friends on IMVU you can simply hit the Chat Now button in the program’s main window and you’ll be connected to someone who has also hit that button and trust me, there’s always someone. The only downside of this Chat Now feature is that most people leave even before the avatar is fully loaded and they don’t say a word, but you shouldn’t give up too quickly as there are interesting people to be found occasionally and you can also look for potentially intersting people on the website instead of using the Chat Now feature.

If you have chat now enabled there will also pop up a balloon on your taskbar every now and then telling you that someone is waiting for a ChatNow session. In this case your room will be used, if you hit Chat Now yourself, the room of the other person will be used and if the other person leaves in that case you will be sent to one of the default rooms with noone else in it and the program will ask if if you’d like to give it another try and you’ll be connected to someone else.

I have found a few nice people through Chat Now, so it’s really worthit to try it once you’re there. Besides Chat Now and a people search there are also groups, so communities within the IMVU community. Just try to find a group, or multiple groups that are to your liking and you might just come across some cool people to chat with or to hang out with in public rooms or even in real life (RL) if they’re close enough.

I’m
Zhooibaal
on

When you sign up there will always be a Guest_ prefix before your name though. It doesn’t bother me too much, but some people find it annoyin. But getting rid of it will cost you some $$$. Which brings me to the only real downside of IMVU. It’s more or less free to use, but to get everything out of it means that you’ll need to spend some $$$. I don’t do that, at least, not yet, you never know what might happen in the future.

Xinput Driver for Microsoft Common Controller

PC, PC gaming | Posted by Zhooibaal
Sep 19 2007

This is just a quick note for anyone who is trying to get his/her xbox 360 (or compatible) controller to work on Windows XP SP1 or SP2. It doesn’t matter whether you have Home or Professional edition, or 32 or 64 bit for that matter. The driver that you can download from Microsoft.com does not work. Whatever you do, it keeps giving you a message that only says “the installation did not complete”.

There is, however, a solution for this problem. There are two of them to be exact that don’t involve any hacking or cracking or anything nearly that hard to do.

  1. Download a driver package from Microsoft Hardware
    Just choose the kind of hardware, which is “controllers” in this case, then choose the kind of controller, then your operating system (Windows, Windows, Windows or Windows) and last you choose the language of your operating system and there you go, you get a download that is considerably larger than the one you get from Microsoft.com when using a search and I guess that that has a reason.
  2. Use Windows Update to get the driver, worked for me.

I haven’t actually tried option 1, but various forums informed me that this works, but simply using Windows Update is still the easiest way to aquire Microsoft drivers.

Anyway, I hope this helps anyone who might stumble across my blog while searching for a solution to get his/her xbox 360 controller to work on Windows XP.

I’m not sure why you can also download a Vista driver from the list on Microsoft Hardware, because Vista has native support for these controllers, beit wired or wireless.

FOJ Community Mod video

PC, PC gaming | Posted by Zhooibaal
Sep 02 2007

My friend Michiel “NecroDOME” Gijbels (the same guy as I made Über Zombie with, together with even another one) and I have been fooling around with the Flatout Joint (FOJ) Community Mod for Flatout 2 and all this jumping, crashing and flying around resulted in the following video which I uploaded on Youtube for you all to watch:

FOJ Community Mod video

The video is a bit long, but it contains some pretty neat crazy jumps and crashes. All footage is from 2 player sessions. I was using “DooM” as my ingame nickname and Michiel was using “1337 z0r” as his nickname.

The New Stuff Chronicles #6: Meet Centurion

PC, The new stuff chronicles | Posted by Zhooibaal
Aug 24 2007

Here we go with the 6th episode of the New Stuff Chronicles. In the previous episode I informed you about Fluffy and now it’s time for another computer to be announced. Only big difference is that it’s a desktop instead of a laptop this time.

Meet Centurion:

Like Tiger I named this one after a part of it. Tiger was named after it’s mainboard which is a Tyan Tiger MPX, but Centurion is named after it’s case: a Cooler Master Centurion 534.

Here are the specs:

Type: desktop
Name: Centurion
Model: self built
Operating system: Microsoft Windows Vista Business
Processor: Intel Core2 Duo E6550
Motherboard: Asus P5K
Memory: 2.0 GB DDR2 800
Video: nVidia GeForce 8600GT
Sound: Integrated High Definition Audio
Harddisk: 1x WD Caviar 500GB (7200RPM)
PSU: Spire 500W ultra silent with blue light
Optical: 1x Lite-On DVD+/-RW-DL
LAN: 1x integrated gigabit ethernet (1000mbit)
External connections: 6x USB 2.0 on the back, 2x USB 2.0 on the front, 1x firewire (IEEE1345) on the back, 1x firewire on the front, 1x PS2, 1x eSata, 7.1 HD audio jacks, 1x gigabit LAN, 2x DVI
Extra: Broadcom 802.54g wireless network adaptor

Like my other PCs, Centurion will soon have it’s own page on this site alongside Slashdev, Tiger, Fluffy, Stoomketel and Oud Brik.

Centurion’s purpose is to replace Slashdev as my main gaming PC back at home, while Slashdev will be relocated to my appartment in Heerlen where it will replace Tiger which will get a new role as home server. “Then why not put Centurion at your appartment?” you might ask. Well, the answer is simple: gaming power is too inviting to play games. While Slashdev is still more than adaquate to my gaming needs, Centurion is quite a bit more powerfull. I just needed a machine that is a little better on desktop performance than Tiger is and I want to use Tiger as a server. I also want a good gaming PC back at home where I am during the weekends so I can play any game I want while I’m there.

That’s about all I have to tell about Centurion at this time.

Relocation of Stoomketel and Tiger

PC | Posted by Zhooibaal
Feb 11 2007

My second pc, Tiger, and my third pc, Stoomketel, have been relocated to new locations to serve new purposes.

Tiger is now my main workstation at my appartment about which I allready told a little bit in my previous post and I must say that it’s an excellent workstation. It boots fast and it also loads my programs pretty quickly. It’s only major drawback is that it sucks at gaming. Most graphics cards suffer from a bug in it’s mainboard which prevents graphics card from functioning properly, so now it has a GeForce FX 5200 which is by far not enough to run even a remotely recent game. But that’s not what Tiger is for anyway, it’s supposed to run my office applications decently and it does that very well, so I’m happy with it, for the games I have my Saturn and my NES there.

Previously Tiger was only being used for test purposes for any stuff I didn’t want to do on my main PC Slashdev.

And stoomketel has been relocated to a friend’s house, Dennis’ house to be more precise. There it will be functioning as the sound recording station for our band Knepper and all of it’s side projects.
In it’s current form, Stoomketel is in no way capable of fullfilling the task of recording station as it doesn’t even have a sound card installed and it’s harddrive is sounding like it’s going to blow any minute. So there is still some work to be done to get it working properly and I haven’t yet even mentioned that I allready replaced it’s CPU because that thing died and now it’s suffering from severe overheating even when idle, so I have to find a decent cooling solution and it’s in a need for a complete operating system reinstall.

When Stoomketel is finished there is only 1 part missing from our new recording "studio": a compressor/limiter
A compressor/limiter is used to keep any sound signals that go through it at the same volume level with a configurable margin to reduce the amount of required editing to keep the volume at a constant rate througout a song.

PC bargains! Yay!

PC | Posted by Zhooibaal
Dec 09 2006

Hmmm… Something went wrong about a week ago and it was not my provider’s fault… Apperantly I forgot to click the publish button on my previous post resulting in only me seeing it :S

Now that has been resolved, it’s time to create a new post and as the title reads, it’s about some cheap stuff I got for my PC at this lovely online store called 1to0.nl. They had a very, and I mean VERY, cheap keyboard lying around and those things are always handy and I also needed a new PSU (Power Supply Unit) for Tiger.
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Meet Tiger

PC | Posted by Zhooibaal
Nov 03 2006

In my previous post I told you about the dual socket motherboard (or mainboard if you will) that I bought and now, almost a few days later, it’s a fully assembled pc.

You can see the specs on the PCs page and then click Tiger, or you can simply click here to see it all.

Tiger case Tiger casefans Tiger top fan

Some changes will be made to it over time, but for the time being, this is it.

Tyan Tiger MPX dual Athlon MP 2400+

PC | Posted by Zhooibaal
Oct 30 2006

Tyan logo
Today I got the first few parts of my latest addition to my PC setup. A mainboard, memory modules and 2 CPUs.
As you can read in the title of today’s post, the mainboard is a Tyan Tiger MPX. By far not the latest model available from Tyan, but that is what second hand market is for.
2 Athlon MP 2400+ CPUs will do service as processors and while not the most powerfull anymore, they are more than adequate.
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New wifi router: ASUS WL-500g Premium

Networking, Other, PC | Posted by Zhooibaal
Oct 06 2006

I’ve been using the combination of a cheap Sweex broadband router with an old Kobishi accesspoint to provide myself with a wireless internet connection, but the age of the equipment was starting to show. The accesspoint would not pass through DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and it failed to provide service a lot lately requiring me to reset and completely reconfigure the old thing about every 2 weeks. Sometimes it lasted longer, but sometimes I had to reconfigure it even multiple times per week.
The Sweex broadband router on the other hand is still functioning perfectly, but I didn’t want to just get a new accesspoint, this time I wanted it to be all in one.
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