Geek and a Half

August 2nd, 2007 by Jake

Maxthon2 has just moved out of release candidate stage and is now ready for public consumption. Give it a try, download it here.

Maxthon2 sports a new look, free accounts that hold your favorites and other settings online so you’ll never lose them, and other neat little features like a built-in screen capture utility, built-in ad hunter/popup blocker, and content control (disable images, javascript, flash, ActiveX, etc). I’ve only just named a few, so go give Maxthon a try.

August 2nd, 2007 by Jake

Since I switched to Vista, one of the most annoying things for me was trying to figure out how to get to the Network Connections window. From the desktop, it takes 4 clicks to get there, plus you get another window open you didn’t want. If you want to restore the original link and have the “Network Connections” icon back in your Control Panel, just do this:

Open the registry editor.
Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Control Panel\don’t load\
Delete ncpa.cpl
Open your Control Panel to find your beloved Network Connections link back again.

If you’re even more lazy, and you don’t want to open the control panel, make a new shortcut that points to either ncpa.cpl or control.exe netconnections.

July 18th, 2007 by Jake

Yeah… it’s been awhile. I know. Stop complaining, I’ve got something cool to show you.

You know that ugly background that shows up with Windows Vista whenever you lock your computer or log in? Good news: You can change it. Here’s how.

First, download ResHack (Resource Hacker). Open the EXE.

Open an explorer window and navigate to C:\Windows\System32\. Find the file imageres.dll. You’ll need to first take ownership of the file, and then give yourself full permissions. If you don’t know how to do that, Google it or something, I’m not gonna hold your hand through this.

After you’ve taken permissions, open it in ResHack. Look under the IMAGE resources and find your desktop resolution that corresponds to a resource number:

5031 = 1280×1024
5032 = 1280×960
5033 = 1024×768
5034 = 1600×1200
5035 = 1440×900
5036 = 1920×1200
5037 = 1280×768
5038 = 1360×768
5039 = 1024×1280
5040 = 960×1280
5041 = 900×1440
5042 = 768×1280
5043 = 768×1360

Note: If your resolution is not listed, you should use 5031. The image will stretch.

Find the one that matches your resolution, and open that numbered folder. Right click on the “1033″ and select “Replace Resource”. Browse to another image (preferrably of the same size… I don’t know what Vista does as far as stretching/tiling the image). When it asks you for the resource info, type this in:

Resource Type: IMAGE
Resource Name: 50xx (your screen resolution from above, the 50__ number)
Resource Language: 1033

Your new image should appear on-screen. Before you save it, go back to /System32/ and rename your original imageres.dll to something like image.res.dll~. After that, back in ResHack, choose File > Save As, and save it as C:\Windows\System32\imageres.dll. Close ResHack, try a Windows+L, and see if you see your image. If you do, congrats, you don’t have to look at Microsoft’s crappy “abstract wisp” art. If not… something went wrong. Try again, or… go cry or something.

Pictures of it showing it works: (You can’t PrtScr on the login page ;) )

Notice how it handles the transparency well, which is good.

Now, if we didn’t have to hack the damn thing just to change it! Come on Microsoft, think a little!

April 11th, 2007 by Jake

Awhile ago I blogged about a new guitar I had bought from a cousin of mine, and I hosted the picture of it in my images directory here. Funny how the Internet works… here are some statistics pertaining to that image file from April 1, 2007 to current date:

#reqs #pages %bytes  URL
2492  1557   8.48%   http://images.google.com/imgres
1535  0      14.07%  http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm


Which basically means that the image has moved high up in Google’s image search (try searching for ‘warlock guitar’ on Google Images, it’s on the first page), as well as being on over 25 MySpaces, some forum signatures, and other miscellaneous sites around the ‘net. That image is the top file requested off my server, and contributes to my bandwith usage somewhat considerably. What’s neat, too, is that I actually “made” that image to an extent. There was originally another guitar behind this one, so I had to do a bit of editing work and cut it out. Oh, and the shadow was me, too. Incidentally, this image is more popular than the original I took it from.

Considering its apparent popularity, here it is again in all it’s (mysterious) glory:

Rock on.

Update: If you search for ‘guitar’ on Google Images, this very guitar is second in the list (at time of update, will probably change). I don’t know if that’s supposed to make me feel good about myself, or if that’s supposed to be some sort of achievement or what, but I think it’s pretty neat.

February 16th, 2007 by Jake

I hadn’t even noticed this, but apparently comments have been completely gone for awhile now because I had changed the way my permalink structure was here on the blog, and I guess something in it wasn’t showing the “Leave a Comment” form. I’ve since changed the structure (again) and comments seem to have automagically reappeared. Good one, WordPress. You can bet I’ll be submitting a bug report on this one.