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Showing posts from 2009

Red, black and loud...

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Hmm, I know I should've paid it with my own money, but my dad bought me a new phone when we and my mum went to church and took a stroll during Independence day. The phone's a Nokia 5320 XpressMusic, which was the Finnish electronics firm's way of pissing off Sony Ericsson and its ubiquitous Walkman line. The phone's a 3G/HSDPA-capable handset, with media playback capabilities of course, although the latter features were its selling point, for those teens and twenty-somethings who can't get enough of their fave tunes, yet aren't willing to shell green for an iPod or iPhone. It looks just fine on the cosmetic side, although the rewind/FF/play keys are a little wobbly, and the USB jack cover is a little too awkward to pop out - those who frequently plug their device to a PC or a USB-capable audio player may end up breaking the flap over time. It boasts a dedicated DSP chip for a more epic sound experience, much like the decoder used in the original N-G

Funny but true: Rockstar Games' thoughts on social networking

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I find this spoof website of theirs entitled MyRoom, from Grand Theft Auto IV, quite funny. The fact that they poke fun at our society is, is what makes me play GTA often. I often find Jack Thompson and his followers' opinions about the series as rather bollocks; sure, they have a point regarding the apparent risks of underage kids playing violent videogames, but the fact that school shootings are merely exaggerated by yellow journalists such as Faux, er, Fox News, and overzealous bigots cash in on the GTA craze, made me think that they're getting too far, although I do cite Hot Coffee as purely R*'s fault, since they unwittingly left the offending code, and ended up wasting a large sum of money just to fix the mess they made. OK, enough yada-yada, here's a witty excerpt from MyRoom.com, which as you may notice while playing the game, is a thinly veiled parody of MySpace. I'm sure this one applies to them teeny-boppers and newbies to the internets out there: Tips fo

Au revoir, comrade...

I guess Niko Bellic of Grand Theft Auto IV was right, life is complicated. There are times that people stab you in the back, some nasty things happen, or one of your best buddies leave for a reason. Like in the case of a friend of mine named Janry. He is indeed a respectable young man, a good friend to me and my cousin, and a talented person. He is a little strict sometimes, but he has a real sense of humor and laughs when I show something funny for the lulz. And his leadership skills are something that's worth mentioning, too; he's currently a member of the local youth council in his neighbourhood. But it's sad to say that he had to leave us for good, since he enrolled in a maritime academy, so as to fulfill his promise to his family. He won't be able to connect to the internets or at least have a shot at communicating at us, but at least he did something that we can all be proud of, right? Well, good luck, comrade, GOD Bless, and aim high... Blessings, Huck

Opera Mini doesn't work for you? Here's a workaround...

OK, so I was pissed off. Really, really pissed off, when my phone refused to connect to the internets via Opera Mini. I have a Nokia 6233, which runs on Series 40, Third Edition. Nokia made a lot of changes in the interface, of which it added some functionality, and some epic design failures. One of which are access point settings. Starting with S40 3rd Ed phones, you can't specify a proxy when you make a new Access Point via the manual settings. Anyone unfortunate enough to be a T-Mobile or those with WAP network plans (such as TMobileWeb users, Airtel NOP users) are unable to use J2ME programs that require internet access (such as Opera Mini, Google Maps, or games which involve online access). I dunno, but it seems as though Globe Telecom was a bit piss-poor at implementing its Over-The-Air connection settings; it turns out that the config files they're assimilating to end-users have something missing, therefore making it difficult for them to connect using Opera. A workaroun

Windows 7 watermark blues...

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I once patched my Windows 7 install just after installing, well, to get rid of the annoying "For testing purposes only" nag message that comes with every beta copy of Windows. There are a couple of third-party hacks for this, most of which involves editing a system file named USER32.DLL. You can do it with resource hacking tools, by finding the strings related to the nag message, and then edit them out. Another method involves an automated script to replace the old DLL with a modified one. The problem is that when you try to replace the DLL in Windows 7, applications in compatibility mode crashes. I searched for hours just to find out the fix for this problem, and I nearly got into reinstalling the whole system. As it turns out, the permissions and file ownership have been changed from its default values. Modifying the file will impair compatibility, and causes a conflict of some sort unless if you give them the default permission settings (you can still use the patched user3