ManToAdmire's Blog

Need for Speed Undercover Review

mantoadmire — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:59:21 +0000

Need for Speed Undercover returns to its roots with hokey cutscenes, wild cop chases, and solid racing action.

The Good:
* Plenty of cop chases
* Instantly join races with press of a button
* Isn’t long before you’re driving a cool car.

The Bad:
* Lots of quirks and nagging gameplay issues
* Emulates Most Wanted, but doesn’t necessarily improve upon it
* Story isn’t much to get excited about
* Frame rate isn’t great.

PS3 review | XBox 360 review

Create and edit icons for free with IcoFX

mantoadmire — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 06:26:40 +0000

If you’re looking to create or edit custom icons, try IcoFX. With support for multiple resolutions and transparency, you can create slick, resizable icons for applications you develop or just to help you quickly find oft-used folders. And you can export icons into Windows or Mac format. The software offers some basic image editing tools, but you can also import images from other programs like Photoshop or Illustrator. IcoFX will preserve transparency and even do the resizing and color mapping. The Tools menu offers both batch processing for handling multiple icons, and a resource editor to change the icons for binary files.

IcoFX is available as a free download for Windows.

Try IcoFX now! [via Lifehacker]

Stream online videos to your PS3 and XBox 360 with PlayOn

mantoadmire — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 05:44:22 +0000

PlayOn streams online video from the likes of Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix to your Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or HP MediaSmart TV. In addition to the three streaming video sites mentioned above, PlayOn also supports CBS, CNN, and ESPN.

The Netflix streaming might cause some problem. If Netflix streaming is what you want most, you can already turn your Xbox 360 into a streaming Netflix player for free or just wait until the fall update.

The application is available as a free three-week trial and costs $30 for a full license. It’s available on the Windows platform only.

Tekken 6 trailer: TGS 08

mantoadmire — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:50:23 +0000

Tekken 6 has been officially announced for a fall 2009 release. The latest trailer gives us a glimpse of the Tekken world where some damn hardcore fights take place.

Platforms: PS3, XBox 360

Remove DRM from your songs

mantoadmire — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:14:41 +0000

Apple’s iTunes, MTV’s Urge, and similar online stores take the pain out of buying music, but the embedded digital rights management technology in the songs adds a new headache, limiting where you can play them and how often. Some xapps strip out DRM by cracking the encryption, but that tends to be illegal.

You can achieve the same results with the following steps:

1. Create a new playlist with all the songs you’d like to rip
2. Use your software’s Burn Disc option to copy the music to audio-CD format
3. After you’ve burned the music to disc, rename the originally downloaded
songs with another name
4. Insert your newly burned CD-R and click Import CD to copy the songs back
into iTunes or whichever player app you originally used.

That’s it! They will now be stripped of all DRM

Create a desktop shortcut for Hibernation

mantoadmire — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:10:49 +0000

The Shutdown.exe command can shut down or restart your computer, optionally forcing it to shut down even if some programs attempt to prevent it. But it does not include an option to hibernate. If you hibernate quite often, then you can have a desktop shortcut for quickly putting your PC into hibernation.

To create a shortcut, right-click on an empty space on the Desktop and select ‘New->Shortcut‘. In the ‘Type the location of the item’ box, add this text:

rundll32.exe PowrProf.dll SetSuspendState

Click on the Next button. In the ‘Type a name for this shortcut’ box type ‘Hibernate’ and then click on the Finish button.

If the shortcut does not work, then the hibernate option might not be enabled. To enable it, click on the Start button and select ‘Settings’. Click on ‘Control Panel’ and then double-click on the ‘Power Options’ icon. Click on the ‘Hibernate’ tab and make sure the ‘Enable Hibnernate‘ is checked.

Speed up Acrobat Reader

mantoadmire — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 10:58:28 +0000

It sometimes feels irritating when Acrobat Reader takes around 5-10 seconds to load a PDF document. It’s mainly because of the plugins it has to load that it slows down. You can speed up the loading by removing the plugins you do not require.

To do so, follow the steps below:

1. Make sure Adobe Reader is not open. If so, then it will lock the files and not allow you to move them. So close it down.
2. Open the installation folder of Acrobat Reader
(C:\program files\adobe\acrobat\reader\….)
3. There will be a ‘Plugins’ directory over there. Cut and Paste all the files and folders from that directory to the ‘Optional’ directory.

Once you do so, you will notice that now Acrobat Reader will open up quickly. .

Keyboard shortcuts: Text Navigation & Editing

mantoadmire — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:51:01 +0000

When you open a document window in a word processing (or similar) program, a pointer appears in the upper-left corner of the window. The text you enter will appear at the pointer. In insertion mode, the new text is inserted into the existing text, the existing text is automatically pushed back to follow the new text. In overwrite mode, the new text overwrites the existing text. The following keys automatically scroll the window to keep the pointer in view when it is necessary. These keys also work in the text boxes of dialog boxes and list boxes.

Insert            Toggles between overtype and insertion modes
Arrow Keys        Moves the pointer one character in the direction of the arrow
Home or End       Moves the pointer to the beginning or end of the current line
Page Up/Down      Moves the pointer up or down
Ctrl+Right/Left   Moves the pointer to the beginning of the next or previous word
Ctrl+Up/Down      Moves the pointer to the beginning of the preceeding or next paragraph
Ctrl+Home/End     Moves the pointer to the beginning or the end of the document
Delete            Deletes the next character or the selected text
Backspace         Deletes the previous character or the selected text
Ctrl+Z            Undoes the last action
Ctrl+C            Copies the selected text to the clipboard
Ctrl+X            Cuts the selected text to the clipboard
Ctrl+V            Pastes copied text from the clipboard

Refresh Thumbnails And Save Space

mantoadmire — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:47:34 +0000

In Microsoft Windows XP, you can select the Thumbnails view for any folder, thereby gaining a quick way to find images. In some earlier Windows versions, you first had to right-click on the folder, choose Properties, and check a box titled Enable Thumbnail View. Either way, Windows generates a small thumbnail image for every file in the folder. For many file types, the thumbnail is just an oversized icon, but for image files, it’s a small version of the image. Because it takes time to generate the thumbnail images, Windows caches them in a hidden file named Thumbs.db.

In theory, the Thumbs.db file stays up to date with the folder’s current contents, updating thumbnail images as necessary. Inpractice, the file can sometimes get out of sync, and may also wind up containing thumbnails for files that have been deleted from the folder. You can right-click on an individual file and choose Refresh Thumbnail, but for many photos in many folders that’s too slow. Since Windows will re-create the thumbnails as needed, an occasional general cleanup is a good idea, and it’s easy to do.

Select ‘Search‘ from the Start menu, choose to search for files or folders, and search your local hard drives and their subfolders for files named ‘Thumbs.db’. When the search is finished, you’ll have a list of all the thumbnail files. Click within the results area, press ‘Ctrl+A’ to select all of them, and press the ‘Delete’ key to delete them. Click on the ‘Yes to All’ button. Now all of your folders with pictures will get new, fresh thumbnails the next time you view them. In addition, depending on how many such files you had, you may save quite a bit of disk space.

Make risky file extensions obvious

mantoadmire — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:27:32 +0000

Having file extensions visible can make certain malicious programs in your e-mail in-box more obvious. For example, showing a file attachment such as image.jpg.exe, which would otherwise have the harmless-looking name image.jpg. On the other hand, displaying all file extensions all the time looks ugly, makes file names more difficult to read, and increases your likelihood of changing a file’s extension accidentally when renaming it. With a Registry editing, you can make Windows display only the file extensions of executable files, which you’re less likely to rename or interact with directly. Follow these steps:

1. Click on the Start button and select Run
2. Type in ‘regedit’ and press OK 3. Double-click on the ‘HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT’ key
4. Scroll down the list to the ‘exefile‘ key
5. Right-click in the right pane and select ‘New->String Value’
6. Type in ‘AlwaysShowExt‘ and press OK

You may need to restart Windows to see the effect, but from now on, all application files will have their .exe extensions visible in folder windows and other programs that display file names, even when ‘Hide extensions for known file types’ is selected.