In current news, my girlfriend and I are making a trip to Hawaii next week with a few friends. I’m really looking forward to getting away from the city for a while (not that I don’t love Vancouver) and finally getting my fins wet while scuba diving again. I might have to take a bit of a break on this whole ‘post every two days’ thing while I’m away, depending on internet availability. I’ll try to get something up and running though.

I’ve also been putting a bit of spare time into getting my Youtube channel a little more streamlined and putting a few more videos up on there in order to increase it’s popularity. Most of my videos are probably going to be related to World of Warcraft (I’m currently in a progression guild at the moment), but there will be some other videos as well. Zxian’s Youtube Channel.

Now it’s time for sleep.

For now, I leave you with a video of some kittens my friend is taking care of at the moment.

• Almost done my research for my masters. Only a few more months until I’m done!
• Dave Matthews Band concert at the Gorge! Amazing times with friends. Good music, lots of raw dogging (if you weren’t there, don’t ask), and plenty of empty Corona bottles.
• Upgraded the main video card in my desktop to an XFX ATI 4890 (900Mhz core, 3.9Ghz Mem). This thing screams…
• Upgraded my desktop and netbook to Win7 RTM. This is a legit final build copy (I’ll be buying my licenses on Oct 22), and it’s awesome. There’s a couple of small quirks when it comes to UltraMon and some other apps, but those will be sorted out soon enough.
• I became the guild master of our guild in World of Warcraft (I’ve been playing for about a year now). Herding cats is fun!!

I think that should do it for now. Like I said, there will be more frequent updates in the future. =)

I had also built a media center a while back that would double as a downloading machine for my girlfriend and her roommates. Because of the way their house was setup, running ethernet to all the rooms was simply impossible, so everyone was on wireless. Everyone in the house also tends to download a lot of stuff. Let’s just say Bit Torrent and wireless don’t always like each other. It ultimately brought the network speeds to a crawl, so the media center was setup with a single copy of uTorrent installed. There were a number of bugs with the initial setup that were just bothering me, so last Friday night I installed Vista Ultimate x64 on the machine. All I have to say is that Vista MCE is glorious.

My workstation at UBC was the last Vista capable system I own that hadn’t been upgraded. That all changed this morning, and I’m now writing this from a Vista Business x64 system. Let’s just say, I’ll probably never move back to XP.

I fired up Visual Studio 2008 and started writing a simple little .NET app to act as a wrapper for the command-line window. At the moment, it just runs all of your folder pairs, but I’ll be expanding the command line parsing to search for specific pairs. You’ll need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed for the software to work. Simply extract the file into the SyncToy directory, follow the help instructions for setting the scheduled task, but replace the program path with the following:

“C:Program FilesSyncToySyncToyHidden.exe” /hide /quiet

Obviously you’ll have to replace the path with the one that’s relevant to your system.

Please let me know if anyone runs into any troubles with the software.

Download Link

P.S. Thanks to jcarle for the help with the command line switches.

And yet… I hate you. You make drivers in Vancouver turn into complete and utter morons with no sense of the word “grip”.

The original ASUS EEE models (700/701) only came with a 4GB flash drive for the system files. Since there was the chance that I’d be running something more than just plain Windows and IE, I needed a model that had a proper sized hard drive. Of the choices on the market at the time, the EEE 1000H seemed like the best fit. For $450 on sale I really couldn’t complain.

The basic package was great. 10″ screen, 1GB DDR2-667, 160GB 5400RPM hard drive, and 5 hours of battery life (actually using the thing). However, there were times that 2GB of RAM would be nice, and the hard drive was a little sluggish for my tastes (I’m impatient). After $30 for a 2GB stick of RAM and $90 for a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB drive – the difference is clearly noticable.

While I was at Anitec the other day, I also noticed that they had a Western Digital Blue 500GB drive on sale. I’ve had times where my 160GB external just doesn’t cut it, so having the massive portable storage will come in handy.

My previous setup included a single Acer X263 monitor at work, and two Acer AL2016w and one Acer X243 screens at home. You can see in the picture below that the tri monitor setup at home was nice, but still not quite perfect. The dot pitch on the three screens was essentially the same, so images and windows didn’t change size immensely when moved from one screen to the next, but the panels were clearly of a different construction. The colors shown on the two screens was noticeably different – the X243 had a slightly bluer hue, while the AL2016′s were slightly browner. It’s a subtle switch, but noticeable.

At work, the one big screen was nice, but having a second monitor is just far more productive. I figured that I would sell the X243 and X263, take the AL2016′s to work, and get three 24′s for home. NCIX had a sale on the Samsung 2443BW for $330, but I’ve always been a little wary of dead pixels on monitors. Through NCIX, you have to pay an additional 5 or 10 percent on the monitor’s price to get a zero-dead pixel guarantee (and even then there’s no complete guarantee), but with FutureShop, if you get a dud screen – just return it and buy a new one somewhere else. Thankfully, all of the screens are perfect and look absolutely stunning.

The picture is really crappy quality, I know. When I took it I wanted to get back to using the screens instead of snapping pictures of them. I’ll see if I can get a better picture sometime later this week.

Needless to say, I’m very happy with the upgrade.

That being said, it’s quite easy to run Hamachi as a service now.  Click on the gear in the main Hamachi window and select “Preferences” to bring up the configuration options. Under “System”, click on the button that says “Run Hamachi as a Windows Service”. It will restart Hamachi, and voila!

EDIT – Yay! The old theme is back again. I’ve also improved the Hamachi status indicators to make the site faster. They’re now being pulled from a database which is updated by the server every 5 minutes.