Hijinks Inc.

Category: News

  • Microsoft Academic Alliance

    There’s two colleges in the town where I live. The state university, and the community college. The university has the football team, the prestige, and most importantly the student discounted software available for those who enroll. Naturally, I go to the community college ($47 per credit hour? Yes please).

    I spent some time being bummed about my lack of cheap operating systems and copies of Office. Than I started in the Microcomputer program, and enrolled in the Microsoft Academic Alliance. I knew it included access to programming suites, but that was about it. Here’s a sampling of the more useful programs available for my educational pleasure:

    • Microsoft Access
    • Windows XP Pro
    • Windows Vista Business
    • Windows Server 2008
    • MS-DOS 6.0 (!)
    • Visio Professional 2007
    • XNA Creator’s Club Subscription

    The one that really surprised me was the XNA Creator’s Club subscription. It’s basically an SDK for making games for the xbox, and the ability to rate and critique other member’s creations. You can learn more about it here. Normally they charge you 100 bucks for a subscription, which although a mere drop in the bucket compared to the price of say..Windows Vista Business..is still nothing to sneeze at.

  • HP TouchSmart Review

    I got my HP TouchSmart IQ507 Monday afternoon, and after playing around with it for the last couple days, I have to say it’s an awesome machine. Awesome enough to warrant a quick review!

    First thing you’ll want to do is open up the HP Touch Screen Controls and disable the Touch Screen Sound option under the Global Settings tab. Doing that will make your experience much more enjoyable.

    The 22″ screen looks amazing, it sports a healthy 1680×1050 resolution, great for checking your email, playing games or watching videos. As I see it, the main drawback is that it’s a glossy screen, which is crazy reflective, but a necessary evil in order to properly protect the screen.

    The touchscreen functionality isn’t quite ready for everyday Windows use out of the box, seeing as how a lot of things in Windows are a little small for accurately tapping with your finger (and since the screen isn’t actually touch sensitive and is merely using IR sensors to detect your finger creating a break in the IR field, it tends to be just a little off from where you want to click), so it can be quite frustrating. But I was able to make most basic tasks a little more bearable just by tweaking a few settings and adjusting to the screens minor misinterpretation of taps.

    Windows Media Center is fantastic on the TouchSmart, even though some of the icons are a bit small and there aren’t a lot of configuration options for such things I was able to navigate with minimum difficulty. The TouchSmart does include a remote for controlling the Media Center as well, so once the novelty of poking your computer screen wears off you can control things from the comfort of your couch.

    The included HP SmartCenter is more visually appealing than it is useful. Although it is by far the easiest program to navigate using the touchscreen, so HP did their job well in that respect. The best way I can describe the SmartCenter is to advise you to think of it as RocketDock meets your media library, meets a mediocre coverflow clone, meets Al Gore moonlighting as a professional hobo (this little gem is your reward for sticking it out and reading this article up until this point, yay for you!).
    Also, every time I started the SmartCenter it re-enabled that annoying beep that the TouchSmart plays each and every time you touch the screen. Maybe I’m just easily annoyed.

    I also took a few minutes to install a copy of Starcraft on the TouchSmart, and while the game doesn’t look at all visual stunning on a 22″ screen, it makes up for it with its very point-and-click oriented interface, making it a perfect candidate for a touchscreen computer. Simply put, playing Starcraft is awesome on the TouchSmart.

    While the on-screen keyboard is fun at first, your wrists will likely cramp up after only a few minutes of “typing”, the functionality of it is further limited since the screen isn’t exactly multi-touch and it tends to lose track of your keystrokes after the first few when you try typing faster than one letter at a time.

    In the more practical realm of data entry, the included bluetooth keyboard is a very nice slim form factor. It features minimal dedicated media hot keys, just mute and volume up/down controls, so the layout isn’t at all crowded. Don’t fret though, you’ll still be able to control your DVD or music from the couch even without your remote, since all the F keys have secondary functions assigned to them for media playback. My main compliant is that it’s ridiculously loud when typing.

    Speakers on the TouchSmart actually surprised me, they’ve got decent range and fantastic volume, sound is crisp even on the higher end of the volume scale. I’ve owned numerous TVs that have had worse speakers than this system.

    Anyhow, as I meantioned before I’m going to try and install OS X on it. I’ve partitioned the drive and am going to start out by trying the latest build of iDeneb. I’ll post an update in the next few days.

  • Invites for the boxee alpha

    If anyone is interested in trying out the alpha version of boxee, just leave a comment with your email address and I’ll send an invite your way.
    From their site:

    On a laptop or connected to an HDTV, boxee gives you a true entertainment experience to enjoy your movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, Last.fm, and flickr.

  • DOS Tips: Part 1

    Back in May I started a series of posts about how to better take advantage of the Terminal in OS X, now months later without my MacBook Pro, I’ve resorted to DOS. I suppose it is only fair that DOS gets a series of its own.

    [1] net user administrator /random
    Who knew Windows XP had a random password generator built in? Just make sure and write it down, or else you’ll be in big trouble next time you try and login.

    [2] label C: new drive name here
    Sure you could just rename the volume from My Computer, but this is more fun. Swap out C: for whatever drive letter is attached to the volume you’d like to rename and you’re good to go.

    [3] cls
    Clears the screen. Simple, yet handy.

    [4] dir
    Displays a list of files in the current directory.

    [5] rd directoryname
    The RD command lets you remove entire directories, just replace the directoryname variable with the name of the directory you’d like to nuke and fire away.

  • The Scourge Invasion: A Survivers Guide

    If you play WoW and have logged on in the past few days, you might have noticed that Azeroth is under attack by the Lich King. Turns out Arthas wasn’t too excited with the prospect of having us crash his pad up in Northrend, so he’s sending us a little taste of what’s in store for us in Wrath of the Lich King. Can you say zombie apocalypse? I knew you could. The event hearkens back to the opening of Naxx pre-BC.

    It all started with crates of zombie contagion and infected roaches appearing last week, and the arrival of Argent Healers in the capital cities. Players infected with the disease would turn into zombies in ten minutes, then were able to infect other NPCs and PCs. Argent Healers could cure you of the plague, and kill zombies with holy retribution to the face. The plague has gotten progressively worse over the course of the past week, dialing down the incubation time from ten minutes, to five minutes, and now to one minute. The Argent Healer’s numbers have been decimated. You can find them next to faction leaders and outside the main gates of capital cities.

    Your experience may vary, but on my server Shattrath is completely overrun with zombies, PC and NPC alike. Getting anywhere in the city without a flying mount is near impossible without getting infected, but here’s a few tips that might save you from becoming a ravenous zombie (and taking that 10% hit to durability).

    • The infection debuff is the equivilent of 3 disease counters. Paladin’s Cleanse and Priest’s Abolish Disease can remove it, but it takes a few casts. If you arn’t one, make sure you’re good friends with a few.
    • Zombie’s are slow. Their Lurch ability increases speed by 100% for 10 seconds with a 30 second cooldown, which ratchets up their movement speed to that of a normal mount. That means that if you’re over level 30, you can outrun them 66% of the time, and if you’re over level 60, you can outrun them 100% of the time.
    • Avoid major cities. B list Capital cities like Thunder Bluff, Silvermoon, Exodar, and Darnassus are good places to hang out. Most of the player organized raids are being conducted against Shattrath and Orgrimmar/Ironforge. Undercity isn’t a great place to be either due to it’s proximity to the quest hub at Light’s Hope Chapel in EPL. Avoid these hotspots and you’ll avoid the bulk of the zombie population.
    • If you fight a big group of zombies, you’ll probably lose. If you disagree, go try it. Trade is filled with people griping about how sick they are of the zombie event, but the truth is if you don’t pick a fight with them you’re probably not going to get infected. You’re faster, more agile, and you have more tricks up your sleeve then they do. Be alert, and you’ll be fine.