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Tired of MS crippling its own products? I know I am.

I was really bummed to find that my new laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 (x64) didn’t allow remote desktop connections. Lame!

Fortunately, there is a hack I found here and here that allows you to enable remote desktop on Windows Vista Home Premium. Unfortunately, it only works on the 32-bit edition, so I updated the file with the 64-bit DLL from Vista x64 SP1. This will allow users of Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit to be able to use this hack (oh, and there are also batch files for Ultimate and Business as well). If you do not have SP1 installed on your machine, I’m not sure if this will work or not.

What to do:
Download this zip file and extract it wherever you want. Then you will notice there are three batch files; simply run the one that corresponds to your version of Vista (be sure to right-click and choose “Run as Administrator” or it won’t work).

This hack worked for me on my laptop. Keep in mind that if you have 32-bit Windows Vista, you’ll need to use the download links I referenced at the beginning of this post. Also as a helpful tip, if you have two or more computers on your network accepting remote desktop connections, you’ll need to change the listening port(s) on the additional machine(s).

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: Windows Vista; remote desktop

I was on AccuWeather tonight because we’re having some foul weather here in Minneapolis, and I was trying to figure out if I was going to freeze to death on my way to work tomorrow. The high today was -3. That’s right: the high was a negative number. I mean, you know it’s cold when your doorknob actually burns your skin, or the dog poops and it’s frozen before it hits the ground. Yikes!

Anyway, Accuweather has a little sidebar applet on their homepage that lets you display the temperatures from five cities around the world. I picked what I felt were four other stereotypically cold cities for comparison purposes, but Minneapolis beat ‘em all:

Wussies!

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: humor, Minnesota, weather

There seems to be a completely non-scientific way to prove that low gas prices equals bad economy. Consider figure 1:

“Ah,” you say. “This is good. Low gas prices are good for everyone. Hooray!” False. Low gas prices are bad for everyone. Consider figure 2:

The graphs are not directly comparable—even with my vast (read: half-arsed) Internet research, I couldn’t find anything over the same period of time. But you get the idea…as gas gets cheap, we Americans lose our jobs, and the economy tanks. Which brings me to figure 3, the Dow chart:

Again, the charts don’t lie. I can only imagine how dire the situation will be when gas gets below $1.00/gallon!

So please, OPEC, listen up: start screwing us over again at the pump so we can get our jobs back!

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: economy, gas prices, humor

So my 360 finally died last week—fired it up only to be greeted with the telltale three red rings. Frick!

I have been kinda looking for an excuse to get the Elite version anyway, so I wasn’t too mad. Impulsively, I ran out and bought an Elite…but then I thought: what’s better than one XBOX 360? Why, two 360s, of course!

To whom do we turn when disaster strikes? Google, duh. I immediately did some Googling for fixes. After reviewing some lame Youtube videos (er, “online classes”), I was ready to dive in. I took the thing apart (broke the seal & thus voided my warranty), took the heat sinks off the CPU & GPU, scraped off the old thermal paste, and applied some Arctic Silver 5.

Then, I attached some #8 sized washers to the backside of the motherboard (beneath the x-clamps that hold the heatsinks on). The goal here—according to some random Youtube guy anyway—is to create a tighter seal between the top of the CPU/GPU and the heatsinks, in theory transferring more heat from the CPU/GPU to the heatsinks. Finally, I put the 360 all back together (overall, I was pleasantly surprised how easy the thing was to disassemble/re-assemble).

Well, I am happy to report that it actually worked! I was shocked. The red ring of death has subsided. At least for now. I fired the old one up and played Gears of War 2 just to punish it and–so far–it’s working. I can’t guarantee it won’t crap out again in a couple days, but hey…it was in the name of science.

So if you’ve got an out-of-warranty 360, are looking to get a new one anyway, or just like to tinker and don’t care about voiding the warranty, then give it a shot! Just Google “XBOX 360 red ring of death fix” and you’ll have literally hundreds of posts/sites dedicated to the topic.

Note: the “towel fix” is not recommended….

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: red ring of death, video games, xbox 360

I got a fancy new Logitech laser mouse but was still disappointed that it was pretty laggy in games. So I hunted around a bit on how to increase the USB mouse polling rate and found a lot of info. Too much info. Every forum seemed to have a different method.

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about right now, Windows sets the default USB polling rate to 125Hz, which is the equivalent of 8ms of lag. Some twitch gamers like to overclock the default polling rate to make their mice even more responsive. The lags associated with the various speeds are:

1. 125 Hz = 8ms

2. 250 Hz = 4ms
3. 500 Hz = 2ms
4. 1000 Hz = 1ms

The more you bump up the speed, the less lag you get. Of course not all mice can handle the speed increase. The other downside of increasing the polling rate is that it eats up a tad more CPU cycles—of course on a multi-core, Core 2 system this is hardly an issue.

Anyway, I finally came across a nice program that does all the work for you. It’s called hidusbf. Follow the instructions and it should work just fine. I have tested so far in Windows XP 32-bit. I’ll test on Vista x64 tonight.

Update: This doesn’t appear to work on Vista x64–at least not for me. If you do happen to install the driver and your mouse stops working, simply use your keyboard to navigate to Device Manager, uninstall the mouse driver, and unplug and replug in the USB cord attached to your mouse. I wouldn’t recommend using this on Vista x64 unless you know how to fix it if it breaks.

You may also want to download this dx_mouse_timer_dialog so you can verify that the tool actually worked.

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: DirectInput, USB; mouse polling rate; DX9; DX10; PC games

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

The King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
(Matt. 25:37-40)

Bear with me, the title of this post will make sense in a second.

I have gone a few times to a place here in MN called Feed My Starving Children. Basically what it is is a Christian organization that prepares, packages, and ships meals to hungry/starving children all across the globe. I recently went with a group from my wife’s work and we packaged more than 400 meals in less than two hours. They use donated money to pay for the meals and volunteers to prepare them.

Currently, FMSC can produce one nutritious meal for $0.17.

By the time the elections hit us in November, it is projected the Barack Obama will spend $90 million on political advertising. The McCain ad budget isn’t that big, so let’s say it’s $60 million. That’s $150 million spent on ads by election day, with each candidate telling us how great he is and how evil the other guy is. You know the drill: one guy looks like Jesus Jr., with a white halo around his head, and the other guy is made to look like the devil incarnate. I hate political ads and I’m guessing most of my fellow Americans do, too.

Anyway, how many starving children could we feed for $150 million? Let’s see, at $0.17 per meal, we could make a whopping 882,352,941 meals. If a child eats three meals per day, or 1095 per year, we could feed 805,802 starving children for an entire year (and not have to watch nauseating ads, as a bonus).

Here’s the formula, folks:

$150 million for ads no one cares about anyway
÷
$0.17

---

882,352,941 meals
÷
1095 meals to feed one child for a year

---

805,802 starving kids that could be fed for a whole year

Need I say more? Put in these terms, spending on political ads is both disgusting and infuriating.

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: politics; global outreach

For a while now my Optoma HD70 has had a ton of dust blobs all over the screen; they are especially prominent in dark scenes of movies or games. I tried cleaning the lens (it didn’t help), but after reading through some forums, it sounds like a few people have had the same problem with their HD70s, too. I thought I could live with it, but I’m just too anal, so I finally called Optoma and got an RMA number. Turns out this problem IS covered by the two-year warranty, so I’m sending it in. So far my experience with Optoma’s support has been very positive; they have been responsive and helpful.

I’ll report back when I actually get the projector back—we’ll see! So if anyone’s out there with a dust-blob-ridden HD70 (or any Optoma projector, for that matter), know that it is covered by your warranty.

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: projectors; Optoma HD70

I just bought and installed Crysis Warhead via Steam. Great game, everything was running well, until one time I fired it up and 1920×1200 suddenly disappeared from the available resolutions.

The oddest part was, even editing system.cfg or game.cfg (as described here) and forcing the resolution manually through those files didn’t help—the game simply would not display 1920×1200. I have a 24″ Gateway monitor.

I tried uninstalling/re-installing Steam and then re-installing Warhead, deleting all my profiles and save games, and still—the highest resolution I could choose was 1920×1080. Frustrated, I trolled various forums for answers, all to no avail.

Finally, I discovered something on my own to fix it—I set the resolution in the Launch Properties of the game in Steam. Here’s how I did it.

• Go into Steam and go into the “My games” list. Right click on Crysis Warhead and choose “Properties”
• Next click on “Set launch options…”
• In the launch options box, type the following:

+r_width 1920 +r_height 1200

This corrected my problem, and now the game runs in 1920×1200 goodness. You can of course swap out any value you want in r_width and r_height, to force any resolution you want. Like if you wanted to force 1440×900, you’d use: +r_width 1440 +r_height 900

I hope this helps someone else out there alleviate some Crysis-related angst. I know it was driving me nuts, so I’m glad this fix took care of it.

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: steam; Crysis Warhead; DirectX; 1920x1200; PC Games

Sorry to anyone who tried to access my site today and got an error. I was in the process of moving my site from a crappy old computer in my basement to a GoDaddy hosted account.

I’ll post the steps I used to move my files to GoDaddy…I bet some folks will find it helpful.

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: GoDaddy; domain; hosting, site maintenance

OK, let’s talk about Windows Vista vs. Mac OS X.

Nope, this isn’t another “Microsoft vs. Apple” debate. I’m a guy who has used Windows PCs his whole life, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

I’d like to talk about my experience coming into the Mac OS world, primarily from a Windows user’s perspective.

A little back story: I work as Interactive Producer for a content marketing agency in Minneapolis. Part of my job is to oversee our Interactive Designer, who, surprise, uses a Mac 99% of the time. As part of my training, I was given a Macbook Pro laptop so that I could learn Flash and the rest of the Adobe CS3 suite in a Mac environment. It’s an Intel-based Mac, with a Core 2 Duo running at 2.2 GHz with 4GB of RAM and some flavor of an Nvidia GeForce card. I’m talking about Mac OS 10.4 by the way, as we haven’t rolled out Leopard yet.

Superficially, the first thing I noticed is how dang sexy–and pleasingly minimalistic–the thing is. Clean lines, brushed metal finish and an Apple logo that glows white when you turn it on. Open it up, same story. Modern. Aesthetically pleasing. The old school Mac sound when you first turn it on. The keyboard has precisely the right tactile feel to it, with just a slight tick tick sound instead of that clunky tapping sound common on cheesy keyboards. The single-click button by the Touchpad feels nice too, although I’m not sure how to explain it. It just feels right; that’s all I can say.

At first, the interface felt clunky. Not because it’s clunky, of course, but because I have been trained in Windows for 10+ years. Where’s the Start menu? How do I switch between apps? What are all of the keyboard shortcuts? Where’s “My Computer”, for heaven’s sake? My Documents? WHERE IS MINESWEEPER?

The first thing I did, oddly, was remove the antivirus software. Shh, don’t tell my IT guy. I had to download a removal tool from Symantec because it couldn’t be easily uninstalled. I’m guessing that’s Symantec’s fault, not Apple’s.

Speaking of, the concept of uninstalling a program by simply deleting its directory seems foreign to me; and yet, it feels so…appealing! One thing I’ve learned to hate about Windows is the registry. I really appreciate that the Unix-based Mac OS–like Ubuntu and other Linux flavors–simply stores application configuration data in text files. A botched uninstall cannot corrupt your whole system, whereas on a Windows box, a botched uninstall of say–Symantec Antivirus–can make a new PC feel 10 years old and cause a geek hours as he/she manually removes hundreds of registry entries. Ick! In summary: loving the ability to remove programs by simply deleting their directories.

What else do I like? The Dock is nice. I’ve used Stardock’s Windows version, although Apple’s is much more elegant and refined. The overall interface is just very sleek and sexy.

Overall, I’m still much less efficient on a Mac than I am on a PC, but again I blame not the system but myself, as I’m still learning. I can absolutely fly through tasks on my XP box at work, but with Mac OS, right now I’m a little more…methodical. I’m sure that will change over time.

As far as gripes, well, I’m a fiddler. A tweaker. I like to mess with stuff, even if it breaks. I feel like with Windows, it can be tweaked to my heart’s content. The Mac seems less so, but again that could be a lack of info on my part. Another big one for me is the lack of gaming support. That’s not really a knock on the OS, but it is a reason that would keep me from switching over to solely Apple. Also, it’s hard from a Windows perspective to get used to an OS that’s not really designed around left-vs-right clicking. Agh! When I use the Touchpad I always forget I have to hold down CTRL for the right click.

I’m not a fan of Safari, but FireFox is available for Mac so who cares? I’ve already had countless hours of fun with GarageBand. The Adobe CS3 suite functions pretty much like it does on Windows, so not much of a learning curve there. I honestly prefer the Vista Explorer to the Mac OS finder, but that’s personal preference. I’m sure there are Apple fanatics out there who would gleefully gut me for even uttering those words.

So those are my initial thoughts. I don’t plan on heading solely to the Apple camp anytime soon, and I still have a lot of things I like about my Windows boxes. But that little Macbook left a good impression on me, and it’s likely I’ll continue to use–and grow fonder of–it in the weeks to come.

I’ll write more as I get more familiar with the elegant, mysterious, and metrosexual world that is MacOS X.

written by Andrew Block \\ tags: Apple, Mac OSX, Microsoft, Windows Vista, Windows XP