Most blokes never read the manual… why have a manual when you can use the magic created by swearing a lot eh?

This is probably why I have never spotted this before, but on the PC, Open up your Steam app and go to the my Games tab. Right Click on Team Fortress 2 and choose ‘view player manual’ from the list.

Enjoy.

I had to put this up I want one of these :0)

TF2: Sentry Turret Case Mod

This one has been out for a couple of weeks or so now but it’s no less fun than any of the other TF2 video’s.

So, Meet the scout:

Team Fortress 2: Meet the Scout Trailer

A couple of weeks ago I decided to experiment with my home wireless set-up. Currently I am running a Netgear router that includes their RangeMax Next technology to provide draught n capabilities. Until now it has been set-up to broadcast the b/g compatible signal only. Since I was in my garden at the time and was receiving a weak signal, I decided to see what would happen if I switched the modem to output at full power, intended for the benefit of n capable devices of course.

The result surprised me a little as I actually received a stronger signal through my normal Wireless card built into the laptop. So this got me thinking, Summer is on the way and I plan to be in the garden as much as possible so… Off I went this weekend and bought a PC card to go with the modem. The NetGear WN511B coming in at £39 seemed the perfect choice given it is the partner card for the router and the price was almost £20 less than the other cards on show.

Installing the card was a breeze, following the usual run the CD first routine and once it had negotiated with the router performed the necessary handshake etc. I was able to get a blistering 200+ mbps over wireless Fantastic! All ran fine for a day then suddenly things started to go south. The wireless card refused to connect, no error no warning just nothing at all. It has taken me all of sunday evening and yesterday evening to finally nail the issue.

Of course I went through the pain of attempting an uninstall which was unbelievably crap. The installer wanted Cab2 which doesn’t exist on the HDD or on the damn CD so I gave it the jackboot treatment and deleted the driver and all installed files manually and used RegCrawler to blat the registry… at this point I had already dropped the laptop once carrying it from the office and wasn’t taking any prisoners.

So I downloaded the latest software and installed it without using the CD, during the download I noticed some release notes, apparently this version (the same as the one on the CD) fixed an issue where the card can’t connect to the router if it is set to run in a mixed security mode of WPA2 and WPA. This rang a bell as I run that mode due to having an older laptop at home that my wife uses, of course it can’t do WPA2 and the wireless card isn’t supported any more.

So once the card was re-installed I switched security mode to WPA2 only and reset the router. As soon as the router was back up the card connected fine and I got the superb speeds I got before. I then switched the router to WPA and reset again, and again the card connected fine. Finally I switched back to mixed mode and the card refused to connect.

So I am now stuck with WPA mode only until NetGear actually fix the issue, a shame as I do like to run the highest possible security I can, when I can, but at least for now I have a working wireless n set-up and can hopefully enjoy a great summer of catching up on my backlog of podcasts, shows and training that I have been lining up.

I was prompted to visit Matthew Buchanan’s blog to gain a full understanding of timelapse CSS after reading the initial post on Ajaxian. Matthew has basically put together a neat bit of JS that ‘de-composes’ a page bit by bit, he’s then videoed the results, reversed it and the result is a cool video of a page being built up bit by bit.

I only wish I could build pages this quick ;0)

ajaxian have managed to get hold of some free chapters from a new book being produced by the Pragmatic Programmers. There are two chapters to download and they are pretty good. The first chapter hits on the DOM API’s and uses a specific challenge to walk through and expose us to dojo.query and class addition, the second chapter is Ajax the Dojo way which exposes us to dojo.data and dojo.grid.

The book is in Beta and as with all the Pragmatic programmers books you can buy the beta and get updates all the way up to the final publication.

A buddy from work sent me a link to a guy by the name of Mark Vidler today. I spent about 1 minute on the site before I was blown away with the talent displayed by Mark.
This guy can take different video and music sequences and blend them together perfectly to come up with something completely different.

if you are looking for something other than AudioSurf to spend your time on tonight go visit Mr Vidler it’s a joyride you will not regret.

As a sample for you ‘oldies’ out there who remember the Beatles and Monkeys and how often they ‘collaborated’ ;0) Check this out:

I was compelled tonight to actually perform a stunt. Yup fat as I am and wired with Caffeine I actually performed a real bona fide no tricks stunt - without the aid of a net. Ladies and gents I jumped on board a fast moving band wagon.

Yup, I s*** you not this sucker was moving and moving damn fast, i think I got a splinter…

I paid a full £10-ish for AudioSurf, a game that has been gathering erm… steam on the er… STEAM network. — see what I did there ;0) — The game allows you to ’surf’ your music collection collecting different coloured blocks strewn all over a virtual track. The track and blocks are actually generated based on the song you choose. In the latest version you get the game, the full soundtrack from Valve’s Orange Box and a new feature that allows you to surf songs from net radio.

One superb feature is that you can discover entirely new songs from featured artists. Tonight I discovered ‘Lost on Purpose‘, a one man indie band. This guy has an acoustic feel to his songs with a real upbeat rythm. his site and ordering process for his songs could do with a bit more polish, evidently he’s a better musician than web developer, but then I’m no musician (unless out of practice drummer counts) so I’m not going to hang him out to dry for that.
Anyhow, his stuff is great and he’s available on iTunes so you can find him and buy him real easy. I think you can play samples from his site too if you want to get a feel for the music.

So, Two recomendations for you: Buy AudioSurf and go check out a one man indie band… you don’t have to do both btw but do one and do it now ;0)

Lost on Purpose - the 70’s:

I’ve been struggling this week with a decision to revert my laptop back to Windows XP pro from Ubuntu. Not because I have gone off Ubuntu (or Linux in general) far from it! Unfortunately I have a need for a mobile platform that I can use to help me learn Adobe CS3 and to work with my new camera. The software that came with my new camera (an EOS 40D) won’t work properly on 64 bit XP and has exhibited problems in a virtual environment.

Sure I could dual boot my home PC but then my camera is tied to my home office if I want to utilise the remote shooting ability that the software gives me.
Plus, I want to learn Adobe CS3 in a more deliberate manner than I have employed up to now, and trying to get it working under WINE is a pain.

I have finally managed to get my laptop re-installed and running with all the apps I need, a process that has taken much much longer than installing a linux distro, especially because I don’t have a home partition that holds all my settings.

One thing I really missed was the Compiz desktop. I’m surprised at how much I have changed the way I work because of the flexibility offered by multiple desktops. A quick search for ‘virtual XP desktops’ in Google popped up some results and there were some free tools out there, not to mention the Microsoft power toy, but the usefulness and wow factor is just not there really. So Last night I made a more determined effort to dig something out, another Google search or two later and I stumbled upon CubeDesktop This app is damned awesome! for a windows app. Unfortunately it’s not open source or free so that’s a bit of a pain, but it is reasonably priced and very feature rich.

I’m running it on a laptop with an AMD Turion 64 bit processor running in 32 bit mode with Win XP Pro and I only have an ATI Radeon 200M graphics card on this rig so nothing special at all.

The cube looks sweet though, it’s pretty smooth and I have not dialled things down much at all, theres some great transparency effects and you are not restricted to just a cube either, you can have a carousel, flip between desktops and have a flat desktop browser too.

The latest version let’s you have 6 desktops (I can’t see a way to change this at all) each can have their own Icons and wallpapers if you choose, and you can only see what’s on each desktop by hovering over the icon in the task tray or flipping between the desktops but it’s far far better than anything else I have seen for windows.

Definitely recommended if you want to get even close to Compiz Fusion but don’t expect to have everything available in Compiz, not without buying most of the object desktop suite as well.

I miss Linux but I have a reasonable XP system up now and I have my reasons for it. ;0)