Jordi Mas has begun the roots of a Brain Age type game for GNOME called gbrainy. It’s a logic puzzle engine only at the moment but it’s hopped it can evolve into a more complete brain training game with arithmetical puzzles, memory puzzles, and color puzzles. He released version 0.1 yesterday and it’s looking great. It certainly could use some polish but it’s an exceptional start after a few weeks work. I look forward to contributing to this project as it evolves. It’s built using Mono, C#, and Cairo.
This evening I decided I didn’t really like the generic USB Hard Disk icon my My Book Premium Edition created on my GNOME desktop when plugged in. I found a few images online and took a photo of my own to make some. I figured I’d share them here since my first inclination was to search and didn’t find anything to my liking. Here are mine as transparent PNG files.
Since updating to the latest Windows Live Writer beta I became unable to post images to Geekport using the WordPress API. After some Google keyword tweaking I was able to find the answer here. Just a quick tweak to a WordPress .php file.
I decided to go for some all-you-can-eat fried chicken at Golden Corral the other day and noticed two things which are awesome relief for people who get itchy with the thought of people going to the buffet line with dirty hands. First, they had sanitary patty paper boxes scattered around at the register and the buffet counters to pick up the food tongs with. You know–those wax paper things that go between hamburger patties when packaged. This is a neat idea as having “sanitary” on the box makes the intention a bit more obvious than just having napkins in the same place. The other thing I noticed was that the bathroom did not have paper towels–only air dyers. Not surprising, but this is usually annoying as you have nothing to grab the handle with on the way out. But lo! An interesting device on the door!
You can just use your forearm or wrist to open the door, keeping your squeaky-clean hands clear of the handle tainted by proper hand wash-challenged folks. Check out their website. This is a great idea. They aren’t as inexpensive as one would think ($70-80 for a pair) but hopefully they can become less expensive with success, or maybe a larger company can pick up the product for these guys.
Last night’s premiere of High School Musical 2 appears to have broken all kinds of ratings records. The most interesting of which is that it was watched by 17.2 million folks nationwide according to overnights. That would make it the highest rated basic cable showing ever. That still doesn’t even begin to compare to the series finale of Cheers or M*A*S*H and such on broadcast networks but still pretty darn impressive considering the number of options viewers have these days.
As to the content, I was rather disappointed. The setting doesn’t work at all. The songs, while fantastic, seemed overly optimized for radio play/soundtrack sales and worked into the story. The original was much more charming. You’ll no doubt get plenty of chances to see an encore over the coming months if you really do want to see it, but in hindsight I would have rather picked up the soundtrack and come up with my own setting/plot in my head.
(This is a rather technical post so feel free to skip this if the title means nothing to you)
I had a dilemma last night. I was linked to this great article by someone in ArsTechnica’s #linux on setting up SeamlessRDP to my VMWare Windows XP installation to achieve an effect similar to VMware Fusion’s Unity on Mac OS X. The problem is that I soon found out that Remote Desktop is disabled in XP Home Edition, only to be enabled in XP Professional.
It took a lot of digging around but I was eventually able to figure out how to get this enabled. So here is my guide on how to enable Remote Desktop in Windows XP Home Edition. Just a heads up that this was important to me because of RDP’s ability to launch specific applications for seamless integration into my Linux desktop, if you don’t need this and just want a full desktop window, one of the free VNC solutions might be better for you (TightVNC seems popular).
The first thing is to trick the installation into thinking that it’s actually XP Pro. I found this information here. Before doing this it might be best to make sure your install is already set up with Service Pack 2, etc.
- Navigate the Windows registry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet00X/Control/ProductOptions (where ControlSet00X is the one with the highest number) and delete the “ProductSuite” key.
- Create a new DWORD key in this same folder called “Brand” and set it’s value to 0.
- Reboot Windows. At startup mash F8 to bring up the boot options and choose “Last Known Good Configuration”.
After some hard disk churning you will be back to your welcome screen or desktop. You can then go to the System control panel and see that you now have a Professional Edition setup. This is great so far but unfortunately doesn’t actually install all those professional features.
Now I needed to get Remote Desktop to accept incoming connections.
I found this batch file on a forum post. It’s easy to follow; it basically creates a .reg file with the required keys, merges it, and does a reinstall of terminal services. After a reboot you should now see Terminal Services alive and well in the Services Administrative Tool. A “netstat -a” in the Command Prompt should show port 3389 as listening. At this point I was able to connect to my server but was getting disconnected immediately. After some more digging I found a replacement termsrv.dll that was actually from a Service Pack 2 beta but did the trick for me. Follow the instructions there or here (it must be replaced in safe mode). You might be interested in the registry edits mentioned in those posts as well for concurrent users.
I don’t know how much of this was necessary but after all this tinkering last night I am now able to Remote Desktop with success to my XP Home installation. Yay! One more thing… make sure you have a password associated with your Windows user!
