Asturias

Doing Better

"Doing better next time. That's what life is." -- Logen Ninefingers (Before They Are Hanged)

Wisdom by Homer ... not the Greek

"Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try" -- Homer Simpson in "Burns' Heir" (1F16)

Back to the Future: Firefox's Download Manager

Another unwanted, unrequested change in Firefox, was the change of the download manager in Firefox 20. All of a sudden, the downloads immediately stops if the internet connection stops, and of course cannot be resumed properly after the connection has been restored .. thanks for nothing. To get back the old UI and behaviour, change the configuration in Firefox (about:config):

• browser.download.useToolkitUI = true

Restart Firefox afterwards and you're good to go.

And of course I am still unhappy about the UI changes and the frequency of the updates, but that's another story.

Interview with Richard Branson

Richard Branson - Chairman of the Virgin Group:

I particularly liked the statement by Branson, that they offer more than the people expect them to do. That's the way to distinguish oneself from the competition.

System Shock 2: No Respawn

"Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone. Panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect immortal machine?"

Perhaps my favourite quote from a computer game.

Just bought System Shock (from 1999!) on Steam. Time to remember some settings which makes the game more enjoyable to me. For all settings check the(?) System Shock page.

• Monster Spawning:
  If you've killed everything in a given area, and you wait around long enough, you'll notice that more monsters are spawned to keep you busy. To minimize respawning, use the configuration variable:
  
• no_spawn
System Shock 2's ecologies look at how many monsters are in a given area. If a defined minimum number of monsters are present, there is a chance that a new monster will spawn. The variable:
• lower_spawn_min n
reduces the defined minimum monster count on all ecologies by n.

• raise_spawn_rand n
lowers the chance of a monster randomly spawning by changing the random chance from 1/i to 1/(i+n).
• Gun degradation
  The config variable:
  • gun_degrade_rate
  is a multiplier for the rate at which your weapons degrade. For example, to completely eliminate weapon degradation & breakage, set the value to 0. To tone it down, set it somewhere between 1 and 0.

Gender neutral names now and then

Now:

• Jordan
• Dakota
• Payton

 Then:

• Chris
• Pat
• Tracy

Disable Auto-Eject Behavior

To disable the auto eject behavior of disk drive (when clicking on the drive in the Windows explorer), you can disable the built-in CD burning settings in Windows by adding/modifying the following registry entry:

• [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer] "NoCDBurning"=dword:00000001 

To take effect, you have to log off and then log in again.