Sunday, December 16, 2007 while watching the end of Season 2 of Heroes on the Xbox 360 (streaming from my PC with the new DivX support) the video started skipping randomly. A four second freeze, then twenty second freeze, finally amounted to a perpetual video freeze that prompted me to reboot my Xbox 360. Well, there in-lies the problem. Instead of being presented with the lovely chime and brief animation of the usual Xbox 360 boot process, there was silence accompanied by the soft glow of a blank plasma screen. Perhaps I had knocked some cable loose or my network was on the fritz. Reboot number 2… Nothing! Wait… What’s that? The “Ring of Light” was taunting me with a display of 3 Red Lights. Reboot number 3… Of course, I was doomed (moreover my Xbox was doomed). Read the rest of this entry »

Playing Frets on Fire with the official Red Octane SG or Gibson Guitar Controller shouldn’t be difficult to setup, but it’s a little more complicated than Plug-N-Play. Frets on Fire doesn’t seem to retain joystick settings when mapping the buttons from a Guitar Controller into the game. It may work for a little while, but I’m sure many have noticed that the controller setup is bound to fail. Mainly the Strum Bar fails to function during the game (which really sucks when you’re in the middle of a song, hell, or just trying to navigate the menus). This guide will show you how to properly setup your Guitar Hero controller to work flawlessly with Frets on Fire everytime!
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After many happy attempts to play nice with Unbuntu I finally have thrown in the towel, but when you do that Unbuntu still keeps a tight grip on your PC. I, like so many others during installation, added Unbuntu to my bootloader as recommended. However, this posed a problem when I tried to uninstall it.

So, after a minute of Googling I downloaded the EmergencyBootCD (http://ebcd.pcministry.com), which removed the Unbuntu from my bootloader with ease.

1) Once you download this, make the ISO file and burn to a CD.

2) After the CD is made; just insert CD, reboot, change boot sequence, and fire the PC back up.

3) When the program loads choose Number One and go to MBR and that is it.

4) Shutdown and remove CD and the boot loader for Unbuntu has been removed.

Simple? Yes. Easy? Yes. The way Unbuntu should have been but was not.

Would-be PHP Developers Rejoice!

For those curious about making their computer(s) into a web server are in luck. A open-source program called VertrigoServ can make this a reality simply by installing a tiny software package which contains all the components needed to have a fully functional web server in seconds. By installing and running VertrigoServ you will have Apache, PHP, MySQL, SQLite, PHPmyAdmin, ZendOptimizer and SQLiteManager all controllable by a simple context menu that runs in your System Tray. The best part is the fact that you can turn your newly created server on and off with a single click rather than configuring IIS or other random network functions required by most server software solutions. Don’t take my word for it. Check out VertrigoServ’s website and see for yourself.

I was on my way to work when I decided to kill some time at my local Target. Usually there is always a good deal going on like the time I bought a 256 wristband usb bracelet(looks like those cancer bracelets but has a usb inside) for $20. Well, this time was no different; while sorting through the mess that is external Hard Drives I found the WD 320 GB HD for only 150.00.Well, this obviously was a sign to pick one up so I did, actually, I picked up two. The only thought leaving the store with $300 worth of hard drive space was would these work as video servers? Read the rest of this entry »

Replace the Windows Taskbar with the Mac OS X Dock

If you are a Windows user who always wanted to get rid of the Taskbar for a more sleek approach - look no further. RK Launcher for Windows is a tiny application that mimics the functionality of the Dock in OS X. It even captures many of the special effects such as the magnification of the dock icons when the mouse hovers over them, drag-and-drop adding and removing (complete with the “POOF” effect), the genie effect for minimizing windows, etc. The developer hasn’t worked on it for a bit (since 2005), but the beta works great for now!

Download RK Launcher

I never set out to do this experiment, 30 day without any kind of media besides the Internet, it just happened. Since the thirty days ( and counting) have passed my social media life has become defunct and some part of my soul reserved for Brittany Spears, George Bush, Movies and other types of media has been long forgot .My life is now full of articles for Althack, a little of Digg for tech news, the WII, and the addictive Guitar Hero. Imagine not having any information on what is going on in the world and worse yet not knowing what movies are playing. Read the rest of this entry »

As I was listening to a few songs tonight and I think we had all had this thought at some point in our lives: What other bands have the same sound as coldplay or metallica. That is when I found this neat (to say the least) search engine for music, called Music Map.

Music map is basically a search where you enter the artist and it will find other artists (big or small) that share the same type of sound.For example I did a search for Blink 182 and it came up with a band called Feeder..I clicked on Feeder and it mapped that band with more bands like them. Drop by, give it a try, and Map it

Music Map

The PC Meets Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero 2 is the innovative and highly addictive follow-up to the guitar playing simulation Guitar Hero for the PS2. Needless to say for those who play it, the gameplay is second to none. It will soon be available on all three Next-Gen consoles, but if you don’t own any machine (PS2 or Next-Gen) and would like a taste of Guitar Hero 2….fear not.

Freetar Hero is an Open Source Port of Guitar Hero 2 and the gameplay is fairly good for this barely beta port. Although it isn’t a complete port (it’s just starting for crying out loud) the basic gameplay is strong. Better yet, Freetar Hero allows you to use ANY song your want PLUS you may download the Freetar Editor which enables you to create your own gameplay using your favorite songs.
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PSPad is by far the best text editor I have ever used on the Windows platform. No matter if you are a designer, PHP developer, programmer, database editor, or just a casual user of basic word processing this software does it all. It has a laundry list of features including:

• work with projects
• work with several documents at the same time (MDI)
• save desktop sessions to later reopen all session files
• FTP client - edit files directly from the web
• macro recorder to record, save and load macros
• search and replace in files
• text difference with color-coded differences highlighted
• templates (HTML tags, scripts, code templates…)
• installation contains templates for HTML, PHP, Pascal, JScript, VBScript, MySQL, MS-Dos, Perl,…
• syntax highlighting according to file type
• user-defined highlighters for exotic environments
• auto correction
• intelligent internal HTML preview using IE and Mozilla
• full HEX editor
• call different external programs for different environments
• external compiler with output catcher, log window and log parser for an “IDE” effect in every environment
• color syntax highlight printing and print preview
• integrated TiDy library for formatting and checking HTML code, conversion to CSS, XML, XHTML
• integrated free version of the top CSS editor TopStyle Lite
• export with highlight to RTF, HTML, TeX format to file or clipboard
• column block select, bookmarks, line numbers, …
• reformat and compress HTML code, tag character case change
• line sorting with ability to sort on defined columns and drop duplicates
• ASCII chart with HTML entities
• Code explorer for Pascal, C/C++, INI, HTML, XML, PHP and more in development
• spell checker
• internal web browser with APACHE support
• matching bracket highlighting
• PLUS MANY MORE!!!

PSPad is a free download and can be found at pspad.com