Month: April 2007

Since about a week, I have added AddThis to my blog posts, which allows to add the blog posts to almost any bookmark manager (they even support some I have never ever heard of before).

The footer of the posts have been re-aligned too and have been tested to look nice in 1024 x 768 and up in Opera 9.20, Firefox 2 X54 and IE7 (all in full screen mode) and it appeared to disply fine. If you experience any problems, please let know!

I found this nice tool thanks to the AskReaMaor Blog.

Technorati Tags: Blog, AddThis
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I knew about the Prophet64 since quite a while but if I recall correctly it wasn’t quite available at this time. Since I read on the C64 Music! Blog.

Then I ordered it at Prophet64.com by PayPal and received a confirmation of receiving and sending out the thing pretty quickly. Actually, 2 days later the thing arrived. Because I have 2 left hands, I asked my grandfather to insert the SID2SID to me. And what can I say?

1) The Prophet64 works perfectly and really is easy to use and very compative with professional software you know from the PC – the manual is easy to understand (tried the Sequencer yet so the MAIN application on the cartridge!).

2) I noticed that it has some small irregularities. The 1351 mouse (I tried 2 real and 2 compatible ones) only works for me at all when I hold down the CBM key while selecting the Sequencer.

Also, sometimes the application accidently sets the volume to almost zero when loading a file after playing the demo, if 2 SIDS are available and sometimes the speed is set wrong and won’t change when adjusting.

3) 8bit ventures are very friendly and replied to my emails within 48 hours and replied to my questions.
Didn’t get the feeling that they don’t care for any second.

4) The instruments seem to be patched to sound right on each SID (6581/8085). However, it’s strictily not recommended to mix both types as they told me by email
(And I have to admit the demo song sounds better with 2 x the same type of SID chip).

5) According to my grandfather, the manual was simple to understand and well written and the SID2SID really works great in my C64G. Here is the 2nd SID output to connect to my stereo:

Even a noob can produce nice sounding SID music in stereo (2 x 3 chanels) with a GUI looking and feeling like Windows and being never slow or ugly. I also was warned to not use the Prophet64 on a worn out C64. I noticed it seems to be quite stable and it’s not that easy to make it crash.

So far from what I saw , the applications seem to be something like close-to-100% bug free. The SID2SID manual even indicates a slight sense of fresh humour! 🙂

Anybody who sucks in traditional C64 SID composing like me can celebrate now and get his cart! 🙂

Technorati Tags: Old computer games, C64, Commodore 64, Prophet64
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Now that ICQ 6 is out, it’s time to look what the community has to offer:

First, I found this in the official ICQ 6 Forum which appears to look like a post written in the style the ICQ Team used to have when they still had ICQ Customer Support

So it appears that offcial ICQ 6 skins will come soon. ICQ 5.1 also had official ICQ skins but only 2.

Well, the community is faster and already made ICQ 6 skins on its own, some can be found here.

When ICQ 5 was released, the Portuguese and German version were released two weeks after.

So, I would encourage anybody to rather wait than using the patch released at the same link as the skins.

Technorati Tags: ICQ, icq6, skin
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ICQ 6 Final is out and can be downloaded here, including info on what is new, a history video and the story about the new ICQ soundtrack.

This entry is considerably short, sorry for that.

And for all who miss me on ICQ: Use Skype at the moment, thanks.

My earlier words regarding ICQ 6 can be found here.

I got pinged while I wrote this by Flashboy, thanks for that! 🙂

Update: My first experiences: It looks nice, from the features a lot gained in comparance to the preview, but it looks like the preview so no new screenshots needed.

The Xtraz are no more in an Xtraz center but accessable from the message session window, the bottom of the contact list, the top and some by right click on a contact in your contact list. This way an intutive operation and accessing on the xtraz is possible and way easier than in ICQ 5.1 but it also lead a lot of users to think that the xtraz are all missing (however only the demo versions of the flash promo singleplayer games are missing) which is of course not true.

The History converter (ICQ 5.1 to ICQ6 in this case) doesn’t work correctly yet and missed out 1395 if my 1400 history files.

The new sounds by infected mushrooms are nice, I really like them! (but I am not yet sure whether I will really keep them on).

A lot of features are however still missing and are about to come soon, details about those can be seen on a checklist here

Technorati Tags: ICQ, ICQ6
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ICQ 5.1 allows now to send free SMS to Israel!

For this you require to have a balence of free SMS. The default SMS balance is appearantly 14 and you can get more free SMS doing either:

1) Sending a SMS to yourself (if you are located in Israel), or

2) Receive SMS from Israel.

Both will give you 8 credits!

Funny thing is that the links at the bottom refer to (I suppose) wrong sites within the ICQ homepage tree.

It’s possible to send free SMS to a few other countries and paid SMS to others using localized ICQ 5.1 clients

Technorati Tags: ICQ, sms, Israel
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Mr. Orkut got interviewed recently. (English/Portuguese!)

He talks in the video interview about the privacy, history, security issues.
Future plans of Google and how it is working for Google.

He also talks about his opinion regarding Brazilians and the whole community.

The very interesting video is in English including Portuguese subtitles.

Watch It!.

Source: What Should Orkut Do? Community.

Technorati Tags: Orkut, video, interview
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If you had or have experienced lately that the Blogarithm graphic was messed up like this:

… then this was because they had some problems. So you have seen SearchNut instead.

Here is what Andrew of Blogarithm wrote to me:

“Hi Joerg,

Blogarithm is still alive, but we had a mixup with our domain registration. This has caused problems for some people to get to our site or see our graphics. The fix to this is propagating through the Internet, and it should clear up in the next day or so. Hold tight and we will be back. We are very sorry that this happened and the it has inconvenienced you.

Andy”

Technorati Tags: Blogarithm, blog
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In an earlier post, I explained that GameSpy Arcade and Netscape can destroy your Windows Vista/Vista Firewall/ (and force you to reinstall it from scratch if you have no restore point set and/or a recent image).

I decided to share this blog post with them.

Here are the rplies by GameSpy Arcade and Netscape.

While Netscape reply was all positive, the reply from GameSpy Arcade showed much that they don’t quite bother:

“Hi Joerg

Windows Vista is not a supported operating system for GameSpy Arcade. We have no estimated time on when or even if support will be added.”

When I re-replied with saying that it’s just the installer to fix, they replied with this:

“Hi Joerg

Great suggestion, but one that will not be happening anytime soon. As stated before, it is not supported and there are no plans on supporting it in the near future.”

Then I said, they should at least put a warning as the problem destroyes the firewall if you do not disable it before the installation.
(Will help a lot of people and avoid frustrations like Vista-reinstallations).

I have am yet in the process of waiting to hear back from them.

Taken into consideration that they replied pretty quick in the past – I would say – they ignored my final statement!

IGN Network doesn’t seem to care about this serious problem (which only requires a small fix or at least note from their side) pretty much.

Here the nicer reply from Netscape:

“Dear Joerg,

I am writing on behalf of Netscape Internet Services to answer your recent questions/comments.

Thank you for taking the time to write to Netscape Internet Service. I have carefully read your email and understand where you are coming from on this issue. I have gone ahead and forwarded your request as well as your comment to the appropriate department. At Netscape Internet Service we are committed to providing quality customer service to our members and appreciate receiving your feedback.

Thank you for choosing Netscape Internet Services. If you have any further questions, please feel free to email us at any time.”

Technorati Tags: 64bit, Vista, Windows, firewall, Netscape, GameSpy, GameSpy Arcade, support
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I used to write a bit about other interesting blogs I found.

But infact I didn’t do that since quite a while, so time to brake that habit and do it again.

The blog post is from Doobybrain.com – my-teacher-doesnt-know-any-email-etiquette.

He writes about the nice way, his teacher Bill messes up emails, annoys his pupils and at the end he gives some hints to the GMail users.

It’s worth reading it – poor teacher. We only had one sending us files with CRC error by emails 🙂

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Gmail
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Opera released 9.20.

Download links, changelog and info as found on Desktop Team blog:

“9.2 is not only an important update with bug fixes and the new Speed Dial functionality, it’s also a milestone in spreading Opera to new users around the world: Opera 9.2 for Windows ships with 31 languages

The latest addition is Macedonian, so if you know the language, feel free to post a small celebration message in the comments section Remember that we also have a number of forums where you can discuss Opera in your own language.

If you haven’t done so already, please go to opera.com/download and get your brand new Opera.”

Technorati Tags: Opera, 9.2
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