Tech

I have a few tech items I want to throw at you
I was once going to have a separate tech blog, art blog, justice/philosophy blog

now it's a big mush
maybe one day sorted
a record of what I'm not sure
more than likely to disappear down the memory hole


Game that held my attention more than 3 days of this year:
Deus Ex - Human Revolution.
if you don't care about gfx and dig the "interactive", "non linear", and rpg aspects of the Deus Ex world, the previous one, invisible war, was pretty good.
My machine started chugging almost at once with the new one, and I actually had to crank it down to cartoonlike levels to play it,
but I like inventory management, and it really sucks playing games where you just kill everybody. It's not a part of my daily life, killing everybody, but our modern media trains us to it young.
My first 3 run throughs I killed the entire precinct on the mission, before realizing I could just talk to the front desk clerk.
There are some interactive bits that makes me feel like I'm strapped to a chair with the Diana Troy intoning "I sense some hostility, Cap..."

The Path
A game without any clear purpose. It seems. But nothing is really what it seems in this claustrophobic ramble in the woods. Beautiful music, reminds me of Pooka.
I keep playing it. I actually suggest you don't read the wikipedia article on it, because the game's purpose is really a slowly told creepy interactive set of stories about - rape/murder/childhood/molestation/exploring. It's really soothing. Pretty. Disturbing. Haunting. Sad. Messed up. Original.


Other cool things:

Nevercenter Silo
The coolest, fastest, most streamlined and responsive 3D subdivision modelling application I've ever used. No animation, its just sub-d modelling with everything you need and nothing extra in your way.
It's so fast with complex models it makes me shiver with glee.
really, I was shivering with glee, it totally rocks.
mix it up with Pixologic's ZBrush and you wont want to look at Maya without a gun to your head for modelling.

Virtualbox
In the Time of Terabytes we don't give a crap that our OS is a bloated POS taking up 8G of space. If you are a Tech you need to run many different operating systems, if you're a Geek, you probably have used vbox for years.
Run any server or desktop OS inside a window with full network support.
I stopped using VMware when it became 450 megs, this is 30 or so and its free.
Vbox can also fire up vmware disk images.

Q-Dir
It's free. I'm in love with it. You use it instead of "my computer" or explorer.
multiple customizable panes and tabs to all your folders with saved layouts recalled almost instantaneously. If you have a bazillion things to sort, or lots and lots of folders and different projects, this little program will save you so much time. Donate to the guy, I'm dying on skid row courtesy of the CIA, so I can't.
8P

UDK
I fell in love with level design a long time ago after realizing a certain groundbreaking company had given me the tools to build that they had used.
Fast forward 20 years, and instead of the pixelated ogres of Quake, we have full normal mapping and real time previews.
UDK lets you build a number of game styles. Out of the box you can start building environments similiar to Unreal Tournament or Gears of War. Adding enemies and bots takes more effort, but with patience the entire toolset is available and you can start building immediately. Excellent documentation, good file importing, and you can mix it up with extensive static meshes created in your favorite 3D prog
It's free.

Windirstat
Want to know what's taking up all the space on a drive or in a folder?
Windirstat to the rescue. I've been using it on windows 7 x64.
It literally kicks ass. Tiny program from portableapps.com
shows you visually and lets you delete by looking for the big chunks!
Weirdest name ever, but a great tool.

Sony Vegas
Mac has Final Cut. Windows has... finally something decent.
I love AfterFX but dislike Premiere. Vegas is based on a Sonic Foundry product  I used to use for multitracking music. Now it's the nicest software video editing suite for a pro on PC. Expensive but nice and very responsive. Excellent codec support.

Malwarebytes, Avast, and Ccleaner
The first 3 programs you should put on any computer you are trying to clean up from virii or other buggy activity

Unetbootin
It makes flash drives that will boot up to linux. It supports a dozen distributions, and has multipurpose bootloaders that can detect other OS on the HD. Create custom live disks and tool disks with a bit of extra effort.

Trueimage
Techs usually use Ghost, I like Trueimage because it's special boot disk is linux based and excellent at autofinding shares and mounting various usb devices for backing up the target machine. It can save to FTP. It will image 'nix filesystems.
What does it do?
for the non-geeks, it's a drive imager. For backing up. You set your machine up the way you like it, get it all perfect, then make a disk image.
Installed inside windows it can image your machine while you use it, and when you machine dies, the boot disk can start it to retrieve your backup from any number of storage options.

ctupdate/wsus offline
Do you ever need to update a machine that doesn't have the internet?
Or you have 90k/s and your machine wants to dl almost 2 gigs before it will get back to work?
ctupdate downloads all the patches for whatever version of windows you want and creates an update/patch/servicepack disk.
Using this will sometimes fix an xp installation,
since it goes through every update and can be forced to reinstall, it will catch that one update that just didn't work properly and upon which everything else is hanging.
Can save you from reinstalling a wratched machine.

Filezilla FTP client and server/Quick n'easy ftp server
Portable versions available, and lots of similiar products. Maybe people will one day realize that using standard file sharing in any OS is a  sloooooow transfer. So. Step back ten years, put filezilla server on one machine and client on the other . Suddenly that 2 hours file transfer between two computers in the same house becomes 20 minutes. Keeps me from resorting to sneakernet in small lan environments.

marriage cults vs. behavioral reality - christianized marriage laws entrenched in legal and administrative hegemony force all other concepts of marriage to be criminalized

Remember the beginning of that "Braveheart" movie?

Where the "lord" had the right to fuck his wife before him?
Because that was the law right.
She wasn't allowed to wear the scarf that showed she was married to someone
because all marriages had to be before the "authority"
and when the couple applied to get married

the Lords of the area,
and their sons
the rich

had the right to fuck her first.

I was thinking of another situation
today
a Celtic couple

and found the parallels, now
to be so glaring and disturbing

I was also thinking
in conjunction

of an article I was working on
about what christian churches are really about

colonialization

making sure families give to the church
instead of all those sinful undeserving other people in your life
so the people of the conquered land
give their money
to the church

instead of helping each other grow
as strong
as the kings

You cannot create or fuck
unless the kings have an opportunity to profit off you first

That's what money does
combined with "law"
and christian controlled administrations

permits
you are not

permitted

you must submit your application
to the kings

and the "Law" of liars,
who swear on black books of mythology

Marriage cults are strange things.
They work, but not for everyone

for the majority of us
they don't work well at all
yet, like most things

ten percent
order the other 90 percent around
and rob them