Archive for category General
Demonoid Account Request
Posted by Zeno in General, Technology on May 17, 2010
I have been trying to become a member to the Demonoid.com torrent site for over four years it seems. And with my always hectic schedule I haven’t ever managed to get on during one of their very very short sign-up time’s, which if I remember right was like between 4PM and 5PM -8:00 GMT only.
So without blathering on anymore, Registrations are Closed and the only way to get a usable account now is with an invitation code, which I assume comes from a current member.
So, I am asking that any member that has an account on Demonoid.com and would be willing to lose one of there’s, to please send it to me at the listed Blog email. Place some obvious subject line to weed it out of the spam filter and my own “Auto-Deleting”
The torrent searching sites around out there these days have really went to shit, and I would really like to be able to check out Demonoid being that 90% of torrents I download come with their tagged text file.
You may directly email me any codes to zenosxr@yahoo.com. NO spam please, or I will just block your entire domain.
Man at LHC claims he’s from the Future (Funny)
Posted by Zeno in General, Media, Technology, Videos on May 7, 2010
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future
A man arrested at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe was recently arrested “attempting” to shut down the project, claiming he was from the future where it was a “Chocolate Dictatorship Hell Hole”. This story received over 3,700 hits on Digg.com where you can read the full story.
Here is the embedded video from Revision3.com.
Here is a link to the video on Revision3.com – Diggnation Episode #250 with the full story.
It’s the second story if you don’t want to watch the full episode (highly recommended to do so, as well as subscribe, Diggnation Rocks!)
You can Read the full story here on Cnet.co.uk which I highly recommend doing as well. Pass this on, it’s hilarious!
FSX Tips, Tweaks and Tricks
FSX Tips, Tweaks and Tricks
I found this document a long time ago, and have found quite a few items in it that have helped eek out a few more FPS from my flight simulator. I hope someone else can benefit from it. Unfortunately I cannot remember or find the site from which it was downloaded or give credit to the original author who I assume will contact me if there are any issues (See Note at Bottom).
Please note that you take ALL risks upon yourself when making system changes, and there are no guarantees that any of these tips will do anything at all as the “art” of tweaking FSX is varied, opinionated, and most I’ve found do not help at all, or actually hinder performance.
Use tweaks Sparingly at first, and test each and every one before moving on to another one. This makes it a very lengthy process, but also allows you to easily undo anything that causes issues, crashes etc. Take it from me, after installing several addon’s and tweaks, and then getting a CTD on Every load no matter what settings that took me several days and several re-installations to repair. Use common sense, and enjoy!
FSX Tweak Guide (Click to View in PDF Format)
Note To Author: I acquired this document some time ago, and was unable to find any contact information to ask for republish permission, or the original link to this document. I reproduce here in all respect, and give credit where credit is due. Please contact me for credits, or other issues related to this document.
Aspartame & Your Health
This is in fact a very old issue, which has been in debate for decades now. However, after doing just a few minutes of research on this chemical food additive, I was surprised and appalled that any such substance could ever be approved by anyone for use in extensive amounts of food supplies. Only the US Govt, and the FDA could get away with such blatant poisoning of millions I suppose.
Below you will find many links to various sites and articles, quotes, etc., almost all of which were written by respected research or university doctors which weren’t paid by the chemical producer for skewed research results.
Of the 92 listed symptoms for aspartame intake by humans, not only disturbing in themselves being that there are 92 of them for a food additive, the ones that stand out to me right away are, four different kinds of seizures including Grand-Mal (Tonic-Clonic), Dizziness or Problems with Balance, Diarrhea Seizures and Convulsions, Difficulty Breathing, Petit Mal (Seizure), Partial Seizures, and DEATH! Remember, this is for a FOOD additive, NOT a drug that was approved after over 16 years of non-approval by the FDA, and only was approved after Donald Rumsfield made it to Washington, appointed a new FDA commissioner, and had President Reagan write an Executive Order that the FDA couldn’t make any decisions about aspartame until he came into office.
Some of these reports are like most legal documents, but are most certainly worth reading if you have any doubts about the consumption of this product.
First off, is an actual scan of the 92 listed side effects and reports directly from the FDA.
http://www.sweetpoison.com/aspartame-side-effects.html
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Aspartame-Adverse-Reactions-1993.htm
http://www.dorway.com/bressler.txt
http://www.wnho.net/fda_92_symptoms_on_aspartame.htm
http://www.dorway.com/raoreport.txt
I am sure most of you will find the above data to be either conspiracy theorist in nature, or just incorrect data. I offer anyone to do research on the topic and not find that aspartame which is used in maybe thousands of daily ingested food products by the American public from young children to the elderly, to be anything less than harmful, or at the least, untested. Results published from the multimillion dollar production company are most certainly tampered with as history has showed that almost all large company’s will skew their research when profit margins are involved. By law their stock has to rise in value, and admitting to putting a dangerous chemical in hundreds to thousands of food products doesn’t help their bottom line.
At the least, I hope even just one person prevents their children from ingesting this dangerous chemical, and hopefully stops ingesting it themselves. Those diet cokes aren’t going to help you lose weight, just contribute to a possible nasty tumor in your later years.
Think about it…..
My Take on Relationships
First off it is work. Second,opposite do NOT attract. If you have nothing in common it will never work. You have to be able to talk. Even when you want to scream, take a deep breath and really talk. Fight fair. Talk about what bothers you. Not what he/she did 6 months ago. Only what the current issue is. You have to have compromise. Pick your battles, don’t fight over every little thing. A good relationship is give and take.
Be willing to experiment in bed and in life. You never know, you may have the time of your life.
Make time for each other. No matter what, find time in the day for just the two of you.
Make sure your partner knows how you feel about them, and you know how they feel about you. Know what your partner wants in a relationship. There is no need in moving on with the relationship if you want different things.
Long time No Posts
Sorry for the extended absence for any that did in fact register to the RSS for these blogs. I have been incredibly busy with a 5 yr old, a new girlfriend and various other day to day things that only gives me a few hours a day tops of free time that I usually devote to other matters 
I will try to get back to blogging some, and posting the usual reviews and such.
I plan to write a review soon for several MS Flight Simulator add-on’s that I have tried recently as I have finally gotten back into flying which has always been a life long passion of mine. Reviews will include the FSX aircraft from PMDG Simulations, Flight1 Software, AES, Aerosoft, Nemeth Designs and others. I hope to include as many screen shots as possible, and I also have a nice PDF for FSX tweaking that I am looking for permission to republish since there aren’t that many around the net, and FSX is a notoriously CPU/GPU hungry application.
I am also in the process of migrating all my production machines to Windows 7 which is another undertaking as I have refused to run Vista since it was never a very polished product from the get go, luckily they finally seem to have hit the nail on the head so to speak with Windows 7.
My recent netbook included the horribly crippled Starter edition which I promptly upgraded to Ultimate a few weeks later. There are so many reviews on the Acer Aspire One netbooks that I haven’t planned to post a lengthy article on it at this time, unless there are comments that would request yet another review of the product. I am running the newer 532h-7352 version with the Intel Atom 450 CPU.
For those still subscribed thanks for sticking around, stay tuned for more reviews, video’s, guitar tablature, and now a soon Flight Simulator section for those interested. As always comments are always welcome, although flames, jerk offs, and spammers need not apply, you will be auto-deleted anyways, don’t waste your time (or better yet, go ahead, your time deserves to be wasted).
Lastly, Don’t Forget guys, this Sunday is Mothers Day, get those cards, flowers, and gifts in order less you hit the doghouse for the upcoming week!!
Autumn Acres Corn Maze
I have been very busy lately and haven’t gotten around to writing much on the blogs, but did want to at least take the time to p0st my recent experience with a corn maze. Yes, you heard right, for those that do not live in agricultural area’s you may have never heard of one. I personally had never heard of such a thing until my current girlfriend took me to one, but found them to be pretty cool all in all. We took her 4yr old son, which had a blast, although we actually went a few days before Halloween where the pumpkins and hay rides etc, had a bit more relevance than they do in November when the commercialized Christmas season starts to ramp up.
This particular one is called Autumn Acres, who’s website can be viewed here, however apparently these things are more popular than I knew, and there are two offered just within 40 min drive time in my area, one of which is offered by a local community college. I’m posting a picture below of the satellite view of the corn maze, and yes, this is the real maze. Apparently they cut the design/trails using a GPS/CPU controlled harvester/reaper type machine. Until buying this card at the gift shop, I had no idea the trails followed anything but a random pattern! For anyone that lives within the driving distance of middle Tennessee or any corn maze offered in your area, I highly recommend them for all ages for next year, however they stopped activities this year yesterday at this one, and I assume most all end activities this late into November as the corn will be wilting quite badly by now. Yes this blog posting is a bit late, but I wasn’t even aware of these type of things until about two weeks ago…
Expect to spend anywhere from one to four hours in the maze, depending on which you take, how good you are at the “questionnaire” they give you for navigation, if offered, (we didn’t even use ours and took around 2.5 hours), and dress for the weather with easily removable layers as you will be walking quite a while. This particular maze also has activities for children including a barrel ride, hay ride to a pumpkin patch where you get a free pumpkin, a very large jumping thing that is buried in the ground, like the inflatable houses but much larger, petting zoo, several large slides, and another separate area for smaller children play activities. Concessions and a small souvenir store are also offered and Very reasonably priced for this type of venue. Admission was $8 for “Regular” pass which doesn’t include the jumping thing etc, and $11 for VIP pass which includes all activities.
If you ask me, seeing this type of thing kinda debunks the aliens in the crop theories from crop circles…
Yes, this is the real maze from the air! If you look to the lower left, you can see the entrance and exit of three separate mazes. The top one is the shorter “kids” maze (about .7mi), 2nd from the top is the medium length (about 1.8mi), and lowest entrances are for the longest maze (around 3.6mi).
Autumn Acres corn maze aerial view.
More Wine
Wine – Savanha – Merlot (Vintage 2006)
This was another wine I found at the back that comes in at the under $10 category, is made in
Spire Wine
Western Cape South Africa by Spier Wines and had to give it a go. This wine has a good color and what I describe as an “earthy” taste, very similar to the Fetzer Merlot which has always been a favorite Merlot of mine. A sharp fruity taste with a very long finish which may be a little too sharp, and a bit too long for some, separates this wine from the racks of cheap under $10 reds. All in all, a good buy, and I would purchase again. 6.5/10 ($8.99 avg – 750ml).
Cool trick for finding the combination for Master padlocks
I found this rather interesting video on youtube which I will embed here, and also typed it out (for my own reference) as well, which will make it easier for you guys to copy/paste this into word or something for your own saved reference. I found this one helpful as every other “trick” I found to discovering your combi padlocks numbers involved having the lock already open and basically just watching the wheel pack, which really isn’t a trick at all. Thanks to HeaviestJ on YouTube for sharing this trick!
Note for Step One: (Faster) This takes a bit of practice and feel, but I have found it is much faster to determine the last digit of the combination as follows.
Use the below steps for finding the stop points on the dial, using tension on the locking bar. Starting from 0, work around each stop point putting just enough pressure to find the middle digit as listed, but continue to apply tension until you feel “drag” on the dial, you should be able to eventually lock up the dial in fact.
Continue with this all the way around the dial. However, one of the 12 stop points will have NO drag no matter how much tension is applied (as the fence is hitting the contact points on either side of the wheel notch.)
This is the final digit of the combination.
Written steps for above video. (Pretty sure I got them right)
Step 1
Use tension to find the numbers that the dial will stop on during a full rotation of the dial from 0 and back to 0. Write these numbers down. You will end up with 12 numbers.
Write down these numbers, we will use this lock from the video’s numbers.
| 3 |
| 6.5 |
| 9.5 |
| 13 |
| 16.5 |
| 20 |
| 23 |
| 26.5 |
| 29.5 |
| 33 |
| 36.5 |
| 39.5 |
You should have 7 numbers ending in .5 and 5 integers.
Take the 5 integers which are.
| 3 |
| 13 |
| 20 |
| 23 |
| 33 |
| 3 |
| 13 |
| 20 |
| 23 |
| 33 |
| Now remove all numbers that end in the same digit, which in this case would leave us with the number 20.
This is the 3rd number in your combination. |
We now have the number 20 as our 3rd number.
Step 2
Using the number you received from step one above, (in this case 20) divide this number by 4.
So 20/4 = 5.
In this case we received no remainder.
If you DO receive a remainder, write it down. It will either be, 0, 1, 2, 3.
If for example we had an ending digit of 18, when dividing by 4, we would have a remainder of 2.
This is the number we will use to find the final two digits of the combination.
Since we had no remainder with our number of 20, we will start with 0 (using the 0,1,2,3 corresponding to the number of remainders in the 3rd digit division), and add 4 to it until you reach the last number possible in the master lock, which in this case would be 39.
This gives us: 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36
If we had a remainder of 1, we would have started with 1 getting: 1, 5, 9, 13….
With a remainder of 2, we would start with 2 getting: 2, 6….
Step 3
Now working off of the numbers we acquired earlier we have ten numbers.
0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36
Any of which can be the first number of the combination.
Now
If the remainder we had earlier from the four division is either a 0 or 1 add 2 to that number. Giving:
0 = 2
1 = 3
If the remainder is either a 3 or 4, subtract 2, Giving:
3 = 1
4 = 2
Now since we had a remainder of 0, we will start with 2, and 4 to each number so:
2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26, 30, 34, 38
Which gives us ten numbers, any of which can be the 2nd number of the combination.
We have now worked 34,000 possible combination’s down to 100. So:
First Digit is one of these ten digits.
| 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36 |
Our 2nd digit is one of the next ten digits which we worked out with the remainder addition/subtraction step:
| 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26, 30, 34, 38 |
And our last digit is 20.
Start from the first digit and work your way through them, with the started combination being 0, 2, 20, the next being 4, 2, 20, 8, 2, 20 and so on, until you have your combination to your lock, this will take a few minutes but is certainly faster than trying 34,000 combinations!
Thanks to HeaviestJ from YouTube for this awesome trick!
Mid-Town Drive-In & Movie Reviews (Harry Potter 6 & Public Enemies)
Just for the sake of the drive-in in Mid-Town, and the mis-print of the Roane County news, I wanted to post here that they are not in fact closed now, after the 1st of Aug. They will be open as long as attendance permits (which I am sorry to say was very low for a Friday night and a new release movie), however they will at least stay open until Labor Day. Anyone in the area, I highly recommend checking out the theater if you haven’t already, two movies for $6 a person cannot possibly be beat in this day and age, and while the restaurant is closed, the concessions stand is still open with burgers etc. If you have a child you would like to take to the movies, but they are too inattentive or whatnot to sit for 4 hours, this is the perfect venue. Bring a blanket, a cooler full of your favorite beverage and have a night out at the drive-in. Vans or pick-up trucks are perfect for these theaters which are a dying breed. Unfortunately, after speaking to the ticket clerk / owners family, we found TVA spill that made national headlines has hurt tourism / out-of-town income to the local business’s more than I originally thought it had. Yes the spill was completely awful, but I hadn’t realized just how hard it had hurt local business’s like the drive-in until speaking with them personally. Unfortunately the local paper used this issue plus the drive-in’s closing to spin some ratings on their paper and were inaccurate, and didn’t make an effort to correct themselves. It is a small county, and my friend loves the drive-in, so I wanted to post this here for anyone that happened upon it through any search engines. Help save it by attending if you can, or at least enjoy it before it’s gone, or buy it if you have the money (it is available for purchase for $275,000)
Anyway….about the movie reviews.
We just went tonight to see the new Harry Potter 6 (& the Half-Blood Prince) and Public Enemies.
Public Enemies was the first one up, and as far as movies go it was fairly decent, with me personally scoring it a 3/5, with as usual, great acting from Depp. Christian Bale, who plays the supporting role as the FBI agent Melvin Purvis, gives a so-so performance equal to his performances in the Batman franchise, which just could have used more emotion, unless both characters were fairly bland, emotionless people. Depp was his usual self, who played outstandingly as the charismatic Dillinger. While there were several other gangsters from this era portrayed, the emphasis was most certainly on Dillinger and the exploits he went through. Most of the movie deviates from historical accounts to make the plot flow more smoothly, and give the sequences more action, for which even I noticed (even though I am far from a buff of this time), but didn’t mind. The plot moves along quite nicely with nothing that detracts from the main storyline, or other scenes that would otherwise detract from the movie. While the supporting role of Purvis seemed rather bland and emotionless, nonetheless, his performance was convincing, and for anyone that enjoys depression era gang stories, or is facinated by such, I think would find this movie enjoyable. I would certainly recommend to anyone that enjoys action/drama movies to go see it, and in fact, it has enough romance in it with Depp’s girl in this movie to make it worth going to see with your girl if she just cannot decide on a flick, and you want to see something you can both enjoy. There are several gunfights, with, from my experience, have Very realistic gunfire sounds and wounds. Unfortunately, for those of you familiar with the Dirty Harry movies, or brains on the screen, you may be dissapointed, but fact is, real gunfire and wounds just don’t look like Hollywood. These gunfights however are very realistic (as far as Hollywood goes), with little (shooting without aiming), or (this magazine holds 2,500 rounds). All in all, this movie was worth paying to see, however it’s re-watchability (if that is a word), would be in the lower range. It’s just not a movie that I would enjoy seeing more than one time. For most of you that aren’t either in love with Depp (as my friend was), in love with gangster movies, or depression era films, you can probably wait till this hits video and save yourself the $50 bucks.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was decent, as are all the Potter franchise movies, however with the 6th installment, being that the books increse in lenght as they go along, they had to seriously cut up the film in order to keep it’s time down. As is, I believe I remember it to be 154mins long. Almost every scene was chopped down to the point that my friend attending with me had trouble even following the story and would constantly ask what was going on. She is one of the ones that hasn’t read any books but has seen every film, and she still had trouble following what was going on. Maybe because I had read the book so recently, but I seemed to notice every mistake they made, which I didn’t do as much on previous films that only seemed to cut plot filler out. Unfortunately they either cut or re-wrote major plot points of this film, including a fairly long scene towards the end that didn’t even take place in the book at all (first time for a Potter movie I think), and it didn’t even make any sense nor move the plot forward in any way. Unfortunately, I give this movie the lowest marks of any of the Potter films, being chopped up to pieces the way it is, and that deviates from the book in too many points for anyone that reads the books to enjoy as much as the other movies before it. which is sad being that the five films before it stayed with the books plot enough to be almost straight on. 2/5, but I still recommend any Potter fan to see it in the theatres (which I am sure you already have as this is probably the two-thousandth review on this film.)