(the paint was still a bit wet when this picture was taken, it looks even better in real life :D)

People only have 140 characters to say what they want to say – someone’s day was bad, that’s probably as much as you’ll hear about it. Someone did something cool, you’ll probably hear what they did without the life-story of where they went, how they got there, who they bumped into, etc. Short and to the point.

2. Customer Service

Where else can you send a wish/request/complaint into the world and get a response back within 24 hours:

@hypn wishes there was a cheaper way to ship stuff from HongKong to ZA – already tried HongKong Post, DHL and UPS. Any other suggestions? :|  11:20 PM Apr 19th via web

@FedExEmily @hypn Good Morning. Would you like for a representative to contact you on rates from Hong Kong to ZA? about 20 hours ago via web

As it turns out I no longer need to ship stuff from Hong Kong to South Africa, but think about that for a second… a company picked up on a need I had “tweeted” – even though it didn’t mention them – and contacted me to find me a solution. That’s brilliant marketing if you ask me.

There was also an incident recently where I downloaded Nokia OVI Maps, which is meant to be “free” , which kept telling me that my license had expired. I send out a “tweet” to @Nokia complaining about this, and they got a local PR consultant to contact me to resolve the issue.

No phone calls, no being on hold, not menu prompts to try and get through to get to an operator, no have to explain your problem over and over again… you tweet, and (good) companies respond. Now if only my bank had a @Rbjacobs (from FNB) doing what he does… I’m opening an account with FNB in the next month or two. Customer service has evolved, has your business’s?

3. News

Why bother paging through your morning paper, or having to scroll through pages of ads and useless information to find the day’s news, when you could just get it through Twitter – often the news breaks there before it’s picked up by the major news sites (granted, it might be a bit inaccurate if not completely false). A lot of the bigger news sites even post the headlines on Twitter, eg: BBC’s Breaking News.

There’s also “trending topics“, a great way to find out what people are talking about around the world. When 9/11 happened a friend of mine was in an “IRC channel” (chat room) with someone in the military or something, who was relaying information to them as stuff was happening. I’d imagine if Twitter had been around then, people would’ve been “tweeting” from inside the buildings – far more information than a reporter would ever be able to get – and who knows how valuable that information could be in saving people or knowing what risks still exist.

4. Finding people

By searching for a few keywords you can easily find like minded people, or even people stuck in a situation – for example, at the time of writing this the volcano in Iceland has tourists around the world stranded… Twitter’s advanced search page lets you limit search results to a certain distance from you, so you could (in theory) quite easily find people stranded at your nearest airport, in need of accommodation… and hopefully help them out :)

5. Synchronizing to Facebook (and Google Buzz)

There’s a Facebook app called “Selective Tweets” which is able to read in your “tweets” on Twitter that have a keyword (default is “#fb”) and set them as your Facebook status. There is also an official (I believe) Twitter app for Facebook that “tweets” your Facebook statuses… personally I prefer to have Twitter update to Facebook. There’s also Google Buzz, which I don’t really use *cough* twitter clone *cough, that’s able to “buzz”(?) your “tweets” from Twitter – though it tends to be somewhat delayed. Just one post to update 3 “social networks” – doesn’t get much easier than that :)

First up we have a travel advertisement board, with Avast anti virus (or is it anti spyware?) reporting a trojan. Makes you wonder who installed it (the path is in “Program Files”), or what this computer’s doing with an internet connection:

Next up we have Ster Kinekor with good old “Active Desktop Recovery” on one of their self-help terminals. I would’ve loved to watch someone who can barely use these machines when they’re working try and figure this out:

The catch is it’s a raw disk image intended to be written to, and booted from,  a flash drive… making it a little tricky to use in VirtualBox as it doesn’t support booting from USB drives. So here’s a VirtualBox disk image of hexxeh’s Chrome Os Diet… just download, unzip (well, “unrar” technically) and start it up :)

Thanks for your work hexxeh!

(The default username and password are both “facepunch” – speaking of which, check out http://www.facepunch.com which I believe hexxeh is involved with)

My download mirror: ChromeOS-Diet.tar.gz (290mb)

Download the VirtualBox image here: ChromiumOSvdi.rar (290mb – extracts to 800mb)

Features:
* start each level with 9999 sun
* get  9999 sun from each sun
* build for free (must have enough sun to build the plant though)
* instant cool-down after building a plant
* invincible plants (don’t take damage)
* all plants start cooled-down at the beginning of a level
* one shot kills zombies (cone/helmet/etc zombies take 2 shots)
* start a level even if you haven’t filled your plant slots

Hacks can be enabled/disabled individually, or all at once.

Download: Hypn’s Plants VS Zombies Trainer.zip (4kb)

Plants VS Zombies official site

1. When you “edit” a file and make and save any changes, FileZilla pop-ups a message saying “A file previously opened has been changed – Upload this file to the server?” – and sometimes it uploads the file anyway, even if you click “No”. I’ll prefer to upload my files when I’m ready thank-you-very-much, besides I save often to make sure I don’t lose any data, not just when I’m done with the file. Here’s the pop-up:

2. When trying to “edit” a file that you’ve recently edited, FileZilla doesn’t always realize that you don’t have the file open any more, so asks you “A file with that name is already being edited. Do you want to reopen ”?“. This is fine and well… if I actually still had the file open, but in most cases I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, this is a bug – and an annoying one at that. Here’s the pop-up:

Considering I’ll be using this program all day, every day, at work I refused to put up with these annoyances – why do people have to try and make their programs so smart, just make it do whatever it’s meant to do, and make it do it well (and fast) so we’ll all be happy – so some tinkering was in order. In both cases I simply removed the code that triggered those two events, and I’ve made a patch so you can do the same (at the bottom of this post).

For anyone who’s interested, the offset that needed to be changed for the first pop-up was “00472C37″ – the “CALL”  needed to be changed to a “MOV EAX,2″ so that there would be a valid “answer” from the pop-up for the rest of the code to evaluate. The second pop-up was as simple as just NOP’ing out the “CALL” at “004272E1″.

Click to download my FileZilla 3.2.3.1 Annoyances Fix patch 5.79kb (although some virus scanners might detect this patch as a virus, it’s because of the program I made the patch in, there’s no malicious code in the download file).

]]> http://www.hypn.za.net/blog/2009/03/26/filezilla-3231-annoyances-fix/feed/ 3 http://www.hypn.za.net/blog/2008/09/30/cleanmem/ http://www.hypn.za.net/blog/2008/09/30/cleanmem/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:49:16 +0000 Hypn http://www.hypn.za.net/blog/?p=149 I just read about a program called “CleanMem” on gHacks.net, it’s a little program (36kb) that reduces the amount of memory that running programs use. There are lots of programs out there that claim to do the same thing that work by filling your memory, forcing stuff to be moved out and into a file on your hard drive. This program’s different, because (from what I can tell) it tells Windows to reduce the amount of total memory a program’s using… so it literally changes the amount of memory a program uses, not where a program’s memory is currently stored.

I’ve tried it, and it seems to work great, so I’d definitely recomment it :) did I mention that it’s freeware? Download it here: http://www.pcwintech.com/node/145

You can download it from here: http://www.google.com/chrome

I’m in the process of ripping all of the DVDs I own to “.avi” so I can just watch them off my hard drive, but it turns out I own 30 DVDs… I thought it was closer to 10 – who knew I was that rich. Anyway, I’m having second thoughts about ripping them because of the disk space, and time, it would take. On the other hand, it saves having to look for the DVD I want to watch (and frees up my DVD drive, if I need to use DVDs/CDs while watching).

I haven’t ripped the last few music CDs I’ve bought to MP3 either, so I spent some time doing that – I own something like 40 CDs… which is quite frightening. Once they’re ripped I normalize them – so it’s a fairly lengthy process in all. What’s ironic is that I’m going to be backing up all my MP3s to DVD (despite having the original CDs), so that I wont need to rip them all again should anything happen to my hard drive – so I guess I’m really just backing up the time it took to rip them.

I still have another 10 DVDs or so to write, possible more – not to mention the DVDs I need to write for other people. I’m considering hiring a DVD-writing-slave to do all this, and all my backing up, for me.

Stupid computers, life would be so much simpler without them. So much to listen to, so much to watch, so much to read, so much to backup.

Okay, that’s the end of my rant. At least I’m (mostly) harddrive-crash-safe, and have more disk space. The weather outside is awesome, I should’ve spent the day at the beach.

The first shows they’re able to easily cut objects out of a video – as if they were filmed on a blue/green screen – without having to cut out the object in every frame. It’s called the “Interactive Video Cutout“.

The second shows how videos can be enhanced by using photos. Basically photos are higher quality, and thus more detailed, than video footage. By combining the two, they’re able to “upgrade” the video quality. This is the really insane one, personally it seems too amazing to be true, but anyway: “Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene” (more info here).

Now if only that software was available for download… I would spend hours playing with it.