Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Why I Am Running On Windows At Home

If people were to ask me, “Why do you have Windows on your home PC and not something like Linux or something?“ and they might because they talk like that around here, then my answer would be, "Games". I like games. I even pay for them. My favourite is the IL-2 Sturmovik set of combat flight simulators. They are what force feedback joysticks were created for.

Flight Gear (http://www.flightgear.org/) is THE open source fight simulator.

If you prefer to fly around space then there is VegaStrike (http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/).

For real life outer space there is Celestia, (http://www.shatters.net/celestia), if you can't cope with the reality of Celestia you can always add in the Star Trek, Star Wars, Alien and other SF objects and systems that are available.

There are also some really slice screen savers about (http://www.reallyslick.com/).

Monday, September 27, 2004

PC Hardware Monitoring

How fast are your fans spinning? How hot is your CPU/Hard Disk/Case? What are your clock rates and multipliers?

Here are some free programmes that provide all the PC metering you should need.

The original Motherboard Monitor (http://mbm.livewiredev.com/) is no longer being actively developed but it is still good for current motherboards so take a look.

An alternative that is till under active development is SpeedFan(http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php).

CoolMon (http://www.coolmon.org/) is a cool monitor that can monitor a lot of things about your PC as well as display data from Motherboard Monitor as well as SpeedFan. CoolMon is currently being rewritten to version 2.0.

Finally there is CPU-Z and PC Wizard from (http://www.cpuid.com/) that tell one all about their CPU and PC system. PC Wizard can link with Motherboard Monitor but in my case it got the case and CPU temperatures transposed....

I Now Know What A Browscap File Is

Do you? Web servers use them to identify the capabilities of browsers and the like. Just like termcap and printcap files then. The print cap file can be found at (Windows) WINNT\system32\inetsrv\browscap.ini.

NASA's World Wind program is big and uses a lot of bandwidth. It will let you see what your house looks like from space. It is a very impressive program. I got a lovely view of Navy Pier in Chicago IL with tour boats tied up along side. I was also very disappointed because I don't live in the USA and outside the USA the resolution drops to 1 pixel per kilometer. Maybe they plan to change that someday as the names of the villages in my area where there. I can't complain thought as NASA is a USA public funded organisation and I don't pay for them.