I Talk To Machines
Archive for September, 2009
Speed up your farming on Farmville!
03 years ago
by Daniel Stinebaugh
in Blah
Just another quick post for my friends on Facebook that actually do enjoy Farmville. (It’s a sad sickness I know….) Once your farm get’s larger then a tank of gas can process it’s time to start thinking.
If your running Firefox and have greasemonkey installed you can clean up and simplify the screen by using this handy script from userscripts.org. (They also have some for Mafia Wars, Google, Most sites. Check the site for your choices.)
Before
After Userscript
But we want speed. I had noticed that when I had all of my animals closed off with no way for the farmer to get to them he would just stand there and they could still be harvested. Then I was able to repeat this with the trees. Then I saw a great idea from one of my Girlfriends friends (DeAnn) where she had surrounded herself with hay bales. At first I thought nothing more of it then she liked trapping visitors to her farm (being you always spawn in the dead center) but then it dawned on me. If I can’t move at all, none of the time taken walking from plot to plot would be needed! That’s right! No more feeling of dread because you skipped a square and had to deal with the time wasted for your farmer to walk the silly diagonals to get back to the missed square. Click in any pattern you want! It doesn’t matter all it cost’s you is one plot of land! (Just make sure you have one set dead center where you spawn) this still allows you to harvest, plow and plant but you don’t have to wait for movement from plot to plot! Easily shaved 3 min’s off of each cycle of my farming!
Windows 7 RC1 All Programs Bug
03 years ago
by Daniel Stinebaugh
in Technology
So I’ve been playing with the RC1 of Windows 7 (and anxiously awaiting my geek approved and signed copy for the HouseParty I’m throwing on it’s release date!) for a while and loving it, however recently I’ve been having one problem with it. My “All Programs” List is empty. Like fully.
Apparently my “All Programs” have decided to become No Programs being all the shortcuts still exist in the folder C:\Users\Daniel\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs however they don’t display. And even newly installed apps disappear after a reboot. I’m currently backing everything up to the network and my kick ass 32gb thumb drive (damn storage is getting tiny these days!) I’ll be doing a fresh install in preparation for the actual disk coming in a couple of weeks!
Still it’s a problem and hopefully one that I can either recreate so that I can inform Microsoft, or one that just happened to be a mistake. We’ll see!
After a bit of research on the net’s it seems I’m not the only one to have this issue. You can find a fix (lowering the amount of links in said folder by creating sub-folders) as I read on this post here.
Zune 4.0 Software update, I like it!
03 years ago
So being one of the few Zune fans (until the HD takes over which I think it just might…) I figured I should go ahead and make a video of the new software so that more people can see what you get with the new Zune 4.0 Software.
- Watch the Video Overview.
Being a geek as well as hosting this at home, I don’t have alot of bandwith so if you would rather watch it locally you can download it via bittorrent by using This Link, or watch it on Youtube Here.Enjoy!
Iron Browser – it's Chrome, De-Googled!
03 years ago
So you all know how much I love google’s chrome browser being lightweight, and super fast. Well there has always been a reluctance of using it simply due to the fact that I know it reports “Anonymous Information” back to home base. No I’m not really worried about any of this information personally, however it is a privace issue and well, if I can avoid it I’d much rather take that route. And so enter’s Iron Browser by SRWare which is chrome minus the google crap. (P.S. Why hasn’t more of a hype been raised over this!?!)
It’s also got popup blocking, as well as a more up to date “V8″ Rendering Engine code and alot of privacy related features that you just cant activate in Chrome.
I also can’t say that I like the lack of one feature that would improve my use of them system wide and that’s a simple master password that hides the one’s that I’d like to save in the browser, but can’t as it’s a laptop and well, you just never know.
There’s also a Linux version (which is still alpha but don’t let that stop ya from trying it!) a Mac version and a portable version. So really what are you waiting for Get it today and browse faster then you’ve ever surfed the net before!
(really it’s fast! I’d say the network is the slowest part of browsing now and that’s how it should be!)
Feedly – The coolest RSS Reader around, and it's for Firefox!
03 years ago
So first off I’m just going to assume you get your news via RSS feeds as well, being that paper’s dead, and if so, you probably use google reader in some fashion. So does Feedly but DAMN does it clean up the interface and add some much welcome features!
Now for a long time I’ve been using either irc (with the NoNameScript) or Snownews which is a command line client for Linux to read my news feeds via RSS. We’re talking long time here 
The old way:
So I figured instead of using a boring text only reader, I’d give something else a shot.
I tried all the normal readers, RSSOwl, GreatNews, and of course Google’s Reader.
Google Reader
RSSOwl was too bloated and heavy,
Greatnews is boring and a bit complicated and,
Google Reader is not available Offline :/ What’s a man to do!?!
Feedly enters the scene (even though it’s still an experimental addon for Firefox) and makes the best of all worlds available! WIN!
It’s got a great interface, sync’s with google reader, is lightweight, fast, and has some nifty features like being able to select some text and explore your feeds and the web for the same.
A nice and useful interface to welcome you!
A quick read of all the latest topics for quick scanning.
Select some text and a dropdown menu appears let's explore!
Topic Explored
It’s just that easy and you can set mass filters or just tweak one feed at a time, Really this is an RSS reader everyone should try! And it’s pretty to boot!
So if your looking around for a good RSS Reader this is the one I’d recommend. Hands down it’s sweet!
