After playing Crytek’s impressive game Crysis for weeks with very jerky, stuttering audio, which sometimes stopped completely, requiring the game to be restarted in order to hear anything at all, I finally found the fix for the problem.

I am running the game under Vista on an oldish ABIT KN8, nForce4 Motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz cpu.
To get the graphics running smoothly I added a Gainward GeForce 8800GT 512mb graphics card and finally to try fix the sound I installed a Creative SB X-FI Xtreme Gamer.

Now, I have come across loads of forums whose only answers are “You have the wrong driver!” which is in most cases nonsense really as Vista does seem to update the drivers reasonally soon after a manufacturer’s release.

Anyway, initially the audio in the game sounded just as bad as when I was using the onboard soundcard. Not good!

I’ve disabled the Sound Blaster Enhancements using the control panel and so far the sound problems have not appeared again. Fixed! If you’re having the same trouble, try the following (Vista steps):

Open Control Panel in normal mode.

Underneath the Sound Icon you should have an option to Manage Audio Devices.

Select the Speakers Icon and click Properties.

Click on the Sound Blaster tab at the top of the next window and tick the box to
Disable Sound Blaster Enhancements and click Apply.

Then go the Advanced Tab and select the Default Format to be at least 24bit and 96000 Hz (Studio Quality).

This should fix the problem with stuttering audio when playing Crysis! If you still have a bit of sound problems on your box, I suggest experimenting with the Exclusive mode on the advanced tab as mentioned previously too.

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by thousands of contributors around the world. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth. See if your neighbourhood is in any good detail. If not, sign up for free and do your bit to build the map.

So another one already. I’m just waiting for these motors to end up on Ebay so I can really start playing… C’mon already, I’ve pressed refresh like 10 times on Ebay and they’re not there yet! What’s the hold up?
I reckon Angelo Di Pietro deserves all the money that’s bound to be heading his way for this.

This sounds waaaaay too good to be true. Expected price is as low as €3,500! I reckon it’ll end up on sale in Ireland for around €390,000 and probably in 2057… I still want one though.
Checkout the webpage at www.theaircar.com or have a quick wiki. Or better still, get really brave and convert your own V8 car into an air guzzler instead.

Check out the lollipops list and see how many musicians you can identify.

Use Dan Pollock’s hosts file, which is kept up to date regularly, to prevent your computer from connecting to selected
internet hosts. This is an excellent way to protect your PC from buckets of spyware, prevent a load of ad-based pop-up traps, and prevent those damn “web bugs” embedded in spam from contacting their sites for user tracking etc.
This block-list provides good protection to IE from certain web-based exploits and blocks most advertising you would otherwise be subjected to on the internet.

All you need do is copy and paste all the text on Dan’s page (except the last line which is the file’s date) into your own hosts file. Remember to do this fairly regularly. This will even bring down your bandwidth use a bit. Even add your own entries to keep your machine from accessing various sites for Parental or other reasons.

Not sure about using hosts files? It’s safe and easy, have a look at a wiki or even a quick how-to article or try these instructions if you’re unfortunate enough to run Vista.

I installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my Compaq NC6000 which has an Intel PRO 2200BG wireless card. Could not connect at all to my home network (WPA-PSK encrypted network running off a Netgear Access Point). The laptop could not even see any networks even after I enabled the SSID to be broadcast from the router.

The following fix got it to work:

sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant      (Feisty Fawn already has this installed though)

sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces  (Comment out everything other than “lo” entries in that file and save the file)

Create a file called /etc/default/wpasupplicant, add entry ENABLED=0 and save the file

sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant

Reboot your system or use the following command

sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

Left-clicking the network manager on the top of the screen then showed all networks in the vicinity. I was then able to select my network, configure and enter the password. Once this was done I could re-hide the SSID on my router.