Welcome to my mini-series “Trip Back on Memory Lane“. Make sure to keep tissues handy and enjoy a trip back to times when the computer world was still “intact” and a lot of fun. I hope to bring back some enjoyable memories back for one or the other of you. I will go beyond the simple nostalgic parts, which are clearly an important part of this and try to make clear and suggestive cross-references to things, mostly problems, that we did or did not have back then, but sill/again have today, in this advanced day and age. I created a video where I show some buried treasures of mine and talk about them a little bit. You can watch the combined video, which includes all of them, the Gravis Ultrasound (GUS) sound card, the PCBoard BBS Software, the IBM OS/2 operating system and my ACE Demos Collection CD-ROMs below. Backup link to video on Vimeo.com Download this video?? in AVI format (140 MB) Note: Correction to one of the statements that I made in the video. It was a Pentium 100MHz and not a 486/100 where I ran the BBS with OS/2 on. Sorry for that. The video is a bit less than 13 minutes long and provides visual images that will bring back memories for many of you, if you shared some of my own personal history of course. I have actually a bit more to say to each of the treasures and started writing content. What I have[…]
When I decided to pack my collections of scene art logos and pixel art fonts to make them public for others to download, I got the idea to create a nice little intro that comes with the packages. Following an ancient tradition in the scene, an intro does serve the purpose to announce the release and to relay greetings and messages to fellow sceners. The intro (or Cracktro), which is short for “Crack Intro”) pre-dates the text NFO files by many years. In fact, NFO files are something that was developed pretty late in the game and was only extensively used for releases on the PC. NFO files were pretty much a novelty on machines like the Commodore 64 and also not common for the use in releases on the Commodore Amiga. I created a NFO file and file_id.diz for my collections releases of course. Anyhow, I created an Intro with the help of the OSDM (OldSkool Demo Maker) intro engine developed by the fellow German scener with the name Peace/Testaware and released my collections with that new intro of mine. As always, I was not 100% happy with the results and started tweaking, changing and expanding things. Here are the results of that tweaking and one intermediate version that will probably never be used for a release ever. The current version will most likely be used for any update to the current packages or for some new collections (I have a lot more stuff floating around here than just[…]
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8 and also Mozilla Fire Fox come with a feature called “Custom Search Providers” or Search Scopes. It allows you to add web sites and search engines to your search box to search them directly, if you need to. For example could you add Amazon.com search to your search providers and search the Amazon.com site directly from your search box, if you are looking for a book, CD or DVD and use Amazon.com as primary online shop for this kind of purchases. You can get a selection of custom search providers at this Microsoft web site. There you can find a number of options for popular web sites and other search engines. Also available there is the option to create your own custom search provider for your favorite web site. This is possible, as long as the site provides a site search option and passes the search parameters, such as the search term in the URL. If you have a web site yourself and want to offer your visitors the option to add your site search to their web browser, then you can do that as well. I did this for my small project SQLHunt.com, a MS SQL Server resources meta-search engine based on Google Custom Search Engine. See the link at the bottom of the homepage that reads “Widgets and Gadgets”. One of the options there is to add the SQLHunt.com search to your web browser. The search providers page for Internet Explorer on[…]
In the case that you forgot Adobe Photoshop at home and need to make some last minute tweaks of some nice and cool graphics for your blog or MySpace page, while at a friends house, who only has MS Paint installed on his Computer, then you don???t have to decide between no image or crappy MS Paint tweaked image anymore. There is now a nice third option available. All that your friend needs is a web browser and an Internet connection??? and who doesn???t have this nowadays. Finding a home with black and white television is probably easier than one with a computer without Internet, right? Anyhow. There have been in the past already multiple attempts to provide a practical photo and image editor on the World Wide Web. Yeah, you could tweak photographs a little bit, remove some red eyes, flip the image, crop it and adjust the colors and contrast or brightness, but that was about it. Pixlr has something for that as well, called Photo Express, where you can do some last minute tweaks to a photo before you put it up on Flickr or Photobucket. But if you had to do a little bit more tweaking to an image, you still required a desktop application installed on your computer. Pixlr provides a neat alternative to that. Their image editor is more than just a nice toy where you can draw squares and lines like in MS Paint. The Pixlr image editor supports Layers and has some[…]
While I was looking for ways to make my life easier by automating things, I rediscovered the MS DOS batch features of the latest MS DOS release and even more extended version of MS DOS for the early Microsoft Windows 32 bit Operating Systems, like Windows 95, Windows CE and Windows 98 (dubbed MS DOS 7). You can accomplish a lot of things right from the DOS prompt without needing to program fancy Windows Applications or something like that. Many things where I thought the use of ???real??? programming languages like Visual Basic or VBScript would be necessary, can be accomplished by using sequences of MS DOS commands in a Batch File (.BAT). BATCH commands are supported by any Microsoft Windows Operation System right out of the box. You do not have to install anything, not mess around with permissions nor do you require Administrator rights and permission to write, edit or execute batch scripts. The Basics for Newbies To learn about the available commands and functions that you can use in BATCH files, open a MS DOS window first. To do that, click on ???Start???, then ???Run???, type ???cmd??? and then press the ENTER key on your keyboard. In the MS DOS window type ???help??? and then press ENTER. Returned will be a list of commands with a brief description of their purpose right next to each of them. Type ???help COMMAND???, where COMMAND stands for any command that was listed by ???help???, to get a detailed documentation and[…]
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