Back!

July 2nd, 2008 Jeremy

I moved all of the site’s content over to a new website of mine, superdeluxeawesome.com in an attempt to separate my blog from my portfolio. However, I’ve decided to move the blog back because of what I’ve accomplished with this domain. It’s got a page rank of 6 and gets a good bit of traffic. So hang in there until I’ve got this all fixed.

WoW Tip: Easy Money

May 12th, 2008 Jeremy

I’m not a WoW pro by any means. My highest level character is a 43 Prot Pally and my alts are a 40 Fire Mage and 21 Holy Priest. So while I’m not a level 70 with a ton of gold to my name, I have played the game a bit.

The reason I’m writing this guide is that I just hit 40 with my Fire Mage. I was so excited to get my mount. I had saved up 9 gold (I spend as a get, so saving up that much is unheard of for me) and ran off to buy my mount. Then I was hit in the face with the realization that in addition to my 9g, I had to spend ten times that in order to USE the mount I was buying. That sucks!

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Syncing Stuff

April 27th, 2008 Jeremy

I recently got Ubuntu 8 to dual boot with Vista and soon realized it was a pain to have two places to store my music, documents, images, etc. I thought about using an extra harddrive as a shared harddrive where I could keep files for both. But I’m highly organized on the computer (which is funny, since I’m not all that organized off the computer) and didn’t want to deal with creating sixty billion folders and I also liked keeping files in Vista’s Documents, Music, etc. folders. In addition to that (yes, I’m trying to prove to you that I’m not just lazy), I didn’t want to fill up the harddrive with all my files. I’d rather keep them all spanned out across three or four harddrives. The only way to do that was with syncing software. So I tried Vista’s syncing software, but apparently that only works with media devices. You’ve failed me again Microsoft!

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Five Websites You Should Check Out Everyday

April 21st, 2008 Jeremy

Note: Updated June 22, 2008 to have 5 websites instead of 3.

Hello! My name is Jeremy Duenas and I live on the internet. My daily activities often include runs to the store (Newegg.com), getting an education (Wikipdeia.com), and of course the occasional run to the dump (myspace.com) to see everyone’s worthless crap. From sun up to sun down I bravely explore the internet. I’ve seen the worst it has to offer (2girls1cup) and the best (digg.com). It is during these explorations that I discover some amazing websites that are updated daily with original content. These are truly my favorite websites. It is for you, a fellow explorer of the web, that I compile this list of Five Websites You Should Check Out Everyday. Please note that this list isn’t in any specific order.

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Windows Prank

April 18th, 2008 Jeremy

note: This has only been confirmed to work with Windows XP

Want to piss someone off? Next time you’re at their house, open up notepad on their computer and type the following:

text1=msgbox(”Click yes to undo”,52,”!”)
text1=msgbox(”Are you sure you don’t want to undo?”,52,”!”)
text1=msgbox(”Well whatever. It’s your computer.”,52,”!”)

Now hit Ctrl+S (save) and change the Save As Type from .txt to All Files. Now name the file popup.vbs and hit save. Feel free to open the file to test it out. All it does is pop up a warning box (to edit the text that displays, change the text in the code. The ‘!’ part is the title, not some weird bit of code).

Now click/drag or cut/past the vbs file into some directory your friend won’t stumble onto. Try the Program Files folder or something. Now right click on the icon and click Send to… -> Desktop (Create Shortcut).

Now click the start button and under All Programs should be a folder called startup. Open it up and put the shortcut to your vbs file into it. Whenever you friend turns on their computer, the warning box(es) will pop up.

FTP via Windows Explorer

April 16th, 2008 Jeremy

For the writing of this article I used Windows XP Professional SP2.

I recently got sick of using an FTP program every time I wanted to upload files to my site. So I searched around for solutions (thinking I could ftp via some hidden Windows program) until I found out that you can FTP via Windows Explorer. Not Internet Explorer, but Windows Explorer.

Connecting

To start your connection, open up My Documents (or any folder on Windows you want). In the address bar, type in the ftp address to your site (Example- ftp.sitename.net). After a few seconds, a box will pop up telling you that you cannot connect. Close the box and right click inside of the folder you were just trying to connect through. Select “Login As” and type in your log in information. Click connect and -poof- you’re connected to your site via ftp via windows explorer.

Make Future Connecting Easy

Close out that window (or keep it open if you’d like) and open up your start menu. On the right side of the menu, under My Computer should be My Network Places; click that. On the left, click “Add a Network Place” . Go through the wizard until you can choose between MSN Communities and Choose Another Network Connection. Select the latter and click next. Now type in your ftp address and hit next one more time (make sure to type ftp:// before your ftp address). Unclick Login Anonymously and type in your login name. Name the connection and hit finish. You will now be able to instantly connect to your site via My Network Places. For extra ease, place a shortcut to the connection on your desktop or quick launch bar.

Portable World of Warcraft

April 16th, 2008 Jeremy

Before you get too excited, I don’t mean portable like the portable versions of Firefox, Pidgin, etc. I mean for a portable harddrive (at least 7.5GB). Portable harddrives come in different sizes and types. I personally use an old laptop harddrive placed inside of an external drive enclosure and my iPod. You could also, if you’ve got one large enough, use a usb flash drive (thumb drive, pen drive, etc.). Obviously, in addition to a drive, you’ll need a copy of World of Warcraft and a subscription to it (so you can play it).

Use With Portable Harddrive

This is very simple. Either install directly onto the harddrive or go onto your C Drive and copy and paste your World of Warcraft folder onto the drive. It’s that simple. You can now use world of warcraft on any computer you want (assuming it has the required specs).

Use With an iPod

If you’ve already set up your iPod to be used a harddrive, go back to Use With Portable Harddrive and follow those instructions. If you haven’t, keep reading. Please note that this is done with iTunes 7 on Windows XP, so if you’re running OS X, it might be slightly different.
Plug your iPod into your computer and open up iTunes (if it doesn’t automatically open). iTunes should display information on your iPod. If it doesn’t, select your iPod under “Devices” on the left side of the program. Under Options, you should see a small list of options. Check Enable Disk Use. Now go back up to Use With Portable Harddrive and follow those instructions (or click here).

Playing the Game

To play the game, all you have to do is open up your harddrive and open up Wow.exe (or whatever the OS X or linux equivelant is). It’s that simple.

The Geek Survival Kit

January 31st, 2008 Jeremy

When you’re a geek like me and you’re forced to survive in the wild (outside of your room), you might not know what to do. Conversations can be awkward, and often lead to you striking up conversations about that shock video you saw last week online. But I find when I’m at school, surviving in the wild is much easier, because I’m surrounded by computers. The only problem is that its not MY computer. With this article, I aim to help you make any computer YOUR computer.

All you need is a USB flashdrive. I use a 1gig LG flash drive, but something as small as 128mb will do. First of all, go to Portable Apps and download the Portable App installer. Install the program onto your flashdrive (it’ll take a while to do this, so go watch 2girls1cup or something :D). Once that’s done, you’ll want to start up the portable version of Firefox. This is where a majority of your survival kit will be going.

If you don’t already have one, head over to google and sign up for an account. With this account you’ll have access to Google mail (gmail), Calendar, docs, and many others. With this account, you get 6GB of online storage. And the best way to use that storage is a little Firefox plugin called GSpace. With GSpace, you can upload/download any file you want via Firefox. That means that if you’re finishing up a class and you’ve got some homework you need to finish up, you can upload the word doc, the images, the audio files, or whatever you need to Google and head home, download/complete the assignment and reupload for download at school. Now you might be saying that you can easily do this with a flash drive. This is true. But if you’re a graphic or web design major (I’m web major), you’ll have MASSIVE files that will very quickly fill up your flashdrive. But with Google + GSpace, you can fill up your 6GB with endless amounts of stuff.

This next one is setting your homepage to http://igoogle.com.  Here you can find little widgets and dock them on the page. Personally, I’ve got Calendar, Gmail, and a few others docked so I can easily view my schedule, email, etc. Also remember to trick out your Firefox. Even though its portable, this version of Firefox can use plugins and themes just like the full version. The only difference is that Firefox auto-clears the browsing history when you remove the flashdrive (this reduces the amount of space needed to store Firefox).

Lastly, make use of the programs on Portable Apps.  There are a ton of smaller versions of popular programs that you can use. There’s graphics editors, text editors, IM clients, and more. Also, you can easily add your own programs that will show up on the Portable Apps menu on the computer. I’ve got some GBA/SNES emulators on mine, alone with a few smaller games (Conquest, Crayon Physics, etc.).

Top 5 Firefox Addons for Web Designers

January 19th, 2008 Jeremy

One of the greatest things about Mozilla Firefox is the addons. And since a lot of Firefox developers are web designers, there’s a ton of tools made just for web designers. So I present to you my 5 favorite. Which means they’re the best, I guess.

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Windowed Mode

January 11th, 2008 Jeremy

love to play games. So much so that I like to do other things while I play them. For example, while playing World of Warcraft, I often have to read up on something in the WoW Wikipedia or the official site. So instead of minimizing the game, I have it set to windowed mode.

World of Warcraft has really spoiled me, because it has excellent built-in windowed mode support. But most games don’t. The other PC games I play a lot are Sim City 4 and The Sims 2. Neither of which have any built-in support for windowed mode. This is quite annoying for me, because I’m one of those people that likes keeping an eye on their buddylist, inbox, etc. So I googled around to find the answer and now I’ll share it with you. First of all, find the shortcut to the game (or the actual .exe file of the game. Either will do) and right click on the icon. Then click Properties.

On your game there should be a little box with the path to the game in it (labeled as “Target:”). At the end of the path (after the final quote mark), type -window. Then click “OK”. This only works with some games, so you might need to try just -w after the final quote instead of -window. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just look at the above image. It’s the “final product” of this whole thing. Even with one of the two at the end of the path, it still might not work. I have no idea why, but some (maybe most) programs don’t have support for that. So if those don’t work, you can give 3D-Analyze a shot. Amongst other things, it can force games into windowed mode. To do this, unzip the files into a directory and run 3DAnalyze.exe. Then click “SELECT” and find and select the .exe for the game you want to run in windowed mode. NOTE: It HAS to be the .exe. Using the shortcut doesn’t work with this thing. After you’ve selected it, click off “Force Windowed Mode” at the bottom of the “Performance” column. Then click RUN.

This also may or may not work. But hopefully one of the two methods I’ve given will work for you. If not, actually check your game to see if it has it already. It’ll be under the graphics or display setting. I’ll be updated this article as I find new ways to force windowed mode.