info @ the P.Pole 07.23.07

Here I am blogging happily on WordPress. Surprisingly enough, the decision to swap over didn’t take me too long and I’m (so far) glad that I have made the switch.

5 things I like about WordPress:

PSP 3.40 OEA

Aside: This is my first post on WordPress. It’s fitting that it’s got to do with looks, because I think this new page is looking pretty hot with the Blix theme (and my own header image). I can’t edit my CSS on the standard, free web version but with themes as clean and functional as these, it’s not a big deal.

I’ve been killing it on my custom firmware for the past month or so and honestly, I don’t understand how people can get by without it. I mean, yeah, the standard come-with Sony firmwares are fine and all (not to mention pretty) but there’s just so much you can do (i.e. not very much at all) in terms of customization. I mean, you can change the hue of the icons/ shadows/ text and the image used as a background but that’s about as far as it goes when it comes to the basic Sony-brand firmware. I’ve yet to install my own theme yet but I intend to once my PSP is done charging (I have a tendency to be a complete battery whore). So, did I brick up?

My Latest Look

I got tired of my Samurize dock and decided to tweak a little. I ended up making a whole other one from pseudo-scratch. That’s what you’ll see in the bottom left corner. As usual, there is the Winamp track progress bar (the larger blue stripe) and my CPU Idle percentage (I made two smaller semi-circular stripes that meet together at 9 o’ clock for this one). The overall effect is pretty sweet I think. There’s also the album art, current track number, and artist + title scroller. As you can see, my “dock” is mostly just a Winamp stats displayer replacement with an idle bar.
For the rest of my functionality requirements I’ve still got my tabbed Objectdock at the bottom of the screen and my invisible’d Vista start menu. A random thing I discovered about Vista (not sure if this works in XP) was that pressing Ctrl + Esc also brings up the start menu just as if I pressed the Windows key. Neato.

ObjectDock 1.9

Lately I’ve ditched my XP partition almost completely (I haven’t used it for a month and the last time I did was yesterday to try and open a corrupted file). I’m not missing the clutter and crap of XP. Now I’ve got the clutter and crap of Vista! I got curious today and checked the List to see which docking programs were compatible with Vista and to see whether my (favourite) ObjectDock by Stardock was on the List. Luckily, it was and I promptly downloaded version 1.9 (some previous ones don’t work w/ Vista). I spent the next hour or so tweaking, making icons, disabling Windows functions (such as the standard taskbar) and just having a fun time with my new dock. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out (click the thumbnail for a full view of my desktop… in full resolution too!). I’d rather be running on 1280 x 1024 but my new monitor/my dad’s old monitor (I switched to a newer LCD monitor when my old one started showing ugly-coloured spots of pink and green…) doesn’t support that high of a res. Anyway, that menu collapses into the bottom of my window and the Vista icon/start menu button doesn’t show unless I press the Windows key (pretty neat actually). I still have all the functionality of the taskbar AND start menu, but a more clean look. The only downside to this all is that I can’t view my system tray icons unless I go into object dock’s preferences and un-check “Hide Windows task bar.” Then again, I don’t use my tray very much anyway…

EDIT: Rocketdock is part of Punk Software brand wares. There’s also Uber Icon (

info @ the P.Pole 05.14.07

I was listening to Arthur’s sermon yesterday about… I don’t exactly remember what it was focused on. Nevertheless I recall topics of a cruise, fellowship through the person of Christ, and discipleship. I also remember distinctly hearing the following sentence:

“If Christ is the center, then we will suffer… for each other’s sake.”

Now is it just me or is that really cute? I personally find it amusing to pick at people’s words to find out what they may really mean. First of all, it seemed funny that he paused immediately after saying that we would suffer. It’s almost as if his thought process stopped there and concluded focusing on Christ naturally leads to suffering (which, I do not deny, probably does and should happen), but it shouldn’t stop there. And then I suppose he tagged on the second part about for whose sake we ought to suffer because he realized how awkward the first part of the line sounded. Of course, this would’ve been a good save if only it hadn’t contradicted the first part. Now, I could go hypercritical (or is it hypocritical?) here and start really nitpicking about what this all means, but I’ll that for your skills of deduction (or was it induction?).

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve started using my Vista partition much more lately and that’s probably due to my XP boot getting old and cluttered. I like neatness. I also don’t mind a fresh look. I’ve got my sidebar with my drives and clock running on the right, my recycle bin (only icon deserving of actual space on my desktop) in the corner, and my quicklist of progrmas in my start menu. I’m also rocking a Samurai Champloo background that I played with.

(click the thumb for a larger view)

Here are the links to the individual files, if anyone’s interested:

• The original (by ~joshgotpsed on DeviantART): 1600 x 1200
• The tweaked (by me): 1600 x 1200

Learn Some New Moves

I’ve recently discovered the wonders of MediaMax and their awesome online services (25 GB of media file storage, sharing, and 1 GB hosting per month all for free). With that said, I’ve got more flexibility with the kind of stuff I can do with firstly my music and secondly the P.Pole. I don’t know if any of my readers actually bookmark this page but even if you don’t, you’ll notice the P.Pole now has its own “Favourites Icon” beside its URL in your address bar/tab title and beside its item in your bookmarks list. I couldn’t do that with Photobucket (by the way Photobucket, I know this is short notice but we’re over, sorry). I promptly switched over all my image hosting needs to my MediaMax account (I’m not going to run out of image hosting bandwidth with their 1 gig/month of hosting versus Photobucket’s pitiful 20 megs/month). My top and bottom banners are now switched over and so are the list icons and other little bits of stuff I’ve tailor made to fit the P.Pole just right (yeah, I’m an OCD freak, get over it).
I’ve also been spending more time on my Windows XP account lately (mostly for some gaming and whatnot) as opposed to my Vista partition. As a result, I’ve gotten to playing with my GUI again. Here is an updated snapshot of my desktop as of right now. The wallpaper belongs to an amazing anime series called (in the words of Amy) “Furi Kuri / Fooly Cooly / フリクリ / FLCL (Pick one)”. I heard about this anime awhile back from the already mentioned Amy (from school) but I never bothered to watch it (partly because I couldn’t figure out how to spell it based on her telling me the name verbally). It’s a great anime, I’d say pretty much as good as Haruhi (but of course, none can take Haruhi off her golden pedestal in my books). Anyway, that wallpaper’s from a DeviantARTist and I figured it’d look sweet with the Winamp skin shown (Avalon 1.2, also discovered on DeviantART). The theme is OSX Leopard Beta (Pinstripe) by dobee (yeah I reverted back to my OSX fetish today).
Getting back to Furi Kuri, I finished the sixth and final episode today (having started the first episode last night, just to give you an idea of how short/sweet/intriguing the series is) and I’m very impressed. The artwork is beautiful and I don’t think I ever caught instances of the makers cutting any corners or cheating by reusing footage (which is common in less-than-amazing animes). The characters were terribly interesting and quirky. Plotwise FLCL was solid and extremely thought provoking (that’s the best I can describe it, you really have to watch it yourself to get what I’d mean if I tried to explain). The entire series screamed of wacky humour that was a fun break from the usual North American humour of Avatar or serious-ish humour of Haruhi. What I enjoyed the most, however, was the stellar soundtrack, composed entirely of music coming from an alternative Japanese rock band called the Pillows. From the moment I began watching, I immediately noticed the quality of the soundtrack. The Pillows are catchy. Enough said.

info @ the P.Pole 02.01.07

I’m currently blogging to you guys from my Windows Vista Ultimate (partitioned with XP) Firefox. I’ve been fooling around with Vista all day long and I’ve got some preliminary feedback on it.
Firstly, I don’t want to come off as fanboyish, since, well, though I’ve never thoroughly used anything other than Windows for my day-to-day computing needs (I did have a brief Linux stint way back when my dad liked to play with that stuff), I use computers enough to spot stupid programming/design (like when I have to terminate and restart explorer.exe every time I want to see a registry change take effect in my taskbar). I’m not overly tech savvy but I think I know my ways around a computer. Anyway, I thought XP’s defaults were ugly and navigation was boring. From a purely aesthetic POV, XP was quite bland. Vista’s default settings, on the other hand, are quite pretty looking and it runs quite smoothly on my machine.
I’ve yet to run into any errors while just trying to get the hang of the OS, and I suppose that’s a good sign. Did I mention how I also had a brief experimental period before with OS X Tiger? Well I did, and I found that Vista’s got quite a few similar features… as I’m sure the more nerdy of my readers have already heard about from various geek blogs (Gizmodo, anyone?). Really, the “gadgets” sidebar, the program search field in the start menu, the window switching application: this all reeks of smart ideas on Apple’s part and smart business by Microsoft.
Nevertheless, it’s looking good and I’m not going to hate on it just yet. For now, Vista, you’re on my “kinda cool but slightly rip off” list. I do have one complaint, however, and it’s that Vista refuses to play my House episodes (or any other video files I’ve got loaded on my drives). I’m guessing that this is that dreaded copyright protection crap that was tattooed into the OS, so I’ll be patiently awaiting someone to crack this… Unless it’s already been done. Guess what I’ll be Googling for the next little while.

EDIT:
Firstly, thanks to Herm for pointing out that it might be missing codecs (I feel retarded now). I hadn’t thought that my father had not installed the necessary codecs when installing Vista (yes, I let him take care of it because I was too busy entertaining my lady friend, or maybe because I’ve not had to set up an OS in awhile). Now that I’ve found and installed the necessary codecs, House plays wonderfully.
Secondly, after a little bit more Vista-ing, well, the OS is lovely. It was lagging before and I couldn’t figure out why. That’s when I decided on grabbing CCleaner again and installing it on my Vista partition. I ran it, cleared 100+ megabytes of trash and deleted 60+ obsolete/useless registry keys. I also ran the disk defragger on my drives and cleared up more trash. Then I cleaned up a gigabyte of hibernation system files (useless) and that cleaned up even more trash off my drives. Now it’s running swimmingly and with no lag. Sweet deal.
Lastly, I reinstalled my usual apps and reconfigured everything. I actually had to reconfigure Firefox twice (takes a long time if you run a lot of extensions like me) because my dad wiped my configuration the first time when tweaking the Vista after the first day. I would’ve just copied my settings over from my Windows XP application data for Firefox (like I did with Gaim) but that turned out to not work as nicely as I’d have liked (Vista uses three separate folders to do what XP’s “Application Data” did). Dumb. Either way, I’m slowly integrating my needed apps into Vista (installing as I find the need for them so I avoid installing an ass-load of stuff I don’t actually use).

Ichiban

Here’s to a brand new year. I’ve never been one to keep up with the news, so my memory of the past year’s “big” events really isn’t that great, so I won’t even attempt a recap of last year. Instead, the P.Pole’s got new banners/pretties to ring in the new year. Have fun. I’m really burned right now: the holidays have gotten to me and I can’t come up with anything constructive/intelligible at the moment. So everyone have a nice day and new year. Goodnight.

New Look

Click title to see what I mean.
So the other day (maybe a few weeks ago) I decided on venturing a short distance away from my previous infatuation with Mac OS X (Tiger or Panther, though I had a bigger crush on Panther). I picked out a slick new skin (after some minor searching) called “aerial” by some guy named danilloOc. I stumbled upon this while searching for Windowblinds skins on deviantART and I was not disappointed. I was getting tired of applying tester skins that were designed for novelty/gaudiness and not for function and cleanness; I was pleasantly surprised with danilloOc’s work though. Every part of this skin is clean and fits together well. Nothing looks random or frivolous. I really do like the look and feel of this skin. Just enough prettiness without being extravagant or gaudy. I hate gaudy.
Now, let’s move away from someone else’s work and check out my background. It’s a tweak of a background I nabbed off of Andrew Bell’s site (Creatures in My Mind) that is listed to the right under “The.Rest” in the menu. I added the splatter effect via Adobe CS2 (wonderfully powerful program: I don’t care what people say about it’s size, it’s worth it, especially when you run it on a P4 with a gigabyte of RAM). I also made a background of the same theme for my Winamp player which–if you haven’t noticed already–is neatly tucked away in the corner of my desktop. At the bottom, similar to last time I did a post like this, is my ObjectDock bar from Stardock, with a black tint this time ’round.
So what’s the verdict on the new look? If you ask me, I think it works. Mind you I’m still running Flyakite OS X for the various effects such as cursors, system icons, start up/shut down sounds/etc. I’m actually somewhat screwed since I do believe I might have wiped my system restore point before installing Flyakite, and since Flyakite replaces system files, uninstalling it could potentially totally implode my machine like I unwittingly did about… a year ago. That sucks. I’m not about to tamper anytime soon. Not until I decide to totally format my computer and start over with only what I need (and not the crap load of programs my dad needs: he’s got his own machine to do that on). That would include Firefox and Wolfenstein. Really, those are my only essentials.

Prettiness

So I’ve been playing with my Windows UI for a long time now, and I’ve accumulated/gone through a good number of applications/tweaks to make my Windows look pretty (in this case, somewhat like a Mac). I’ve been running WindowBlinds for a long time, along with Winamp. “OS X Tiger” was my skin back when I made another post like this, but I switched to “OS X Panther” because, well, because it came out, alright?! I was running a classic skin for Winamp awhile back, but I switched over to iChange recently because of the simplicity and fun extra functions of a modern skin–my favourite has got to be the option for background for the song info and whatnot to stay in it (I can change it to any image I want, either pre-made or custom made). I switched from RK Launcher to ObjectDock because, well ObjectDock is a lot better. It’s clean and without the annoying glitch of RK where it would reset my settings to a default everytime it was restarted. What else is there not shown in the screenshot… Oh yes, I learned about Launchy from Herm’s blog (check “The.Buds” section) and I’m using that to run stuff. I also switched from MS Office to OpenOffice because I needed OO’s equation editor (simply named “OpenOffice Math”) for Physics and decided, what the hell, I might as well just use all of OO for consistency. If you’ll look in the screenshot, you’ll see that I’m still running FireFox. I’m a huge FF fanboy (FFF!) and I really think everyone needs to get it and use it. It just rocks. And beside it in the taskbar is Adobe CS2, a recent acquisition, and a definite upgrade from (the slightly n00bish in retrospect) Adobe Elements 3.0 that I was using for image editing. All in all, I like the way my desktop looks right now, and probably won’t be changing too much for another little while.