Infotaxis Blog

Not to actually imply any of you are my potential mates. 

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<.<

Alright. Well, thats definitely the foot I wanted to start off on - in fact, why do we even say that? starting off on a foot seems like a horrible way to meet someone, I mean, jeez, that would be rude, just walking up and standing on someones foot. 

Okay, yeah… First post and I’ve gone off topic twice, this does not bode well. 

I’m Cobra, not to imply that that is my actual name - no, that is what we on the Internet call an alias, or a “Screen Name”. Don’t think I actually go around to the store with a ID that says Cobra, no, that would be silly - not that I have anything against silly.

Oh, Well, I Have Been Informed That Normally, The Author..That would indeed be me in this case, something that I was unaware that I was, Due to my lack of Publishers yelling ast me to get my Memoir Published…Should Actually be posing about the Subject in the Topic itself.

<ontopic> It sure was a good day today, I mean, I Didn’t Get Fired yet, thats a plus, Oh and I picked Up two movies at Good Will. So, I soppose that Constitutes good </ontopic>

Enough With that, Just as a Notice, I Will NOT be on topic for every post, Infact, I may Never Be on topic.

Did you ever notice, When you See a wall of text, Its always much easier to just read one or two sentences, and then scan the rest for Key words? Kinda like the two readers reading this now are doing.

I have also been infored that I should tell you stories about my life, and my um, “Adventures” I will be Posting when they Occur, Mostly on saturday nights, I will Also Include Pictures.  Raven, has been comenting on my, Erm, “MAD LIF3 HAX0RZ”. Basically, I’m Lucky, Beyond all beleife of the Word. Lucky.

I will also End Every post I make, With Something Stupid I do On a Game, Normally a Screen Shot of me playing a Demo of something and Doing something Stupid,

Like this.

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‘ello. It’s been some time since I posted on here due to stuff, and Infotaxis nao has a new author, who will tell you about the insane things that happen to him. All of these stories are true, btw…

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Fallout 3 is the major release of the year for me, and many other fans of both Bethesda Softworks and Fallout around the world. If I could have anything at the moment, it was “Damn, I wish I could get Fallout 3 on Steam”, and the Internet has answered my prayers! O.o

Fallout 3 is now available for preorder on Steam, standard price of $50, available in 3.5 days (as of the time of posting). This likely means that Bethesda will port their other releases to Steam in due time - Oblivion, Morrowind, and hopefully the older releases that you can’t get anymore (like Battlespire, the only multiplayer Elder Scrolls game).

There is too much to say about Fallout 3, it is a bit overwhelming to write an “Upcoming Titles” post about it. I’ll just leave you with two of the videos showing a good coverage of gameplay.

There are oh so many videos, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-15 unique ones, on Youtube - so if you’re as excited as I am, search for “Fallout 3″, and “IGN Fallout 3″ to find them all.

Thank you Bethesda, for this great opportunity to buy Fallout 3 on Steam. Let me say that you are making the right move, both to widen your audience, and to reduce piracy. You are one of few companies to not include much copy protection, including a lack of serials on your games. This is smart, as the protection does not stop piracy. Adding your game to Steam will cause many of the would-be pirates to buy your game, as often one of the major reasons they pirate is to avoid having to goto the store, deal with installation times from media, serial activation, disks in the drive, etc. - Steam also removes all of these flaws of traditional media. I for one will buy another copy of all of your games if you release them on Steam.

Now we just need to get Blizzard Entertainment on the bandwagon…

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Got that latest Service Pack? Running Linux perhaps? YOU ARE NOT SAFE ANY LONGER! Your keyboard - yes, that’s right, your WIRED keyboard - is insecure!

Source: http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/keyboard/

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Believe what they say or not, this movie is free and interesting. Whether you enjoy the debunking of religion, government, and 9/11, or think it’s stupid and insulting, you’re liable to be entertained by Zeitgeist.

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I’m sure you’ve heard of AlwaysOnTop, right? Where the window stays on top of all other windows - always. What if you want the window to be always on the bottom? There is no function for this in the Windows API! This stumped me for a very long time, until I just dove into learning the Windows API entirely. It turns out that you can parent windows to other windows, and this causes them to inherit Z-Order. By finding the desktop window (which is interestingly Program Manager, a throwback to Windows 3.1), you can parent your window to this and achieve an AlwaysOnBottom effect!

I am doing this using Python and pywin32, so here’s a code example in that language (note that all Windows API languages have similar functions and can share much of their code):

import win32gui
window=win32gui.FindWindow(”EXENAME”,”TITLEOFWINDOW”)
win=window.GetSafeHwnd()
desktop=win32gui.FindWindow(’progman’,'Program Manager’)
win32gui.SetParent(win,desktop)

Note: EXENAME does not include the extension “.exe”

I was searching for this code for months in an effort to create a custom Windows shell. I’m sure it would be useful for a number of other applications as well, such as desktop-level apps, media players, custom widgets, etc.

Enjoy, and I hope I spare someone the headache of finding this that I had to go through.

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As we can see here, the mindless idiots of our nation just love the “personal attacks” McCain’s campaign makes on Obama. Don’t get me wrong, again - I am no Obama supporter. I support Ron Paul. I simply stumbled across this. I am sure that the Obama supporters are just as sheepy and stupid. ^-^

This video was brought to you by the organization of sheep for McCain.

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Screw being politically correct, I want movies like this HERE!

I can hear the voice-over dude speaking already…

“Elvis impersonator… lions… Watch an elvis impersonator kill lions while being clawed apart. Coming to theatres across Syria this fall.”

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(Click the image to view it at it’s full size..)

Brought to you by the Coalition for Infotaxis Lulz.

Dude, I want a kangaroo mount…

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This game is quite the unexpected surprise. Tilted Mill entertainment is a relatively small-name company, but they have really managed to strike a niche genre that I for one adore. This game has Diablo-style gameplay for items and combat, and a unique citybuilder perspective rolled into one game. The basic idea is to grow from a man (or woman, or goblin…) with a hut, to a bustling city - all the while becoming more powerful yourself.

You can check out some screenshots by clicking here.

You have many a character class to choose from, but they all basically boil down to starting resources/items, and special abilities in either combat or townbuilding. I prefer combat-oriented characters myself.

You then go out into the world, taking down level one and two baddies nearer to your hut. Slowly growing your town, you level up and take on increasingly more powerful dens of evil (catch my diablo reference there? no?). You hire various people such as farmers and herders for food, others like craftsman, and guards for you and your town to stay alive. Your town can even be home to wizards and necromancers (I either win or lose before this point [depending on difficulty], so far, so I haven’t tried these yet. The game has quite an assortment of things to see, and, provided you like the basic combat of diablo, provides infinite replayability. With so many items, people, and monsters to get and fight, and randomly generated areas to plod through, you can play this as many times as you want, and it will be different in each.

Let me make clear something that wasn’t clear for me buying this game - your worlds are non-persistant. You create a character, and that character is gone after that game. You can save/load, of course, but you cannot take a decked-out character into a new game.

The difficulty variety is great. On easy, you can solo most places you go, respawn if you die, and the monsters that raid you are almost always noobs. On hardcore, you’re dead if you die once, you can barely kill an enemy den without running back to heal or using potions, and your town is constantly besieged by groups that have your whole village running for the hills to cover.

There is no multiplayer, though the sequel (or perhaps a patch? please?) is rumored to have it. The game is well worth the $20.

If you’re looking for a bottom line as to whether you should buy this or not, and you’re sitting on the fence, do it - you’ll find what you expect in this game. Check out some videos on their main site if you’re still not convinced.

P.S. - There’s no widescreen (as far as I can tell), but it really doesn’t matter. The graphics aren’t great enough so you can tell the difference, tbh, but I personally don’t see why they didn’t support it.

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