Sundries

Years ago, when the ability to connect to other players on the Internet to play games was just starting to become commonplace, I was highly adicted to the game Team Fortress Classic:

As you can see the graphics are a bit dated by todays standards but they really weren’t that bad. But the fact that you no longer were playing against the computer A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) but against real people from anywhere in the world it was just fascinating.

A few months ago Team Fortress 2 was released and I quickly purchased it and have put in many hours of play time. Especially as my favorite position, the Engineer.

click to enlarge image

As you can see, I’ve spent just under 60 hours playing the Engineer so far in the game. Most of the time it’s because I really enjoy that position but sometimes it’s due to nobody else on the team playing any real defense so I become the Engy and setup a sentry for some D.

One thing that’s interesting about this game is you can spray an image on a surface in the game. Some people create interesting animated sprays to try to fool the other team into thinking there is someone sniping from a location:

This is an old trick but if you have 2 or more people hanging around that spray of a sniper squating down to shoot it can confuse you long enough to get your head blown off.

I’ve only created 2 sprays so far for the game for me to use. The first one was designed to antagonize the other team by entering their side of the map and spraying it in a location that many people would see:

I used this one for most of my time playing the game so far. The guy in the image is a pansy from the British TV show called Black Adder. This image is enlarged a little bit from what’s in the game but it’s pretty easy to read and I have a feeling it pissed a few players off personally. Ooppss!!! Sorry, I guess.

I recently changed to a new spray image that I’m sure is pissing a few others off as well. This one was just designed to be used in my own base. I should say I almost always play a map called “2 Fort” where there are 2 forts (duh!!!), one on each side of the map for each team. I took an image from a Doujinshi (Japanese fan-made comic book) of the character Hinata from the manga/anime called Naruto.

Click to see the full size original picture of Hinata.

As you can see, this could tick a few people off but they would have to be way too sensitive for that too happen and in that case I don’t really care too much. I’ve seen people use images from gay hard-core porn in the game so I think my image is pretty tame. It’s not even a real person, just a drawing of a fictional character.

**James.

I spend a very large amount of my waking hours, as well as some while sleeping, on the computer and I’ve never posted anything about some of the great tricks or software I’ve picked up over the years. I found a great program today that has helped me with a problem that comes up from time to time and I figured why not share it. It’s also free!

Sometimes when you try to delete, move, or rename a file the computer may not have released it’s grasp on it and you can get an error pop up such as this:

There were only 2 ways I knew of to correct this. Rebooting the computer which is time consuming and interrupts what you were doing at that moment or hitting the Ctrl – Alt – Del buttons one time to bring up the Task Manager and killing the process for Explorer. This will close your desktop and any file explorer windows you have open as well. Sometimes Explorer doesn’t start automatically and you have to start it manually by going to C:\WINDOWS\explorer.exe and then re-open all of your documents to go back to work.

I found a free program called “Unlocker“ that helps make fixing this program very easy. Once you install the program it adds a menu item so that when your right-click on a file or a folder you see the “Unlocker” option listed:

Click on that to launch the program for that item. There are a number of items you can select from but not so many that it makes using the program a pain. If the program is locked you will show a similar display:

This will break the computers hold on that file letting you continue what you were doing without having to reboot or restart explorer. There is also the option (listed under the “No action” drop down menu) that lets you directly delete or rename the folder or file from this menu.

As an example of how this is useful. Let’s say you buy a new computer and find that you start getting the little warning pop up messages every 30 minutes or so letting you know that your computer did not pass the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) check:

While you are working to get a “genuine” copy of windows to help resolve this issue you will continue to be harassed by these messages over and over. There are a number of fixes to correct this but one that just may help you is to rename the following files in your C:\WINDOWS\system32 directory”

LegitCheckControl.dll
WgaLogon.dll
WgaTray.exe

Simply add “-old” (without the quotes) to the end of the file names (example: LegitCheckControl.dll should be renamed to LegitCheckControl.dll-old) and then restart your computer. This prevents these files from loading to harass you about the WGA problem while you are working on correcting that. (hehe)

The problem is that you can’t simply rename these files but may have to “unlock” them first. Using the Unlocker program you can rename them, reboot, and not worry about these annoying warning messages again.

You can get “Unlocker” for free at their website (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/). If you enjoy this program as much as I did please consider donating using their Paypal button near the bottom of their page.