Show Your ASCII

ASCII if you are not familiar pronounced ass-key goes way back. Going back to at least the 60's, it was a coding standard for early computing. It has also come to be used as a generic term for pictures or images made from characters like letters, numbers, and punctuation. My first experience with this was in high school using C+. I made a low rider truck using letters, it was also a simple animation that the wheels spun and it drove off the screen. (it took me a week to make typing and spacing) Today thanks to the advancements in science and technology its much easier to make a picture into an ASCII representation:) ASCII Generator does the work for you. Consider it making a geek portrait. The application has options to change the characters used to make the image and various other options. Its cool to play around with and its a small program. On their homepage there is a cool example of a photo of the human eye converted to ASCII. Check it out

ASCII Generator

Psychedelic Screen Saver/Desktop

I heard about this a couple of years ago, but its still pretty cool and works on Windows 9x, ME, NT, and 2000. Drempels is a color melting Psychedelic screensaver and or moving desktop background. Its tripy and different and really makes an impression when people see it for the first time. But don't blame me if the weak of stomach get sea sick.
http://www.geisswerks.com/drempels/

AVG Free Edition or Subtraction

For those of you that are unhappy with Norton Antivirus or McAfee and are tired of paying the subscription fees Don't. Don't let yourself be forced into paying for something against your will. There is an alternative to the Soup Nazi-esque Norton and McAfee enter "AVG Free". I personally went from Norton to AVG and on the first scan it found 14 viruses. One or two viruses could not be removed but only because they were in the system restore files, but the fact that it found them there was pretty cool. To get rid of them I had to disable System Restore, reboot, and turn it on again. It helped me to avoid potentially restoring the viruses. There were some trojan horses that were found that I had to Google and research on how to remove but it got rid of 99% and detected a lot that Norton couldn't. The software is free for home use and there is an upgraded pay version but the fact is, if its just for home use the free version does more than enough.

You can say goodbye to subscription fees or reinstalling your old virus scan to get the free subscription period again. ( if you didn't know you could reinstall your virus scan to get the free subscription there's another tip for you) If you are like some people I know it saves you from borrowing or downloading a copy from a P2P and helps to keep you a little more honest. Who can't save a few dollars? It keeps logs of scans, you can schedule scans, enable or disable automatic updates, scan email just to name a few of its features. Check it out

http://free.grisoft.com

Backing up PS2 Games

Well folks I'm not sure about the legality of the issue ;) but backing up your PS2 video games is possible. What do you need? You need, of course, a Sony PS2 (the bigger older model) , PS2 network adapter, an IDE hard drive up to 120GB, and 1 of 2 softwares that are out there, the most predominant HDLoader and Hdadvance. HDLoader even scored a TV spot on "The ScreenSavers" G4TechTV channel. Take your pick, they are rumors but most out there say HDLoader was the original and the other a copy. Who knows neither can really claim Copyright infringement. Basically after you are all done you no longer have to load the original game disk to play your games after the initial install and the load times are drastically reduced. Here's a link to the "The Screensavers" article

http://www.g4techtv.com

Sony PSP

My after Christmas wish is going to be the PSP, Sony's portable gaming device. From what I've read with the features and capabilities its going to really kick Nintendo's a** over the Nintendo DS. Even though it has the additional touch screen its looking more like a gimmick than something that's going to enhance game play. Here's a site that has a lot of advance info and specs
http://www.lik-sang.com

First post just wanted a spot to share some info ... hopefully lots more to come