A few weeks ago, I totally screwed up my theme and I had to cre­ate it from scratch. Of course, since I use the iNove theme by NeoEase – what’s the big deal? Back when I first installed this theme I didn’t know about child themes in Word­Press so I altered the orig­i­nal theme. When I updated iNove nearly a month ago I undid all my changes with one click. I fixed most of it within the hour by mak­ing use of child themes. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t use Inter­net Explorer so I didn’t see how screwed up the blog looked. I’m sorry.

Today, I’ve changed all that. It should look fine with IE once again. Prob­a­bly not as good as it does with Fire­fox or Opera but you can read my posts again. Mostly, the blog was ren­dered unus­able with IE because up to ver­sion 8 Inter­net Explorer doesn’t really sup­port “:before” and “:after” pseudo-elements. Thanks to QuirksMode for the CSS con­tents and browser com­pat­i­bil­ity which pro­vides a quick overview. Any­ways, you shouldn’t encounter any weird dis­play issues with IE from now on. Enjoy!

Almost a month ago, the in-game trailer from GamesCom made it into the net. I know, I’m late but I nearly destroyed my blog and I was on vaca­tion so I was quite busy with other things than con­tent. Any­ways, I’m back and Deus Ex 3: Human Rev­o­lu­tion is one of my most antic­i­pated games next year. For more infor­ma­tion on the game take a look at a pre­vi­ous post. The ‘new’ trailer looks very promis­ing and I def­i­nitely like the look of it:

In related news, there’s also a book planned, set in the Deus Ex uni­verse. Pub­lisher Del Ray announced in July that Deus Ex: The Icarus Effect, writ­ten by James Swal­low, would be released in 2011. The novel is about Anna Kelso, a Secret Ser­vice agent, and Ben Saxon, a special-ops sol­dier, who draw too close to the truth in a world filled with con­spir­a­cies. Of course, the pow­ers that be must silence them so that their intri­cate plans come to fruition. Infor­ma­tion is scarce at the moment but accord­ing to the offi­cial press release some char­ac­ters and story ele­ments will over­lap with the game. Accord­ing to Jim him­self, the novel serves as a “side-story/prequel”  to the game’s plotline.

I’ve never read any­thing by James Swal­low – sounds more like a porn name than a seri­ous writer, eh? (sorry Jim, I couldn’t resist) – so I’m try­ing to stay open-minded about the novel. His work record doesn’t look bad either and he’s already won the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Media Tie-in Writ­ers Scribe Award for Best Orig­i­nal Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion. Addi­tion­ally, he has been work­ing as a core writer on the video game itself, so that should def­i­nitely make an inter­est­ing read. I’m not usu­ally into video game tie-ins but what the hell. I’ve recently aquired Matthew Stover’s God of War, so DX:TIE won’t be a first, right? Right!

Back in March I started look­ing for a new mail user agent, com­monly referred to as email client. Dur­ing the last few days I had a lit­tle time at my hands and I tried Claws Mail, eM Client, Post­box and Sylpheed. Regard­ing Post­box I went for the 30-days trial of the full ver­sion after I’ve com­pared the two edi­tions (Post­box and Post­box Express). I set up a few IMAP and POP3 accounts and then I just used each client for a short time.

Once again, I’ll stay true to Thun­der­bird. To be hon­est, I liked Post­box a lot but it’s not that much supe­rior to Thun­der­bird espe­cially if you con­sider the add-ons sit­u­a­tion. What I liked best about Post­box was the way they orga­nized the accounts. That’s where Post­box really shines. So, instead of wast­ing more time with other clients I just went ahead and did what I wanted to do for a few years – I finally cre­ated a nice User.js to store some help­ful pref­er­ences. I thought I’d share a few of the most impor­tant set­tings that I found with you:

// Thunderbird 3 adds a disk cache. Activate it to cache any remote content.
// Messages and attachments are now cached for IMAP accounts as well.
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", true);
// Grant 50 megabytes of storage
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 51200);

Now, let’s move on to the IMAP set­tings. Read more…

At GamesCom 2010 Bliz­zard revealed how crafters will be able to cre­ate their own gear. In Dia­blo II, you had the assis­tance of the mys­ti­cal Horadric Cube to cre­ate new items. In Dia­blo III, Bliz­zard intro­duced the Arti­san, a new char­ac­ter who does the work for you. You just need to enlist an arti­san and pro­vide some mate­ri­als and he sets out to cre­ate your new gear.

To add an Arti­san to your ret­inue you have to help him out – usu­ally by doing a quest for him. After you gained his trust he will fol­low you on your trav­els. They will set up show in the near­est town and you will be able to inter­act with him there. There are three types of Arti­sans that will be avail­able to your hero: black­smith, mys­tic, and jeweller.

• You can sell and repair items at the black­smith, as well as have him cre­ate weapons and armor for you. He can also add sock­ets to any weapon or armor.
• The mys­tic cre­ates mag­i­cal imple­ments like scrolls, potions, runes and charms, and enchants items.
• The jew­eller is an inter­est­ing fel­low: He cre­ates gems for you and allows you to com­bine gems to cre­ate one of higher qual­ity. This Arti­san can also remove gems from items.

Read more…

So, this week I bought the Sam­sung Galaxy S (I9000) so that I too could revel in the Android glory. I did a litte research before buy­ing the phone and in the end I had to make my choice between the HTC Desire and the Sam­sung Galaxy S (I9000). I went for the Galaxy S because of the Super AMOLED, the 8 GB stor­age, and the big­ger screen. Up until an hour ago I liked what I had.

When I tried to con­nect the phone to the PC to access the SD card though, it didn’t really work. I tried chang­ing a few set­tings and I even installed Sam­sung Kies which didn’t help either. Alright, a chal­lenge then. I set my mind to the task and here’s how I finally man­aged to access the phone’s inter­nal SD card on my PC run­ning Win­dows XP. On Win­dows 7 every­thing just works so there’s no need to install or change any­thing at all.

1. Install Sam­sungs New PC Stu­dio for the dri­vers (Alter­na­tively, you can try to locate only the dri­vers some­where else on the web).
2. Go to Set­tings – About phone – USB set­tings and choose Ask on connection.
3. Go to Set­tings – Appli­ca­tions – Devel­op­ment and turn on USB debugging.
4. Con­nect the phone via USB, choose Mass stor­age from the menu, slide the noti­fi­ca­tion drawer down and select “Select to copy files to/from your computer”.
5. Con­firm the popup by press­ing “Mount”.

Now comes the impor­tant part because this didn’t work the first time.

1. Dis­con­nect the phone in the noti­fi­ca­tion drawer und dis­con­nect the USB cable.
2. Go to Set­tings – Appli­ca­tions – Devel­op­ment and turn off USB  debugging.
3. Con­nect the phone again as out­lined above and now every­thing should work normally.

That’s how I got my Galaxy S work­ing. Every­thing else I tried did noth­ing at all – and I lit­er­ally searched through lots of forums. As long as there’s a solu­tion I don’t mind. Sure, it sucks big time but at least I didn’t have to con­tact sup­port and wait days or weeks for a solution.

A few days ago I had to check out lots of PDFs and I never liked the Adobe Reader that much. I also have a dis­like for the Foxit Reader and while the Nitro PDF Reader has its uses it’s not exactly small, it’s still beta, and if you don’t like the rib­bon user infer­face you won’t be happy with it. I dis­carded Suma­tra PDF because of it’s very, very min­i­mal­is­tic user inter­face and Cool PDF Reader because I got a few error mes­sages with dif­fer­ent PDFs.

Per­fect PDF Reader 6 was too big as was the excel­lent PDF-XChange Viewer. By now I was ready to go with the PDF-XChange Viewer despite its size but then I stum­bled over a PDF reader called STDU Viewer. It’s small, it’s blaz­ingly fast, it opened every PDF I threw at it, and it fea­tures tabs. Absolutely fan­tas­tic! Exactly what I was look­ing for! I would rec­om­mend this viewer to ever­body look­ing for a small but effi­cient PDF reader.