denyerec.co.uk

Wow. April was the last time I made a meaningful contribution to the internet via the medium of blogging, between then and now not a lot has changed, but a lot has changed. Cryptic zen nonsense perhaps, but there’s a shift in my outlook now that is going to promote a flurry of relaxed activity over the coming months. Whether it’s down to the sun coming out, or the magnesium citrate that I’ve taking to examine its effect on depressed mental states I don’t care, but I’m more enthusiastic about things in general than I have been in years. Don’t expect anything overnight, but at least in the coming months the plan is to finally start doing all the things I’ve thought about instead of just thinking about them. Hopefully the change in mood isn’t temporary, as that would be devestating.

In other news, Trier is a really, really nice city to visit in Germany if you like old things (Roman, Medieval, etc) and getting there by Ryanair can cost you as little as £8 each way (ALL IN!) so long as you read the smallprint. Never quite understood why people get so passionately aggressive toward companies like easyJet and Ryanair, as what can one really expect when paying so little?

Finally, it was brought to my attention recently that the Government is subsidising rail transport so heavily that it may as well re-nationalise it and stop the idiot managers creaming off the “profits”, which turn out to be just un-spent subsidy. East Coast Rattletrack is already back with Big Brother, I just wish they’d get a move on and fix the lot, the current situation is a sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham of a mockery.

Turns out my occasional ranting about the really really rude people at the TV Licensing has picked up its fair share of traffic from Google, leading to an email from the owner of a site called NoTVLicenceFee. Go ahead and take a look, he’s certainly more motivated than me when it comes to raising awareness and actually doing something about it.

That’s mankind, generally at least. Fortunately there are a few people who buck the trend and do things like this: Hubble Deep Field Image

If you feel nothing when you watch this, then, well, I’ve got no words for you that’ll make a damn bit of difference.

After a brief exchange of emails and original full-resolution JPG’s to prove authenticity, the outstanding case of one of my images being displayed without attribution has been sorted out amicably. As it turns out, the chap (Mr Roux) who used the image came by it on a CD of images bought at a car-boot sale. Turns out to be more a case of innocent possesion of stolen goods than direct bank robbery so an apology to Mr Roux for that one. As for the stealing bandits authoring the CD’s I can only wonder what other knocked off clobber they’re writing to disc and flogging for 20p a pop at carboot sales. The location in question is “D’Auvergne School La Pouquelaye” in Jersey, so all I need now is a friend over there who feels up for having a couple of polite words. Heavy wooden stick shaped words… I doubt it’s piracy on a scale that FACT would have any interest in, though, no matter how grass-roots they attempt to appear with their Don’t Copy That Floppy adverts and the like.

A common problem experienced by 8800 owners in BF2 is that if they have their lighting and shaders set to “high” or “medium”, after a short while they get the dreaded Yellow Texture Bug, where things appear in flat yellow, then it gets worse and worse until it looks like a bad accident at the Birds factory, then the game will crash.

Turns out the same fix that sorts out the OS Page Pool Memory error in TF2 also alleviates the problem with BF2. Looks like the yellow textures might be proxies for when the game can’t pull the required textures out of swap fast enough. Or something…

Anyhow, the fix works as follows (The following was scoured off a TF2 help thread)

First load regedit. Remeber to back up your registry first, I take NO responsibility for any damage you may cause at all. Ever.

Start Menu > Run > regedit

Head down to this branch: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management

Then find this key on the right hand side: REG_DWORD “PagedPoolSize”

Double click on “PagedPoolSize”. Hexadecimal is listed first. Change the “Value Data” to one of these below: Note: You only need to enter EITHER Hexadecimal or Decimal.

Code: Megabytes Hexadecimal Decimal 192Mb 0c000000 201326592 256Mb 10000000 268435456 384Mb 18000000 402653184 As I’ve got 4gb of system memory, I set mine to 384mb and left it at that. Apparently it’s not wise to go above 400mb, though I’m unsure of the technical implications.

If this doesn’t work for you, try the 169.04 beta drivers from Nvidia, as I’m running those also. Now to find out if this fixes the Jinx in Bioshock…

Update: Yes, indeed this also fixed the high-detail-shader issue on Bioshock. Whoo-hoo!

I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 a little lately, and it’s most entertaining. As some of you may know, it being a Valve game, the option to “spraypaint” a tag onto the walls is present as it was in Counterstrike, however, creating these custom images for use can be a bit of a pain.

First of all, you’ll need something like Photoshop. GIMP will do, but these instructions are for Photoshop. Next you’ll need VTF Edit, which you can get from the bottom of the VTF Edit website. It’s a lot cheaper than Photoshop…

• Now open Photoshop. Create a blank 256×256 RGB 8-bit image.
• Fill this image with mid-grey R 128, G 128, B 128.
• Create a new layer on top of this, and draw / add whatever you want to it. Delete from this layer any bits you want to be transparent in the final spray image
• Press CTRL and click the layer you’re drawing on in the layers pallete, this selects only what you’ve drawn onto the layer
• On the Channels tab, click the second button from the left to “Create alpha channel from selection”
• Go back to the layers tab. Click Layer->Flatten Image
• Now save the image as a TGA file, make sure Alpha Channels is ticked, hit OK and select “32 bit” if a little dialog pops up
• Open VTF Edit, go to File->Import and select your TGA file
• In the dialog that appears, uncheck “Generate Mipmaps” and leave everything else default. Alpha Format should read ‘DXT5′. Hit OK.
• To confirm that yout TGA alpha map worked OK, you can check View->Mask, which should turn on the alpha map preview
• Go to File->Save As and save the file

Once you’ve generated the VTF file you need to place it in two locations:

• \Steam\steamapps\name>\team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos\
• \Steam\steamapps\name>\team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos\UI\

If the folders don’t exist, then just create them. As far as I can tell, it is case sensitive, so watch out for that. When you’re all done with that, load TF2 and go to the Advanced tab on the options page and select your spray tag image.

Simple…

Update: Blagpuss points out that some users might need to add “_english” to the ‘tf’ portion of the path, this might vary for users with other regionalised copies too, so watch out for that.

My images are being stolen. This is beginning to piss me off. The more hawk-eyed readers will notice that at the bottom of the gallery pages is a Creative Commons licence, which permits someone to use my photos for non-profit, if they simply attribute the original image to me. Not a tall order, to be honest. If I could use a Nikon D3 camera for the price of simply telling people I got it from Nikon, that would rock! And you know what, it would be easy to do, too, because the camera has “NIKON” stamped on the top in big letters. Peice of cake.

Oddly enough , my images have “M Denyer” on them, this lets people know that the person who took the photo is called, who’d have thunk it, M Denyer. (The M is for M, by the way.) You’d like to infer from this that such a person deeming my images fit for use would then have to simply display them, as-is, and the attribution part of the bargain is complete. Actually ZERO effort required. Literally, none. It’s actually harder to copy the image to your own FTP server than it is to hold up the attribution part of the bargain.

This is therefore why I get angry when thieving punks like this git running a website about a Jersey Water polo Club and another individual running some blog (I will not abuse this fellow human just yet, as I only hailled them this morning about the issue, so have yet to see how they respond. If they respond correctly, I will be crediting them with a link. If not, I’m going to get angry on their behinds.) use my images and go through the arduous trouble of attempting to conceal the copyright notice.

If you are a non-profit organisation and you leave my copyright notice intact, the images are FREE FOR USE. Get it? It’s clear these people are either compulsive kleptomaniacs for whom the thrill of the steal is the main event, or they’ve got some kind of learning disorder and simply cannot read. Given the fact that both of them have managed to author websites, even if not of any noteably great standard, I am lead to conclude that they are just plain old thieving bastards. Yeah that’s right, I said it.

Just for the record, the original photograph of the White Faced Saki and the Jersey Cow can be found in my gallery.

Update - After lunch Looks like the blog owner over at Quedat took my polite yet-ever-so-Britishly-aggressive message to heart and has reversed their copyright chop, to display the full image avec-copyright. One down and one to go! (That I know of…)

Turns out we had no idea where we were transferring on our way to Oz, and it turns out it was Hong Kong Crazy huge airport with mountains and chairlifts and clouds that sit on the mountains like little hats. It’s cool, though because we’re trapped in the airport for a mere 100 minutes we don’t actually get to see Hong Kong proper.

Mucho turbulance over India and the Russian mountains (Urals?) again, hate that bit.

More to follow from Australia.

(And Doug, if you’re reading, we’ll wave to everyone in the airport on the offchance you know them… )