It’s just gone 6:30 in the morning and I haven’t been to bed yet – well, I napped for a few hours after midnight but that doesn’t count. I’ve been playing with Rainmeter for the last few hours. It’s a desktop customisation application that allows you to display different information on your desktop through various gadgets. It’s similar to to the existing Windows 7 gadgets but the possibilities seem to be endless as you can fully customise it by altering code and even the graphics to your liking.

I haven’t done anything special with it just yet as I’ve just been trying out different skins that are already out there. Some skins can just pull selected info from your PC, in my case it shows my Internet Connection, HDD usage, time and date etc. But some of the themes can be pretty comprehensive, some take up the nearly the entirety of your desktop and give you full access to applications, system info, email and RSS feeds in one hit. It really is quite impressive and it’s interesting to see what people can do with it. Another theme I’ve seen pretty much emulates the Android OS.

The application can be found here, and you can find skins here. Word of warning, a few of the skins do contain malware, but you can overcome this by checking the comments for the skin – if comments are disabled then it’s probably dodgy!

Ok boys and girls, playing fire is bad no matter what way you look at it, especially if you’re doing it in a wooden structure you’ve spelt a few hours constructing in Minecraft. Here’s a screenshot, the first of my Minecraft-playing friends to laugh at this will get their house burned down.

• Got back to work after a two week stint of annual leave making me feel more miserable than ever. The news of redundancy back in November wasn’t a huge deal at first – although naturally I was still pissed – but now the reality of it all has set in. My current job ends on the 31st March 2011.

• Blue Monday was last week, y’know, the most depressing day of the year. It’s an equation that takes into account debt, weather (it’s been shitty), the time since Christmas, time since failing New Year Resolutions, low motivational levels and feeling of need to take action. I like to call mine a Blue Month, January has been bloody awful as a whole.

• I developed a Minecraft addiction, at one point I clocked up around ten hours in a single day. I’ve since sickened myself of this game after digging a 3 mile long tunnel in a few hours.

• Through the said addiction I failed my 70-272 MCDST exam. I didn’t put as much effort into study as I probably should have and I also attribute a fair amount of my failure to Microsoft’s crappy essay-length questions.

• I’ve managed to pre-order the Nintendo 3DS for £199.85 instead of the RRP of £230, which everywhere else is selling the unit for. Other shops are starting to drop their prices, I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that GAME will follow suit, as I have £20 worth of points that would knock the price down to £180 for me.

• I’m now studying for the 70-272, properly this time. I’ve kicked my Minecraft addiction and gaming is taking a back seat. I get to play Dead Space et al when I’ve been good.

• I’m losing chubb again, I’ve walked home from work three times in the last week.

I’m sure February will be a better month as a whole, it can’t get much worse than this so I shall try to be positive.

It’s almost Christmas, and you know what time it is! It’s time for the Steam Christmas Sale, where numerous PC/Mac games from various publishers are available for low, low prices. It’s kind of like an online January sale, only much better. If you were following my blogging shenanigans this time last year, you’d know that I took advantage of quite a few of the offers. This year’s sale started on the 22nd December and is going to run through to the 2nd January with single games changing every 24 hours while game packs are available throughout the sale at a set low price.

So far I’ve purchased a copy of Super Meat Boy and the entire F.E.A.R set. I’ve played quite a bit of it so far and I can only describe it as the best three quid I’ve ever spent. The F.E.A.R. set on the other hand I haven’t had a chance to try, this is mainly due to the games being absolutely humongous in size. F.E.A.R. 2 alone is 14GB in size.

Nothing took my fancy in yesterday’s sale mainly because I owned quite a few of the games yesterday, although I am edging towards getting both Mass Effect games while they’re 50% off.

And to think in October 2009 my Steam game collection consisted almost exclusively of Valve games. These days Valve games only make up a small proportion of my Steam library.

This entry is a test, it may not look very special but it is. This is the first entry I have posted from my HTC Desire. I’m using the WordPress application from the Android Marketplace.

It’s pretty nifty as I am able to carry out all the usual functions I use for this site such as: posting new entries, editing existing ones and validating comments. All in all very satisfactory and handy for blogging during breaks at work or when on lengthly train trips.

I would also like to point out that I have installed a new plugin that will enable you to comment to my blog entries using your Twitter account (if you have one). Just simply click on the ‘sign in with Twitter’ button at the bottom of the entry. This will take you directly to Twitter for account authentication before returning you back to the entry you wish to comment on. You can then comment as usual, simples!

I could introduce the same thing for Facebook accounts, but I really don’t want to.

PS: Bulmers Summer Blend cider is pretty nice!

I will not be messing around making sure this site displays correctly in Internet Explorer, web standards have changed quite a bit in the last decade and it’s about time Microsoft caught up. If you’re viewing this site in Internet Explorer, I would suggest you switch to one of the following browsers:

Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
Opera
Safari

I’ll be making further changes over the coming days as there are a few more bits I want to change here and there.

Naturally there was a load of whining before 8pm, little squeaks of “Why do the Xbox players get it first?” could be heard. 8pm then came and went. At 8:10pm it started going nuts with exclaims of “WHERE’S THE DEMO?” and “I DEMAND A REFUND” being thrown around. The occasional ASCII art of a penis could be seen too. The moderators of that place sure had their work cut out. At one point the forum seemed to die, I guess everyone who was expecting the demo to be available at 8 hit the place at once.

I don’t see what all of the fuss is about to be honest, while I’m looking forward to the demo I don’t see the point in raging about it. First of all, it’s just a game. Secondly Valve didn’t even have to release a demo in the first place; they could’ve easily pulled an Activision who in the last month decided there wouldn’t be a demo because they’d make millions of dollars *puts pinky up* anyway, so what’s the point?

Needless to say, its calmed down a bit now…

Also it appears the demo has been delayed due to server issues on Valve’s side. If the additional 10 hours ensure that the demo plays a lot better than if they’d rushed it out at 8pm then what’s the problem?

Y’know I could’ve swore I’ve downloaded more than this in a single month before, especially when I used to download loads of anime, particularly Bleach (huge series).

Anyway, how did I hit this limit? Well, lets say Windows updates (twice!), downloading Steam games (twice, again – also includes Unreal Tournament 3 which is 8GB a pop, ouch!), Youtube videos in HD and of course, good ol’ torrents have contributed nicely.

Now the question is, in the remaining six days of this month, do I slow down my usage and risk slow internets or do I continue as I mean to go on? Weeeeeell, the latest episode of Dexter will be available tonight.