If so, then chances are your wallpaper might have a severe case of boredom. Luckily, I have the perfect cure: spruce up your desktop with some awesome photos from a few websites, or perhaps your own! Your mind and your computer will be a LOT cleaner and organized when you change your desktop…

…from this (tons of clutter, how can you find anything?)

…to THIS! (photo taken by a classmate during my Italy trip)

What, you don’t know how to change your wallpaper? It’s easy! Just drag your favorite photo into your internet browser, right click, and Set as Background. If that isn’t working, here’s some tutorials on how to do just that if you’re on XP, Vista, or OSX. Today I’m also going to share a few of my favorite wallpaper sites and feature a few select photo-based wallpapers.

InterfaceLIFT hosts a broad range of wallpapers, icons, and themes. I really love how they provide their wallpapers for nearly every resolution, even dual monitors and mobile phones! They have a fantastic array of high dynamic range (HDR) images that really bring out colors in scenes that you’ve never seen before in a digital picture. Some great examples of wallpapers can be found here: Dark Clouds Await by sn0dig, Syrphid Fly by Niels Strating, Giants Causeway by RGH Photography

WinCustomize also has a huge wallpaper gallery with a fantastic photography section. Although most downloads only come in one size, searching for your favorite subject or sorting by downloads delivers quite a few high-quality photos: Rock Face by AzDude, Rainforest Leaves by thecoolcrocodile, ZuBench by Zubaz

DeviantART, which has one of the largest art communities on the web, hosts not only a normal photography section but also a huge wallpaper section with categories like Landscapes and Scenery, Photo Manipulated, and Cities & Structures. Browsing through their galleries is a breeze, just make sure to click on the “All Time” sort for the real goodies: Remains by tonyelieh, The World in my Eyes by Burning-Liquid, Silence of The Storm by angelreich

Do you have a great wallpaper site or a favorite photo you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

First up, the classic CG application, a ray tracer complete with phongphongphong shading, procedural shading on the floor, reflection, transmission, and even some tone reproduction.

Secondly, my quarter long personal project, a simple particle system/b-spline curve generator in XNA, dubbed Q-Blizzard. Turned out to be quite pretty, not exactly configurable though.

And finally, an image that won me a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate in the Pixar Renderman Shader contest. I won third place out of around 30 images! My roommate noted that I should have added an OM NOM NOM caption in for kicks.

Hopefully this will mark my return to regular blogging (going to try monday, wednesday, friday) for the summer and onward. Hell, if mittens can keep up his Daily GameDev.net postings for 2 months, I can do it too. Right? …Right? (I seem to tell myself every few months or so…)

I did upgrade to WP 2.5 though, and it’s working great. More on Tuesday!

Oh, you wanted to know why! Well, if you’re still reading and not playing it, there’s three reasons why Rock Band is an awesome investment (it’s still $169.99) for your Xbox 360, PS3, or (soonly) your Wii. First off, the UI is a lot cleaner than Guitar Hero 3’s. Let’s look at the two side by side.

Rock Band

Guitar Hero 3

Now, do remember that 1-4 people are watching the TV at a time for Rock Band instead of only 1-2 for Guitar Hero 3. However, the Rock Band interface is extremely simple. No complex images on the fretboard, a scoreboard that is easy to see, and the Overdrive meter is so much easier to understand than the star power gauges. All you want to know when you’re playing either of these games is what your multiplier is and if you can use your star power/overdrive or not. With Guitar Hero 3, they’re on complete opposite sides of the screen! Also, the star power gauge is made of lights that fill up, and it’s even harder to see when playing with two players. For Rock Band, all of that information is in one place, at the very bottom of the fretboard, beneath where you’re looking at most of the time to play notes. Obviously, the team behind Rock Band really looked at how people play Guitar Hero and what’s essential to see when you’re playing, and turned that into a brilliant design that’s easy and fun to play.

Secondly, the downloadable content rules. Grant it, I haven’t looked that much into GH3’s available songs, but Rock Band’s library continues to grow. My most recent downloads have been Limelight and Working Man from Rush, Crushcrushcrush from Paramore, and the huge Boston song pack. These new songs bring so much replay value to the game it’s not even funny. Obviously they have all 4 playable parts in the songs, but you can opt to play the downloaded songs in the World Tour mode. So now, I can earn money for new looks and instruments by pretending I’m Geddy Lee.

Finally, the drums just rule. It’s a completely different experience than the lead/bass guitars, and there’s something truly enjoyable about banging pretend drums with real drumsticks. It’s also a huge challenge for me, even on Medium the songs are pretty difficult, especially since the bass pedal is a central component to most songs. It’s a game controller like no other, one you can beat senselessy and not feel bad about it.

If you’re not able to get it yourself, at least visit someone’s house that has it, I assure you that you’ll definitely feel like a rock star, at least for a few minutes. Heck, if they get the new lights and smoke set, all you’ll need are some serious clothes to match.

1. Twitter is short, sweet, and easy to use.

The concept is simple: 140 characters to tell the world what you’re doing. I don’t think you can get more simple than that. No complex forms, no huge commitments, just a simple request, and your simple answer. It has a wonderful web interface, and the settings allow you completely customize your page’s background along with colors for fonts. It’s just a breeze to use and easy to look at, which is a welcome change compared to Facebook or MySpace.

2. It’s an awesome way to network with highly connected bloggers.

I think Scoble puts it best:

You’re communicating to the world that you’d like to be listened to (golden rule: treat people how you’d like to be treated).

Twitter is becoming the heart of the Interblag. It’s what bloggers are doing when they’re NOT blogging. Obviously yes, we all have our jobs and commitments, but Twitter is a way to connect with those people between their blog, vlogs, or however they communicate with the internet at large. It’s a way for those who are connected to quickly poll, grow, and comment with their audience. The value to bloggers to be active on Twitter is absolutely critical: these are the people who you WANT to be reading your blog. They’re the people that will link your blog to others, they know where to share it and who to share it with. They’re all here folks. Come and find them.

3. It’s a great way to keep in touch with friends.

I think Twitter in Plain English hits the nail on head: Twitter is a way to converse with friends in a way that isn’t that important to email them, but doesn’t necessarily demands their instant attention. Of course now, you can use Jabber/XMPP to interface with Twitter. Anyway, I find it to be a neat way to keeping in touch with people I know in the real world online that isn’t exactly bugging them over AIM or Facebook. Also, if you’re concerned about random people like me following your every move, you can make your page private and only allow those you approve to watch your updates.

4. It’s just fun to use!

What really gets me with this are the fantastic clients that seem to be populating the net. The Twitter API is readily accessible and easy to implement, and that’s extremely important as it seems that most people use twitter through outside clients or through text messaging rather than their web interface. My personal favorite at the moment is Twhirl, which is an Adobe AIR client. It’s got a neat, clean interface and colors are customizable, so I’m having fun with it. I rarely have to go to the website anymore, the API is so open that the majority of the functionality is accessible through outside clients.

So, why haven’t you created a Twitter account yet? I guarantee you that it’ll do nothing but help you get your blog known, and connect with others who are on the same quest. Feel free to follow me as well, I’ll make sure to follow you.

That should be a sphere. Not some strange cone thing. Progress is slow, but steady.  Understanding the theory is key to this, and it’s pretty damn tough.

Well, Happy Easter everyone, and I hope if you made some sort of Lenten sacrifice (I gave up fast food!) you’ve kept it. A Wendy’s spicy Baconator is calling my name, and it’s getting harder and harder to resist…

First up is a wonderful tool called Console2, which is an open source tabbed command line utility. It allows easy configuration of fonts, colors, the background colors, and even lets you do some really crazy things if you wanted such as adding a background image. The best feature by far though are its tabs, which I’m sure if you’ve ever used IE7+ or Firefox you know how useful they can be for multitasking. Another great feature is that you can set up plenty of keyboard shortcuts if you’re into that sort of thing. Check it out here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

Console is great if you want to fire up a specific program all the time, but I’m used to slamming WinKey + R and typing cmd so much that it’s basically embedded into my muscle memory. So, I was looking for configuring the default prompt instead of running another program. Pimping out my command prompt has taken me quite a while to find the perfect configuration that suits my needs, and it’s constantly changing as I find new things to add. Here’s what I’ve done to trick mine out:

I’m using Consolas as my font. I absolutely love Consolas and I find it much easier to read than Courier New or the default font that the command window has. Consolas is not available by default and requires a simple registry hack along with a reboot in order to work. I haven’t had any issues with it thus far, and I highly recommend following Scott Hanselman’s wonderful tutorial.

I’m not a Windows command line user at heart, I was raised during my Computer Science classes to poke around Linux machines. Sadly, certain commands like ls -la come much more naturally to me than dir /a. My solution to this is installing the CoreUtils for Windows package, which adds most of the core GNU utilities into the command line. This hack requires installing a package from SourceForge and adding to the PATH environment variable, which are covered in this blog post over at AskStudent.com.

Finally, I’m a huge fan of using the pushd/popd commands: push directory and pop directory. Basically it’s a way to return to directories instead of having to overuse cd or even remember where you were. Luckily, there’s an easy way to keep track of the amount of directories that have been pushed onto the stack by changing the PROMPT environment variable to

$p$_$+$g

Check out the AskStudent tutorial to see how to do get to the environment variables window if you don’t know how. What this does is add + symbols to the command line window as shown in the screenshot. It’s ridiculously useful, and now I just wish I could figure out how to automagically pushd and cd at the same time.

If you’ve got any questions regarding pimping out your command line or other great hacks I’m missing out on, let me know!

My buddy Island Dog pointed me towards a great tool called Defraggler, and this started my journey. Essentially, it allows you to really control the defrag process from a drive and individual file level. It also includes the color graph that sadly, Vista removed. Obviously, this tool is pretty much only for power users, as I’m sure grandma doesn’t even know the slightest about what a hard drive even is. Partly I’m glad that Vista streamlined the process of defragmentation, but I have a feeling normal users won’t be doing it regularly until Windows does it for them or it’s watered down to one huge button called “Drive Maintenence” that does Disk Cleanup, a defrag, and whatever else fun stuff Microsoft decides that your drive needs. For users like me however, I like having a bit of control. Not too much though, I’m not a supervillian.

Anyway, Defraggler is a very neat app. It clearly presents the process, what files need to be moved around, and shows your data being moved around. It also allows you to switch the process priority from normal to background so I can actually use my computer during the process. This is nice for XP, while the visualization helps on Vista. I find the color graph absolutely fascinating since I’m scared to death of low level stuff like this, but my mind does wonder how defragmentation works under the hood. Maybe someday I will be a supervillian after all…just definitely not using Linux to control my orbiting brain lasers.

Reddit has been sucking up way too much of my time during the day, and I’ve decided to put an end to it. All I did was block it through my hosts file to redirect to 127.0.0.1, which works out well since during my work time it directs me to the website that I’m developing.

So, I’m turning off the firehose. I will probably end up blocking Digg and Slashdot as well, and I need to set up Google Reader for my favorite blogs. Yeah, this means I’ll sacrifice that information intake that my brain is used to, but I feel that time could be used to read the several books I have lying around my room, be it Code Complete or the Mythical Man-Month. My guitar is also gathering plenty of dust, and I have a few side projects that I could be working on as well. Here’s to less distractions! Do you have distractions that you could probably do without?

1. Not being able to skip cut scenes
   Sometimes, gamers just want to jump into the action. Yes, I know that designers have spent grueling hours working in their wonderful plot into the game, and skipping cut scenes may mean that the gamer will miss out on crucial story elements and possibly even essential game hints. Well, that’s just too bad, and sometimes I don’t mind taking that kind of chance. Perhaps I just need to vent a bit by blowing up some aliens or lighting a few people on fire. Another gripe I have with this is that some games don’t make the option apparent if it is available at all during a cut scene. Please make them optional. I beg you. One game I played recently that either I couldn’t skip or couldn’t figure out how to skip was Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It’s now collecting dust in my cd case.
2. Bad artificial intelligence
   This one is probably hated by most gamers, and we’ve all seen it. The AI runs enemy monsters or units into a wall, they can’t figure out how to path correctly to follow you, or perhaps the designer of the game just didn’t test the AI in the way that you think it should work. Well, it pretty much sucks when this happens. Rarely though is it a reason to stop playing a game, but when the AI is good it’s easy to tell, and in some cases it’s actually frightening.
3. Hard to use menus
   This is a killer when you’re trying to get things done fast. One might think that this kind of behavior is a no brainer and should be somewhat of an industry standard by now, but sometimes game designers absolutely fail at the 2D portions of the UI. One example I love is simple and definitely proven are any of Valve’s game menus. They are somewhat of a convention in Valve’s games and they present easy options first for beginner users while also allowing more experienced users to easily whip through menu choices. Crappy menus and other UI options are very easy to spot. One of the worse things you can do is slow down a user as they’re going through the menus. Warcraft 3 does this with the stupid chain menu system, which I’ve grown to loathe. Sometimes games can fail completely in both usability and readability, the biggest example of this I can think of is Dead Rising. I couldn’t even read the menus since the text was horrible and it was laid out poorly. Ugh.
4. Collect-a-thons
   When I was 10, I used be able to stand running around various platformer worlds gathering every last bit that games could offer me. Hell, I even got 101% in Donkey Kong 64, but I wasn’t hardcore enough to get all the stars in Super Mario 64 or all of the golden skulltulas in Ocarina of Time. Now however, I absolutely can’t stand it. Games can get by without them just fine, but for some reason developers continue to inject these endless quests. World of Warcraft could even be considered one giant collect-a-thon. I guess that this mentality appeals to some gamers, but I’m over it. And yes, I did beat Super Mario Galaxy, just with the minimum amount of stars.
5. Voice chat
   Ah, the bane and boon of online gaming. I’ve become somewhat jaded to this miracle of modern technology, and now I’m absolutely sick of it. If I’m playing an FPS, I’m there to snipe someone’s head off or lay a trap to waste them with, and not to listen how their day went or who in pop culture is ridiculously hot and said nerd doesn’t have a chance with. I don’t want to hear about how someone is cheating, hacking, or just being a bag of douche in the game. Get over yourself, and shut up. One of the first things I’ll do with games that have voice chat embedded is turn it off immediately. I’d rather leave voice chat to external programs that can be dedicated to the sole purpose of transmitting voice instead of having to build all of that extra functionality into the game.

What things tick you off about video games? I’m sure there’s irksome moments that occur on a daily basis for any gamer, and here’s your chance to rant about it.