Flecks of… Gray?

As has been my tradition for the last 7 years (see 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 2002) I’m making a list of my favorite 10 movies that I watched for the first time this year. Of course, I’m not recommending these movies for everyone, if you want personal recommendations, let me know. In the order that I watched them (newest first), here’s the list:




Honorable Mentions to Quantum of Solace, Watchmen, Sunshine Cleaning, Gran Torino and Food, Inc. which are also great films. (more…)

A few months ago, I posted about how I got onto Dropbox. I’ve really enjoyed it so far but the thing I like the most is something I didn’t know much about when I first got into Dropbox, that’s the Portable Applications. This lets me install all kinds of little junk programs onto Dropbox and they’ll be available to any computer that has my Dropbox on it. Now I don’t have to fill up my PC with all kinds of programs that are a little bit interesting but probably don’t warrant an install; also, if I change PC’s, I don’t have to install all this stuff cause it’s right there in my Dropbox.

Here are the legitimate portable programs that I’ve put onto my Dropbox so far:

1. 7-Zip – Zip file extraction
   
2. Audacity – Audio manipulation
   
3. FileZilla – FTP with nice saved sites
   
4. Firefox – Web Browser
   
5. FoxitReader – Light PDF reader
   
6. GIMP – Powerful Photo Manipulation
   
7. Google Chrome – Light Web Browser
   
8. InfraRecorder – CD/DVD Burner
   
9. LBreakout2 – Ball bouncing game
   
10. MPlayer – Video playing
    
11. Notepad++ – Great alternative to Notepad
    
12. Pidgin – Instant Messaging
    
13. Skype – Internet phone conversation
    
14. Sumatra – Light PDF Viewer
    
15. Thunderbird – Offline email
    
16. uTorrent – Torrent downloading
    
17. VLC – Best video player

Here’s the list of apps that I’ve been able to make portable and install:

1. 1-4a Renamer – Powerful file renamer
   
2. 1Time – countdown or alarm program
   
3. Baby Splat – Baby keyboard mashing program
   
4. CCleaner – crap cleaner
   
5. Deep Burner – CD/DVD burner
   
6. DeFraggler – Defragment with power
   
7. Device Doctor – Get the latest drivers
   
8. Dropbox – Sync it all to a thumb drive
   
9. Faststone Capture – Screen Capture better than PrntScrn
   
10. Faststone Resizer – Resize photos
    
11. Goldwave – Audio tool I actually paid money for (a long time ago)
    
12. Kid Rocket – Kid friendly browser and paint tool that I’m not too big a fan of (yet)
    
13. Launchy – Application Launcher to avoid manually finding all these files
    
14. MP3 Splitter – Split large MP3 files
    
15. MP3 Tagger – Tag batches of files
    
16. Process Explorer – Task Manager alternative
    
17. Revo Uninstaller – Uninstall programs and deep clean remove
    
18. Sizer – make your windows snap to a certain size
    
19. Spybot – remove spyware
    
20. Teracopy – copy batches of files with more options

Awhile ago, I got deeply into Desktop Tower Defense – you may remember all my posts on that game. Turns out that Kongregate has some other great online games too.

My favorites are of course the Desktop Tower Defense original and Pro games

Other Strategy/Desktop defense games that I like are Bloons Tower Defense 1, 2 and 3. Gemcraft and Gemcraft chapter 0. Whiteboard Tower Defense, Balloon Invasion and Onslaught2

Some top map plane shooter games that I like are Pixelvader, Upgrade Complete and Frantic

The Physics based puzzle games that I enjoy are Red Remover, Super Stacker 1 and 2, and Perfect Balance 1 and 2

I prefer the puzzle type games normally, and these are some of my favorites, The Company of Myself, Fantastic Contraption, Filler 1 and 2, and Zilch

Some puzzle games that are fun are Open Doors 1 and 2, Wooden Path, and Boombot 1 and 2, and 99 Bricks.

Happy Holidays!!

After ordering and liking the glasses (for the most part) that she got from goggles4u.com, Heidi decided to do it again for two reasons. One, she lost her favorite pair (which is no longer available) from the last batch of three pairs and, Two, they are having a good sale for the next few days (free frames – use the coupon code : FreeFrame). With the coupon, three pairs of glasses are going to end up being $60US; so for $20 a pair, that’s not too bad.

She decided to complement her last selection of glasses by getting new ones this time around. This is her hopefully great pair, her backup wacky pair (see pic above) and the sunglasses pair.

I drew some inspiration from this guy via reddit in conjunction with this classic Megaman sprite sheet to make my own Excel art. It was great fun to come up with a bunch of cool Megaman characters really easily in Excel. Now, what sort of interesting things could I do with this next?

2 years ago today, I logged out of facebook for the last time; well, kinda. About 3 months ago, I logged back in to facebook for three things that I wanted: to bug my cousin about the Argos loss, to get a picture from Vikki and to get in touch with original Saffron.

After successfully doing those things, I decided to hang around and not log out for good. I’ve been pleased with my use of facebook lately, only spending a few minutes in there every week.

There are some things I like that they’ve done since I used their service last; I like that they have the content of their internal messages right in the email reminder so I don’t have to log in to see it. I also like that I can unsubscribe from tons of stuff that’s not useful and make myself a quicklist of people that I actually want to see their information in a favorites view of the front page (sweet!) Lastly, I can put up my blog posts as notes automatically to my facebook page so lots more people can see my idiotic thoughts and provide comments.

Here’s the keeping my usage at a minimum.