Nathan Alter:

If your motherboard goes out and you have Windows 7 OEM (Windows that comes with a new computer) you’d have to buy Windows again.  Of course, they’re trying to get people to buy the more expensive non-OEM version.  LAN parties be gettin’ expensive…between buying full versions of OSes and individual copies of games for each computer…it’s almost impossible for an individual to do these days.  I hope Ubuntu gaming takes off some day.

Need to do a quick photoshop or drawing on a computer that has nothing installed?  No need to resort to Microsoft Paint.  Try pixlr editor.  Just go to the website and start editing the image.  Nice and straightforward.  (Requires Flash though.)

I introduced Sean to Gimp yesterday.  He had fun messing with photos and drawing new things.  Even a 5-year-old can learn enough to have fun with it.  I also had a look at teaching him Blender, but that interface is not exactly friendly to a 5-year-old.

Google Chrome recently added extensions, making it usable.  Chrome is a web browser that’s supposed to be speedy with Google apps, which I use a lot.  But I wouldn’t use a web browser without adblock.  Now it’s here.  Think I’ll try it out for a few days.

At the Windows command prompt, type systeminfo to see your PC’s stats.  Handy for troubleshooting.

For 2 days at work, I’ve been debugging a crashing program that uses an old Outlook 2000 interop DLL.  It was giving generic ComException errors that couldn’t reliably be troubleshot.  Then there was a power surge overnight and my computer rebooted.  I came in to find the program working just fine on my PC today.   Aaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!

Vanessa got some dark chocolate covered coffee beans.  It was about $4 for a small package of them, so they’re supa expensive.  But you eat one and you know they’re pretty much worth it.  It got me thinking about what would be required to make them.  Here are some instructions I ought to try.  But I don’t know how much coffee beans cost.  The cost could be in the coffee beans.

I forgot to bring my lunch today, but I had an MRE in the drawer at work.   According to the expiration code, it was produced either in 2008 or 1998.  These things are supposed to last over 7 years at room temperature, so I decided to take the risk.  I microwaved the roast beef with vegetables and it tasted fine.

Computer, give me an RSS feed of games with a Metacritic score of 80 or higher that are currently on sale for $5 or less.  I missed fl0w being available for free the other day!

My board gaming uncle was visiting recently.  We played Caylus Magna Carta, Dominion, and the Pandemic expansion.  We found out we’d been playing Pandemic wrong and in a much harder way because I misunderstood one of the rules.  No wonder we could never win.  (Unfortunately, we’ve tried this cooperative board game again a couple of times recently and still never win.  That game is teh hard.)  Dominion is a pretty good card game in which the cards have the rules written on them.  (I usually don’t like card games because they’re often random, but this one’s good.)  Every round of Dominion can be different because you can select what cards you want to use in that round.  You can play Dominion and other boardgames for free online at this German site.