This tutorial will show how to add programs to Startup so they will be launched automatically after a user logged in (like Skype or Anti-Virus programs do).

Using Windows XP, this was really easy: Just drag the application shortcut of your program to Start -> Programs – > Startup. Using Windows 7,  this folder won’t be shown, but it still exists. Here is how to autostart any program:

• Go to your Startup folder. You can access it by typing “shell:startup” into the search bar in your Start Menu:
  
• Now create a shortcut to the application you want to autostart and put it into the Startup folder.
  
• That’s it basically. Now the application you linked to in the Startup folder will start always after YOU logged in. Other computer users have to do the same thing again!
• After you put the first shortcut into the Startup folder, it will be shown in the Start Menu, so you can easily remove the shortcuts again or place new ones there.
  

If you don’t want or can’t use the search, you can also access the folder by going to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and replacing <username> with your actual username. Better enter it directly into your address bar since the AppData folder is hidden and you may not see it.

Using a few console commands, you can easily create giant screenshots of Crysis with resolutions of 28800×16200 or more megapixels, which corresponds with 225 times Full-HD resolution!

Here is how to create such enormous screenshots:

• Launch Crysis, select any graphics settings you want and load a savegame
• Open the console by pressing the ` key on English keyboards, ^ key on German ones (below Esc and to the left of 1)
• Type con_restricted 0 and press Enter. This will unlock all the restricted console commands.
• Now use e_screenshot_width and e_screenshot_height followed by the desired number of pixels, I used e_screenshot_width 28800 and e_screenshot_height 16200 for my huge image.
• By default, your screenshot will be saved as TGA file, you can also change the filetype by entering e_screenshot_file_format followed by either jpg, tga or bmp
• Select your fists as weapon by pressing “1″ twice
• Enter cl_hud 0 to disable the HUD
• Enter e_screenshot 1 to take a screenshot. This may take a while, Crysis will render many parts and put them together as one big image later on.
• Your Screenshot will be located in Crysis/Game/ScreenShots/HiRes as a large TGA file. I recommend IrfanView for viewing the picture, most other programs will crash when trying to open such a big file!

I resized my resulting 1.3GB TGA file to 1920×1080 pixels afterwards in order to be able to publish it here, but of course all the cool details are gone that way. Your result may look like this:

Click here for 1080p version of this screenshot. I actually set all graphics settings to Ultra High and have no idea, why the water reflections and stuff are missing… probably gone due to the down-sampling. Don’t take too many screenshots, otherwise all your HDD space will be gone…

Below are some more down-sampled versions of 450 megapixel screenshots. The weird stripes you can see don’t appear in the full-size versions, so I think I have to blame the down-sampling again…

For some time, the developers at Google were working at a solution to make their search engine faster. Now you can test the new search architecture called “Caffeine” yourself.

Obviously, they reached their goal of increasing the search speed, but didn’t change the search behavior. When searching for normal terms, you can feel a speed increase of up to 75% in my tests, but when using more complex searches with quotes, there is almost no difference.

You can test the new Caffeine search here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Some speed tests:

As you can see, when using quotes, the difference is not that big.

UPDATE: With Chrome 4.0, there are official extensions and a better ad-blocking plugin available! Please check out the AdThwart extension to block advertisements in Google Chrome!

Adblock scripts for Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer have been around for a while, but until now, there was no easy-to-install extension for Google Chrome with a similar  functionality. The latest release of Google Chrome, version 3, has added easy support for extensions, and a nice guy called gg3po has developed an extension to disable advertisements on websites.

Here is how to activate that extension:

• Step 1: Prepare Google Chrome
  First of all, download Google Chrome Channel Changer (alternative download), launch it and set the mode to Dev. Then click Update to save the settings.
  
• Step 2: Update Google Chrome
  In Chrome, click on the settings button (on the right side) and select About Google Chrome. The appearing window will check for updates and download them, if available. After the download finished, close Chrome.
  
• Step 3: Enable extensions
  Now right-click on your Chrome shortcut, select Properties. Add “–enable-extensions” (without the quotes) as launch parameter to your Target path.
  
• Step 4: Download AdSweep
  Launch Chrome, now extensions should be enabled (although you won’t see any change yet). Go to http://www.adsweep.org/ and download the Extension for Chrome (not the User Script!) (alternative download). A window will pop up asking you whether to install the extension, click OK.
  
• Step 5: Restart Chrome & start surfing ad-free!
  Now most ads on websites shouldn’t show up any more!

This is how a website looked before and after enabling the AdSweep extension:

There are so many websites out there who can calculate Currency Exchange Rates for you, e.g. Google Search, Bing Search or Yahoo Currency Converter. But what if you just want to have the exchange rate to use in your Desktop or Web Application? It would be kinda troublesome to extract the rate from one of the websites above, especially when they decide to change the layout of their HTML code.

That’s why I decided to create a very simple Currency Exchange Rates API. This API allows you to either get the conversion rate from US Dollar to your desired currency or can directly convert an entered value. The output is plain text, without HTML or XML attributes for easy access from all sources.

How does it work?

Just call the URL of the API with your desired exchange rate as parameter, e.g.

for Euro. This will return the exchange rate from USD to EUR:

Which currencies are supported?

All in all, 126 different currencies are supported. See a list of all supported currencies on the index page.

Are the values up-to-date?

The API updates itself once an hour, so the values you’re getting may be up to 1h old. This should be good enough since these values are for information purposes only.

How can I use the API on my website?

This example shows how to use the API to display 100$ in € (please replace the &amp; stuff in the URL with a normal &, can’t display it correctly here):

How does the calculator work?

The calculator works almost the same way as the API itself. Call calculator.php with three parameters: original, target and value. original and target are ISO codes of the currency, and value is the amount of orignal currency to convert. The output is the corresponding amout of target currency.

How accurate are the values?

The acuracy of the exchange rates can’t be guaranteed. All values are for informational purposes only. See the footer of the index page for more information.

Mirrors (most recent list):

• http://www.multimolti.com/apps/currencyapi/index.php
• http://www.lennart-moltrecht.com/apps/currencyapi/
• http://tp1.com.ar/currency/
• http://www.sann-gmbh.com/currencyapi/
• http://static.hattrick-youthclub.org/currency/
• http://financy.dbeuchert.com/

Please use multimolti.com or sann-gmbh.com since they’re the most stable ones!

Websites using the Currency Exchange Rates API:

• http://momento24.com/en/, “Currency” tab in the sidebar.
• More will hopefully follow soon!

If there are any questions about the API, bug reports or feature requests, please feel free to comment!

Today I uploaded the latest version of my MultiInput game “Airship Assault” which resolves most known bugs. It is the first game that uses my MultiInput library in order to support many players playing the same game on onecomputer with multiple mice connected to the computer.

Major changes:

• Mouse sensitivity can now be changed ingame
• Game Launcher added, checks whether XNA Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 2.0 are installed before launching the game
• Optimized game file package
• Music file not needed to play the game, if missing, the game will just launch without music
• Source code optimized in many parts

Download Airship Assault 1.1!

On May 15, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha (sometimes just called WolframAlpha) went online. Wolfram|Alpha (in the following just refered to as “WA”) is an answer engine, meaning it can handle complete sentences and questions as search queries.

The special thing about WA is that it doesn’t just display a filtered collection of links to other websites matching your search query, it rather “compiles” all available information on the internet into a overview page showing all interesting facts about the term you searched for.

Currently, the website is mainly focussed on natural sciences (mathematics, physics, engineering), geographical data, stocks and unit conversion, but I’m sure more topics will follow soon. Currently, searching for “The Beatles” returns nothing, but searching for a some mathematical equations gives you a hell lot of information: Plots, Limits, the Derivative, Series representations, Integrals, … It can even show you the way it computed the Derivative with explanations about the methods used.

When entering cities or countries, you will get a map and information about the population, weather, flag, languages, currency and so on. Wolfram|Alpha can also compare data, e.g. the GDP of China and the USA.

Whole sentences are fragmented into different parts, e.g. “Where was Bill Gates born” is structured into “Bill Gates” and “place of birth”, resulting in “Seattle, Washington” and the geographical information about Seattle. Wolfram|Alpha answers some questions in a humorous way, e.g. when asking for the meaning of life, it returns “42″ (quote from “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”).

All in all, Wolfram|Alpha seems to be a very good alternative to Google when searching for information in one of the topics mentioned above and wanting to have a quick overview over the most important data.

If you encounter errors when playing some Painkiller levels or starting a multiplayer game, and the error looks like the one below, there is an easy way of solving it.

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/ParticleFX/Environments/SnowEnvironm..."]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/Items/C1L3_korzenie.CItem"]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

[string "../Data/LScripts/Templates/Items/C1L3_uapka.CItem"]:1: invalid control char near `char(1)’

First of all, patch Painkiller to the latest version (1.64). If the patching doesn’t work because you don’t have registry entries, download my Painkiller registry entries here.

Then you have to download these template files for Painkiller and extract the archive using WinRAR or any other archiving program into the Painkiller directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Painkiller). If it asks to replace files, select “yes to all”. Now your game should work perfectly!

Now that the actual development of Windows 7 is finished, Microsoft seems to begin with Windows 8 according to different sources on the Internet. The new operating system will include innovative new features like cluster support, a “revolutionized file access in offices” and is called a “cutting-edge project”.

The rumors that Microsoft begins developing the Windows 8 before Windows 7 has been released is based on a job description on the Microsoft website saying:

“Are you a talented SDE/T Lead looking for the next technical challenge on a key operating system component? Are you passionate about distributed systems, networking, file systems and want to be the leader of a cutting edge project? Are you looking for a team with abundant opportunities to grow? If so, we have the position for you!

DFSR is Microsoft’s premier file replication engine and is an integral part of our branch office strategy and File Server role. It can scale to thousands of servers and replicate hundreds of terabytes of data. We have shipped the technology that powers file sharing in Windows Live Messenger, Windows Meeting Spaces (Vista) and Branch Office replication in Windows Server 2008 which has strong customer deployment. DFSR technology saves MS-IT and our customers more than 80% WAN bandwidth by using advanced On-The-Wire differential compression.

For the upcoming version of Windows, new critical features are being worked on including cluster support and support for one way replication. The core engine is also being reworked to provide dramatic performance improvements. We will also soon be starting major improvements for Windows 8 where we will be including innovative features which will revolutionize file access in branch offices.”

Since Steve Ballmer announced shorter periods of developing their operating systems after the long time we had to wait for Vista, it makes sense that Microsoft starts that early with the development. On the other hand, it may turn out that it’s just a typing mistake in the job description. Until this moment, Microsoft didn’t confirm the speculation.

Just a few weeks ago Futuremark, a company known for creating benchmark programs for Windows computers (3DMark and PCMark), released a new benchmark called “Peacekeeper“. Peacekeeper tests various browser functions such as JavaScript arrays, DOM functionality, rendering and other things often used by today’s modern websites like YouTube, Facebook and GMail.

Why would you need a browser benchmark? The better a browser performs on your system, the faster websites are shown and can interactively been used. This is especially needed when browsing Web 2.0 websites, and on low-end PCs such as netbooks the difference can really be a barrier. I experienced this using my favourite browser Firefox 3.0 on my Asus Eee PC 900: When typing and address into the address bar, the “intelligent search” feature needs so much computing power that the whole browser is stuck. Also using GMail or Facebook doesn’t make fun when you have to wait for a second before you can click, scroll, type, etc… That’s why I switched to Google Chrome. Jukka Mäkinen, Head of PC Products and Services at Futuremark, said:

“People have more choice now in how they experience the internet than ever before. But they may not realize that performance between browsers can vary dramatically, especially on lower-end PCs. With Peacekeeper, it’s simple to compare different browsers and see which one offers the best performance on your PC.”

Benchmark your browser now using Peacekeeper!

I compared all the major browsers on my computer (Pentium 4 3.2GHz with Hyper-Threading, onboard S3 graphics) and got quite interesting results:

[poll id="6"]

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