A couple weeks ago I rolled back from Vista to XP. This isn’t due to any real performance concerns - apart from the ridiculous amount of time it sometimes (read: always) took to hibernate - but my laptop was built for XP and I lost a fair few functions when I upgraded. Hdd protection and function keys being just two.

However I’d entirely forgotten just how ugly windows XP looks.

Being utterly superficial like I am, I set off to solve this os-tonishing disaster (see what I did there?). My first idea was to use a vista theme, I liked vista’s looks just fine and had gotten used to them. Turns out quite a few people had already tried this - seemingly trying to emulate pre-release vista screenshots - but unfortunately none of them quite worked out. Every one had something that irked me - a glitch here, a flicker there - so I looked beyond pseudo-vistas and found this theme.

It’s the above theme that I wanted to shout to the world about - but it too had a tiny (tiny, tiny) problem. Every time I moved the ‘Test Movie’ window in Flash - the title bar would disappear. This forced me to Ctrl + W to get out of it.. and also looks glitchy and horrible.

All is not lost though (he says, as if this was world changing) as today completely by accident I found the ‘disable visual themes’ checkbox under an application-shortcut’s compatibility settings. Problem solved! By removing the theme from Flash itself.. the glitch doesn’t occur (and minimizes/maximizes quickly too).

Great stylin’ times.

Most recently is this. PSX2PSP is quite possibly the greatest third-party tool ever made for a sony console. It enables you to convert your dusty, old playstation 1 games into psp compatible eboot.pbp files. It’s absolutely fantastic. I never got around to finishing Final Fantasy IX when I still had my psx (despite getting to the second disc twice) - and now’s my chance.

Obviously the graphics don’t compare to the current, or even previous, generations of Final Fantasy games. Or even the latest psp games. But they still look good enough and have a cracking storyline to boot.

Dir.glob(”*”).each {|f| File.rename(f, f.gsub(”pattern”, “replacement”))}

Finds any occurrence of ‘pattern’ in any of the file names in a directory - and replaces it with ‘replacement’. Great times.

To whet your appetites for now though, I present the following:

And also, play: