First off, let me say I don’t have anything wrong with magicians.  I actually enjoy them and have been to one of David Copperfield’s shows.  I even practiced the hobby when I was younger.  Everyone loves a good trick.

My problem is with people like Criss Angel who are not magicians in my opinion, but perform this “street magic” and with people who actually believe this guy has powers.

He does not.  He is nothing more then an illusionist who uses planted people in the audience and camera tricks.  That is not magic in my opinion.  That is called being a talentless hack.

Recently Criss Angel was supposed to escape from a building about to be blown up for demolition.  Except that no one was allowed to be with in visual distance for “safety”.

Well they weren’t counting on a news helicopter exposing his trick with a zoom camera.  I think the video evidence is pretty clear here and exposes Criss Angel for what he really is.  Nothing more then a fraud who couldn’t put on a decent magic show if he wanted to.

See for your self

If you are running Windows Vista and have installed Service Pack 1 (SP1), you can gain around 800mb of disk space back.

When you install SP1, it backs up all the files in case you want to remove SP1.  But chances are pretty good that once you have SP1 installed you really have no reason to ever install it, so it is safe to remove those backup files.

It’s pretty simple.  Press Winkey+R to pull up a run dialog.  Type in Vsp1cln and press enter.

A prompt will confirm deleted the files.  Enter y obviously and it goes to work removing these useless backup files.

Enjoy reclaiming a bit of your hard drive space!

Years ago for some silly reason I signed up on Classmates.com

Since that time they have spammed the living hell out of my inbox.

I finally got tired of it today and deleted my classmates.com account.  I’m fucking sick of their bullshit spam.  I also don’t like the site because it’s what I think of as a “bait and switch” scam site.  They show you all these great things you could do, so you sign up for an account… only to realize you can’t do a damn thing with out forking over money to them.

So, if you’re a classmate registered on that spam site, guess I’m lost to you forever.  Oh well.  Chances are I didn’t like you any way.

In my article here I showed you how to make ISO, BIN, and other CD/DVD Image files mountable by simply double clicking them in Vista.

To accomplish this I used a tool call Creative Elements Power Tools.  It worked fine for what I was doing at the time.

Fastfoward 45 days or more later… I go back to use that tool again to manage some other file extensions in Vista only to discover the tool is now expired and they want $18 to register it.  After promptly uninstalling that bullcrap I went on the hunt for a 100% definitely free tool that would accomplish the same task.

I stumbled upon a freeware tool called File Type Manager that will allow you to manage file types to your heart’s content.  I actually like this tool a bit more.  It’s more “power-user’ish” which I appreciate.  No fluff and stuff bullshit, just a straight-up tool to manage what you are wanting to manage.

Even though it was written in 2001 apparently, it still works perfect in Vista!  Just note that when installing it you will get some warnings about it trying to install old versions of files.  Just be sure you keep the current versions of the files you have on your machine and you will be just fine.

That’s all for this post.  Just wanted to update anyone who may have used that tool in my other post and pass along a free tool I found.

I’m sure you’ve seen them… we’ve all seen them… the little green shield icon with the words “Hacker Safe” next to them.  Showing those links on a site is supposed to make the end user feel safe that their servers are, as the claim, “hacker safe”.

Now I for one have never put any amount of credibility in to that badge.  The claim alone is ridiculous.  Just because it passes some mysterious (what kind, who knows) checks from the hacker safe server, then that site is invulnerable to ALL hacks every where.

I got news for you… it’s bull shit, and I have (more) proof.

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First off, I’ll say I know there is a plugin that sort of does this for Daemon, but it does not associate all the file types and there is no way to add additional types to it and is quite buggy, as well as doing other shit I didn’t like.

I’d been wanting to do this for some time now to simply make it more efficient to mount CD/DVD images with Daemon Tools.  I always felt going through the DT menu from the tray icon was a giant pain in the butt.

In XP this process is different, and actually easier… but at the last LAN I was at every one was one Vista except for one person, so I’m not going to bother with XP instructions… although you can probably figure out how to do it in XP from these.

Vista’s dumb-down feature creates another casualty when it comes to trying to manually edit file type associations.  There is basically no way to do it.  You can change which program a file opens with, but it has to be a program… there is no way to input custom things for file types.  F-you Microsoft.  How do you REMOVE features from your flag ship OS?  Anyway…

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This year’s Spring ride was great, albeit a bit chilly! It was only a high of around 60 for the day, but we’d had these plans for a couple months now and didn’t want to try and get another weekend nailed down that everyone had free. I think we all decided that there will be a temp cap in the future of 70 or above.

But overall, it was a great ride! No run-in’s the police, and everything went smoothly. Once we got to Perre Marquette it was pretty decent out, but cooled back down again on the way home.

We ate at Finn Inn in Grafton, very neat place. If you like fish and have never been there, I highly suggest it.

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I have been using WM for nearly 2 years now. I started on WM5 and have been using WM6 for over a year now. I have had 2 different devices, both are PDA/Phone combination devices. The first was an HTC Wizard, and the second (and current) is an HTC Hermes.

I have loved these lil phones. They do literally anything and everything. Besides a phone and contact manager, you can surf the web, play games, emulate NES games, keep up to date on Weather, sports scores, RSS feeds, navigate using GPS, calculate anything you can imagine, take notes, photos, Exchange sync email, calendar, surf via Wifi, stream music and tv shows, or watch tv shows saved to your storage card…. etc… any way, you get the point.

These devices can do it all. If you want to do it, chances are some one out there has written a program that will allow you to do it.

But that’s where the glamor ends. Sure it may do all of these things, some of them well, some of them not so well, but it does not do them gracefully, or with ANY amount of style or intuition. The interface is a clunky disaster and navigating option menus and configurations is all but impossible at times.

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