Finally releasing my first new Premium Windowblinds theme on my site for this month, hope you all like it. Here is my Eternity WB: Eternity – LightStar Design Hope you all like it! You can also see all my latest releases here:  Themes New – LightStar Design You can check my previous posts here on the site too:  LightStar Design Windowblinds Themes » Forum Post by LightStar Enjoy!

My office has a lot of printouts in binders regarding the history of the universe (The Mithrilar Cycle) that both Galactic Civilizations and Elemental come from.   I once had the opportunity to write a book, Destiny's Embers  and that was quite an adventure.  My original story was 300 pages but my publisher, Del Rey, wanted it fleshed out and had an editor greatly expand the exposition of it.  One of these days, I hope to publish the original manuscript which, I should ...

There’s a new browser concept in town: How it can help you to concentrate, work, and de-stress. Opera conducted a survey and found: 58% of participants said they sometimes feel overwhelmed or stressed while browsing the web. 83% of all respondents said they would like it if their web browser made them feel better as they went about their day. 70% of respondents said that browsing the web on their computer (laptop or PC) is less distracting than browsing on their phone. ...

So, hands high...who knew Microsoft Defender had a VPN included? Well, whether you knew or not, you only have another 24 days to use it before they remove it. In fact, it’s only because they’re removing it that I found an article telling me I had it! So, why are they removing it? My guess is as good as yours, but it might be because folks weren’t using it...d’oh...of course they weren’t: No one knew it was there and MS never bothered to tell us! Btw, VPNs a...

With the benefit of hindsight, Tales of the Arnor should have been handled as a full expansion pack. It just has such a massive scope of changes in it.    For me, personally, it's the first GalCiv IV DLC I've got to work on since Tales of Centauron which I thoroughly enjoyed.  But this one...this one is just so much bigger. This will probably not be the last post I make on Tales of the Arnor so I will probably miss some things here. Of the Nyx So as some of you kno...

So I'm working on the upcoming DLC called  Tales of the Arnor and it's going to go pretty hard into the background on the Yor. To do that, I really need to explain a bit about the background of this game which, since it's a 30 year old series there's a lot of bits involved. No pun intended. In the beginning... So at the start there were the Mithrilar.  These were beings that we would consider to exist outside our universe.  One of them, called Draginol (which is where ...

  Your privacy...the last vestiges of it, that is, will cease to exist on February 16, 2025. That's when Google will start (really? I bet it's been going on for decades) fingerprinting every device accessing the net.  "Fingerprinting involves the collection of pieces of information about a device’s software or hardware, which, when combined, can uniquely identify a particular device and user." - Stephen Almond, I.C.O.   Google maintains that it now has "...

Some people might recall 'back in the day' ...about 10 years ago .... Thermaltake joined forces with BMW Design and came out with the "Thermaltake Level 10" Limited Edition case. It weighed a ton and was a silly price considering it didn't even come with a PSU ... $1299  AUD. I ended up with No.221 of the world-wide 500. Today, I saw on Ebay another for sale second hand [obviously] for $800 AUD - just "up the road" in South Australia .... No.21. ....and it comes with a MoBo and ...

  I really hope everyone has a fantastic new year... what are you wishes for 2025? Mine? That the entire planet is at peace and works together as one for the benefit of all mankind. It's a big dream I know, but we all have dreams...   

So earlier this year I bought a new desktop. Came with Windows 11. I quickly found out that I don’t really care for Windows 11. So I installed Windows 10/ everything worked great. However I know Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 next year and I don’t wish to pay for more patches from Microsoft or any third party. So I starting thinking outside the box. I don’t want to learn how to use Linux. No flavor of Linux has ever worked for me. Steep learning curve. So I bought m...

It's really amazing how easy Ara: History Untold is for modding. The first thing to know is that all the source data files can be found (if you're on Steam for instance) in a directory like: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ara History Untold\assets\SourceMods So say you don't like one of the balance of say...Recipes. Let's go find that. Recipes0.zdata is where all the recipes are. Now I happen to be a bit unhappy that the Feast recipe is defaulting to using money inste...

I went ahead and sprung for the $200 a month for ChatGPT Pro as I do a lot of data analysis on very large and complicated data sets.   The first thing I through at it was last month's full Perforce logs with diffs and and all so that I could get a nice friendly report of the various developers, how many CLs they did and an evaluation on the type of work they did and how much work they did. Here are my results: ChatGPT 4o.  Basically useless.  It didn't even get the...

Hey folks...I've seen many of you wallpaper artists (Az, Sed, tbc, JanOscar, relhom, naroon1, and others) mention (here and there) Midjourney, NightCafe, DALL-E, etc. I'd love for you to post an example of each engine you use and which engine you used to produce it. SimplexDesigns asked me who uses what, and I felt you should speak for yourselves and include what you like/dislike about them. So speak up...

For all my fellow Veterans out there, may your day be great!   

MS just released an updated PC Manager widget (PCM) which isn't too shabby and which integrates with other widgets as well. Btw,  Windows+W  makes your widgets appear. PCM also has a small task bar which can remain on your desktop if you wish ( 2 in my screenie) The task bar has various apps on it like screenshot internet speed, notepad and you can add to it via the three dots, or make it disappear.  You can get additional screenies here:  https://pcmanager.microsoft.co...