I hate it when they do that!

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Andreas

I hate it when someone tries to overprotect me or tries to tell me what I am supposed to do (or not to do) with no easy way of making my own choice!

Microsoft Outlook has this nasty behavior in an extremely annoying feature: for some reason unknown to me, Microsoft has decided which attachments to Outlook items are “safe” and which ones are not.

For those that are not, Outlook has a friendly message for you:

“Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments: […]”

Know what? Thanks for offering protection and trying to keep me out of harms way but I think I really, really, really want to get to that attachment! Any why, oh why did you not put that into the other options that Outlook allows me to configure?

You are allowing me to switch on or off Message Header Shading when reading a message but you are not allowing me to switch on or off if I want you to block potentially unsafe attachments? And you are not doing this since when? Oh – you never did ask but cause that problem over and over again for years now? Cool… here is how you can get around it:

  1. In case Outlook is running, close it.
  2. Click Start, then launch regedit.exe via the Run… item in the Start menu.
  3. Navigate the Registry:

    HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office \ MajVer.MinVer \ Outlook \ Security

    where MajVer.MinVer is the internal version number of the Outlook Version (Office Version) you are running: 14.0 for Office 2010, 12.0 for Office 2007, 11.0 for Office 2003…

  4. Create a new String Value and name it Level1Remove
  5. Edit the new value, entering the file extensions you do not want to be blocked automatically: .exe if you want to unblock executables. Or concatenate multiple extensions: .exe;.url if you want to unblock executables and URLs.
  6. Close the Registry Editor and restart Outlook

Form now on, Outlook will not prevent you from accessing the information you need to access – but be aware: this change is at your own risk, I am not assuming any responsibility whatsoever should you catch a virus, mess up your computer in any way or simply don’t want to deal with the registry!

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US Cities X – San Francisco

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Andreas

A little while ago, I have written a review about aerosoft’s US Cities X – Chicago product. At the time, I had done so because of Chicago being an old familiar area to Flight Simulator pilots – and not so much because it is a nice real-world memory for myself (although I have been there twice). This time, looking at US Cities X – San Francisco, it is different.

Purchase and Payment

As usual with aerosoft products, I buy them straight off their own web site – makes more sense to me than getting it from simmarket – but either way, you have to pay 14.95€ for the product. Once purchased, you will have the record of the software sale and your license key and download link attached to your aerosoft shop account. The download is quick and easy – about 170MB run through the line.

Installation

The installation itself is a typical aerosoft: start the installer, type in the eMail you used to log in to the aerosoft shop as well as the license key you have received and then install into the desired location. In less than five minutes, the system is installed and I have placed my helicopter in KSFO – San Francisco International – which is outside the actual scenery being discussed but close enough to simply fly in…

Flight into Downtown

Coming from KSFO and heading almost straight to the north, I am passing what used to be Candlestick Stadium. Ahead – and slightly to our left – the famous skyline of San Francisco starts to appear – downtown with the skyscrapers and the Transamerica Pyramid, the Bay Bbridge and Treasure Island.

Amongst the San Francisco neighborhoods, the Financial District with the skyscrapers sticks out – the scenery resembles it pretty well and from the distance, the sensation of seeing the famous skyline passing by is present.

Turning west, following Market Street and then making a slight right turn towards City Hall, the sensation is fading – besides the skyscrapers and some other dominant buildings, there is too much standardized autogen for my taste: it just does not look and feel like it should.

From the Embarcadero to the Palace of Fine Arts

Turning around towards the skyscrapers and following the coastline starting at the Ferry Building, passing famous Pier 39 and finally ending at the Palace of Fine Arts, the feeling turns into certainty: this is not it, this is not “the city by the bay”!

Maybe that is unfair – maybe, it is impossible to catch and preserve the feeling the city creates – but in general, I have to say that I had expected “more” – whatever “more” is but certainly more than what I got.,

Technical Perception

From a technical perspective, I would consider the scenery as “mainstream” – specific buildings and other objects are well done – on the other hand, the two bridges, Golden Gate and Bay Bridge, simply are not – you get close to them, they look ugly. So does the strange accumulation of cruise ships between Pier 39 and the Marina – I have never seen them being stacked like this in all the months I spent in the city… it looks like someone did not really want to bother where to place the ships – as long as they are placed.

Frame-wise, I kept getting flyable rates around 10 – 20 FPS when near downtown – occasionally as little as 7 FPS but the scenery was flyable (in a default aircraft).

Night Textures and Seasonal Textures

In all fairness, aerosoft points that out on their web page:

“Because the file size is rather large due to the ground image it only includes one season (in most cases this is not a real issue) and no night textures. The VFR flights over these cities is mostly a day time affair anyway”

I did not really read (or recognize as such) but I do not agree with aerosoft on the night textures: they view of the skyline during dusk or dawn (and even at night when – by the book – you might not do VFR) to me simply is a “must have” for such a scenery. Leaving it out leaves a huge gap in the perception of the scenery. Anyone who wants to take a guess at what I mean, look at the picture heading this article… I took that one from Treasure Island back in 1997 – that is what the night skyline should look like!

Besides, the argument of size fades when looking at other scenery products: US Cities X – San Francisco is barely 170MB – even given that is is a bit older than the brand new Las Vegas Scenery – I am sure it was not a “matter if size” that night textures did not get included in this one.

Summary

On the positive side, the sheer availability of a city scenery for San Francisco is positive. The city is by far one of the top destinations in the US and deserves a quality representation in Flight Simulator X. The modeling of specific buildings and objects is acceptably good but not outstanding – but I did not recognize the strange “shaping” to buildings that – for the Chicago Scenery – aerosoft attributed to “scaling” effects.

On the negative side, I simply must say: the feeling does not carry over – this may be unfair but a “quality representation” of the city to me is different. While the Financial District shows a hint of what the scenery could look like, the rest of the covered area does not live up to that standard.

Finally, the lack of night textures to me is a big “no go” – as much as the totally inadequate modeling of the seashore area between Ferry Building and Marina is. Having said this, it is almost worthless to mention the close-up looks of the two dominant bridges – I cannot see why so much effort has been put into Sutro Tower but not into the so world famous bridge…

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Greetings from the outer Solar System

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Andreas
Voyager Spacecraft

Voyager 1

A hearty “Well done!” to an old traveler – the US spacecraft Voyager 1: NASA has confirmed today, that the space probe has reached a point in the outer solar system where the effects of the solar wind are no longer measurable (it actually reached that point in June but the results got confirmed today).

At a current distance of unbelievable 10.8 billion miles from the sun, this makes her and her sister ship Voyager 2 the two man-made items that had gone farther and deeper into space than any other spacecraft or probe has ever done (and there is not much to suggest that they will have to share that title any time soon with any other space  probe).

Distances

Speaking of distances, let’s bring things into perspective: in general, astronomy deals with huge distances and astronomers have come to use different measurements than miles or kilometers because the numbers grow far to large. Instead, astronomical distances are measured in really “astronomical” units (you will see: its a play of words):

  • The Earth is about 150 Million Kilometers away from the Sun – in numbers: 150.000.000 Km. To make it easy, astronomers have called this an Astronomical Unit. So if someone says “This spacecraft has traveled 1 Astronomical Unit” then this means “This spacecraft has traveled a distance of 150 Million Kilometers.“
  • The light of the sun needs to travel roughly 5 Astronomical Units – in other words: about 750 Million Kilometers – until it reaches the larges planet in our solar system: Jupiter. For that distance, the light will need about 45 Minutes…
  • In order to reach Pluto, the light of the sun would have to travel almost 40 Astronomical Units – in numbers: almost 6.000.000.000 (6 Billion!) Kilometers. That is so far, it would take the light about 5.5 hours to get there (and there is nothing faster than light, as far as we know!).

And that is where our solar system ends for many of us (even though we know today there are dwarf planets behind Pluto). Voyager 1 has gone way beyond that: tonight, she is an unbelievable 115 Astronomical Units away from Sun (or Earth, at that distance, it does not matter).

115 Astronomical Units – that is 17.250.000.000 Km or roughly 10 billion miles. The light of the Sun needs 16 hours to get there – and so does any radio control signal the NASA is still sending to the space probe.

And what is next? In another few years (maybe as little as four) the probe will leave the Solar System and enter interstellar space – it will be the final frontier to cross and Voyager 1 will be the first space probe launched by man to go where nothing man-made has ever gone before….

Reflections

Voyager 1 has also left us something else to consider – and I wish, people would really reflect on it: in 1990, the space probe took a last set of photos looking back at where it has come from. From a record distance of 6 billion kilometers, it photographed Earth – nothing but a “pale blue dot” almost invisible in the vastness of space.

Usually, I write my texts myself – there is no point in being a copy-cat or thief of other people’s words – but in honor of Carl Sagan, I would like to quote a great assessment he made on that particular photo:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan, “Pale Blue Dot”

There is nothing more to say…

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One of those rare occasions…

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Andreas

Did you ever had that feeling before? You find a box, you open it up and all the sudden, you feel like you are in a different time…

I had that feeling today – this “time capsule” arrived via DHL yesterday and I had found some moments to examine its content. The offer on eBay that I had been bidding on (and which I won) said nothing more than “Amstrad CPC6128 with Color Monitor and 75 Floppy Discs” – it cost me 100€ and yes, I am admitting it: it is a waste of money, there is nothing really useful I can do with the old computer, it is taking up space and it will catch dust…

Taking a second look, however, it is a key to an era gone by – not only has this computer and this generation of computers (at that time known as “Home Computer”) ceased to exist and has been replaced by standardized PCs – also, the games reflect the spirit of the time and in this special case, the three boxes the floppies came in reflect the personal taste of their owner (who’s name I have removed in the images).

However, it really was the content of the floppies that got me – yes, you can download an emulator for the CPC series for almost any current operating system, and you can even download huge game archives from the Internet that allow you to play those games on the emulator. But nothing – nothing! – comes even close to running it on the original computer with the original color monitor and the original 8bit sound (and the original flicker of the 50Hz cathode ray tube). Call me old-fashioned but emulation is just not the same as the real thing (just like a flight simulator can never ever make up for a real flight).

And there is one other point: while all those archives on the Internet will provide you with the “professional” software packages sold those days, it is very, very hard to get a hold of those ones written by amateurs: many computer magazines in those days existed because of and provided computer enthusiasts with pages over pages over pages of computer listings one would type into the own computer to get the program going. The attached sample, by the way, stretched over five pages and had a total of just over 300(!) lines of code. It turned out to be a Pac-Man-like game for free (or not more than the cost of the magazine).

Try it out: if you use Google to search for “smiley und die grumpies” nothing will come up. Those are the ones that will be lost when the last old tape cannot be replayed and last old disk cannot be read anymore. Are they important? Maybe not – but they are what many of us that started with computers when it was all new also started with.

<PersonalComment>

I recently wrote an eMail to the person who published a full-blown astronomy program called Sky***t in one of those magazines, asking if he might still have an old copy of the magazine or the code at hand. Sadly enough, I did not even receive an answer. I am sorry, I think, that…s*cks!

</PersonalComment>

Speaking of “many of us“: in the mid ’80s, several different companies had actively developed and maintained independent computer systems such as the famous Commodore C64 or the Amiga, the Atari 800XL and Atari ST Series or the Amstrad line (CPC 464/664/6128).

Although we had been fighting over which one was “the best”, none of them was so much different from the others – their hardware was different but the games and programs had often been available for multiple platforms. Likewise, the magazines their owners read had been different but the content was stunningly similar.

So let’s have a look at some of the games I found amongst those floppy disks I now own (and some that I raised for the emulator and included for one or the other reason in this post).

Bruce Lee – published in 1984 by US Gold. Jump & run through 19 levels, collecting items and fighting the Ninja and the Green Yamo.

I think, this one was one of my long-time favorites back then – the choice between homework and Bruce Lee was an easy one (not appreciated by parents or teachers but what’s new?)

Crazy Cars – published in 1988. Racing car simulator featuring a moving skyline (yes, it is New York – or at least I think I can see the Mrs. Liberty!) and other cars as opponents.

The trick here was to keep the car on track and avoid collisions while trying to outrace anyone else – does that sound so much different from F1 2010 or Need for Speed?

The Hobbit: this one drove me nuts – it was a text adventure based on Tolkin’s story and although the text parser today is considered “advanced for the time“, one had to have the proper key words included to make progress.

The Hobbit, however, was a commercial success story with over a million games sold by the end of the ’80s.

Hunt for Red October: who does not know Tom Clancy’s story about the Russian submarine commander taking his sub and crew to the United States?

Remember, this was the time the Cold War was hottest and the Soviet Union was considered “the enemy” (definitely here in Germany!) and this game gave us the chilling feeling of going to war with the Warsaw Pact. Amazing how times have changed since then…

You may be playing Prince of Persia today on Playstation or XBox – but this one, released in 1990 – was the very first version. Happy 20th anniversary, Prince!

Again, the graphics may be different but the idea behind the game is still the same! And that holds true also for the next game I found on the floppies – a very early version of a military shooter.

Today, we are playing Call of Duty or Medal of Honor – back in 1985 this was called Who dares wins.

I could go on for ages – there are so many games on those discs and there are so many memories attached to them – but I think, this post is already close to its maximum and therefore worth finishing up.

One last game to mention though: the mother of all submarine simulations: Silent Service. Published in 1988 by MicroProse, Silent Service has set the bar for any submarine simulation to come.

Long before Silent Hunter has come out, Silent Service already features a full map of the Pacific, Conning Tower and Periscope Views as well as Weapons management and Damage Reports.

It was one of the first games of a legendary game designer – Sid Meier. You may have never owned a C64, CPC or alike – but if you have every played a computer game, the chance is high that you know at least one of his games.

One last picture for the day – does this one look familiar? I wonder who said that menu bars and drop down menus had been developed by Microsoft or Apple…

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Looking at the ZX-81 – does it work? Or is it dead?

Posted on November 13, 2010 by Andreas

Unfortunately, this turned out to be not as easy as I hoped it would be: the ZX-81 was built to “minimalistic” standards – to be polite! There is no LED or light to indicate if it is switched on or off, there is no sound one can test to see if it works… there is simply nothing but the picture on the TV Screen and – if you don’t have that – no other way to tell if the system is operational or not.

The problem with my ZX-81 is that the box did not contain the TV Connector cable. “Well, fine, I just use the antenna cable of my TV” was my first though and it quickly turned out to be naive: my cable does not fit into the connector of the ZX-81!

So here  I am, not knowing if the computer I bought even works, but curios as hell to learn if it does or not! I decided to “tweak” the connection to the TV a little but – putting a TV Antenna Splitter “the wrong way” into the connection between the computer, just to see if any sort of signal come out of the little black box.

And yes, it does: the TV produced a clear (but not stable) image of the ZX-81 Command Prompt on UHF Channel 36 – so now that I know it does actually work, I can start wondering about how to hook it up to either the TV or – preferably – a modern LCD Monitor.

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