Author: markus

How to break up with your girlfriend… in 64 easy steps.


No comment :)

Getting Fallout New Vegas to work with Wine

If you can’t wait to play the newest iteration of Fallout, yet don’t want to boot Windows to do it – with a little effort you can get it running under Wine as well.

It doesn’t seem to work out of the box, even with a very recent release (Failed to initialize renderer. Unknown error creating the GamebryoRenderer.)

But if you don’t mind adding a little patch and compiling Wine yourself, you should be able to get Fallout New Vegas up and running in no time.

WineHQ Bug 24831 describes the problem and someone else came up with a fix just a few hours later. But if you’re running Ubuntu 10.10, sadly the patch doesn’t apply right away. To manually fix it, just get the Wine source package and edit the file ‘dlls/d3d9/directx.c’, go to line 477, remove or comment out this part

*device = NULL;

return D3DERR_DRIVERINTERNALERROR;

and substitute it with this:

return IDirect3D9Ex_CreateDevice(iface, adapter, device_type, focus_window, flags, parameters, (void *)device);

Save the file and run ‘dpkg-buildpackage’ and when finished, install the resulting .deb.

(Or just download my modified directx,c and save it to wine1.2-1.2.1/dlls/d3d9/directx.c before compiling)

That’s it. Enjoy your stay in New Vegas. :)

How to bake a scone


Step One, Pre-heat the oven ’til it’s hot And take the mixing bowl or pot Spatula or wooden spoon Settle down, we’ll be baking soon A cup of milk, A cup of flour Mix in an egg, wait for an hour Take sultanas to fill the hole I just can’t wait to lick the bowl Take the bowl and pour the mixture in Make sure that you pre-grease the tin You see it’s easy, it won’t take long Now you know, how to bake a scone.

The Next Financial Crisis

If you have about 45 minutes to spare and want a nice, short summary of one of the many reasons we’re pretty much fucked, go and watch “Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis” on Journeyman Pictures YouTube channel.

In times of crisis people seek strong leaders and simple solutions. But what if their solutions are identical to the mistakes that caused the very crisis? This is the story of the greatest economic crisis of our age, the one that awaits us.

Assvertising

The Consumerists reports that KFC has come up with an ingenious new advertising concept: Gluteus Ad Maximus

Or as I like to call it: Assvertising

Also, check out this short news clip, discussing the issue and showing some nice examples :)

KFC ‘Double Down’ campaign has people talking ‘buns’ more than ‘chicken’ [WTEN.com]

Drugging and electroshocking little kids… for science?

A story, so unbelievable, you’d expect hearing it from conspiracy theorists and random crackpots was just published at truthout: The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA’s Experiments on Children.

It’s quite long, but if you have an hour or so to spare, it’s sure worth reading. Involving clinical child abuse on a massive scale, using drugs like LSD and electroshock “therapy” on at least hundred children as young as three, interrogation and torture of POWs and collaboration with Nazi doctors, big pharma sponsoring drugs to be tested on unsuspecting patients, CIA financing and cover-ups as well as physicians and psychotherapists, who’ve kept practicing and teaching in the US for decades, after committing all those crimes against humanity during fifties and sixties.

Due to a complete lack of citing sources, it’s quite hard to check for accuracy of said article – but sadly, it appears quite plausible, considering it all happened during the time of MK-Ultra, a large scale, illegal CIA human research program, which to this day remains highly classified by the US government. While you’re at it, you can spend some time reading up on that too, starting with the Wikipedia article.