Month: August 2007

Enable Remote Desktop Connection on Vista Home Premium

Edit: I have now made a patch zip file for Vista SP1 32bit available here: http://www.unet.fi/fransblog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/termsrv_sp1.zip (NOTE: my file repository will be offline for some time from now on, hope you can find the file from elsewhere… hope it works for you, it did ok for my Home Premium SP1. However, note that I am not the original author of this hack, and can not offer any detailed technical help if something goes wrong; use only on your own responsibility, etc. Note that this does NOT work for the 64bit Vista.) — Note: commenting currently disabled (the thread is getting too long…)

There are many nice, but also quite many really irritating aspects to Windows Vista. Some are due to Microsoft intentionally crippling their own products. One of the most tiresome has been the disabling of Remote Desktop Connection. If you have to run down the stairs every time to check whether a particular process has ended or not, it gets old really quick, and double so when you realise that Vista Home Premium actually includes fully-featured Remote Desktop service, it is just broken by design. Here are the instructions to turn it back on — thanks a lot, guys!

Steps to Add Remote Desktop to Vista Home Premium:

1. Download termsrv.zip here
2. Extract Termsrv.zip to a temp directory
3. Start “Command Prompt” in Administrator mode (Run As Administrator)
4. Run the corresponding batch file for your Vista edition
5. Allow TCP Port 3389 on Windows Firewall or any other firewall product.
6. Done

See: TonyChan.Org Blogs – Remote Desktop on your Windows Vista Home Premium.

Nazi board games

Recently getting my hands on Ian Bogost’s new book, Persuasive Games, this was a nice coincidence: a news piece telling about board games produced under the German Nazi regime coming into auction — an interesting, albeit perverse example about the propagandist use of games. See: BBC NEWS | UK | Nazi board games under the hammer.

Full HD

Full HD
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Samsung M86 ‘Tulip’ 37″ television (LE37M86BDX/XEE) was our choice for our living room. A “full HD” television is also suitable for game sessions, and even for that photo editing stuff in the living room, close to your family. 1920×1080 resolution is enough for many things, but the distance from the screen to the sofa is of course different as compared to the typical PC screen use situation. I still need to learn more about fine-tuning and calibrating a HDTV screen. Here is a nice “dummies intro” into television tweaking, using THX test patterns from a commercial DVD. This screen is not perfect (is there such a thing?) but it should work for us for some time now and into the future, too.

Golden Compass, Stardust, LOTRO

Fantasy in its various shapes and types has been my enduring passion from the childhood days. This summer many nights have been spent adventuring in LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) game world, familiar from years of literary adventures in the Middle-Earth. Then there are the movies. From my favourite authors, Stardust is based on a novella by Neil Gaiman (as a graphic novel with illustrations by Charles Vess). Still waiting for this to premiere in Finland, this should be fairly ok. Another interesting question mark is how the movie version of Golden Compass will look like (based on the charming His Dark Materials novel series by Philip Pullman). The trailer at least looks fantastic enough, or what do you think?

New Life


New Life
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.

Announcing: our firstborn baby arrived this morning. A small, thoughtful-looking boy opened its eyes to the world for the first time this morning, half past ten. Wrinkling his eyebrows, flashes of half-articulated feelings, unthought thoughts of tomorrow pass over his tiny face like quick flashes of light and shadow, clouds and the sun. New day today — a new day and a new life.

DIY: a changing table

Launching a new category here: Do-It-Yourself. Starting from a simple woodworking project, this is how to make a baby’s changing table.

1. You create/obtain some beautiful drawings (here made at the back of an envelope in a cafeteria):

Chancing table: drawings

2.You get some wood (I used some planed sawn timber and hard MDF plate that I got from the local Bauhaus store). Continue reading “DIY: a changing table”