I wouldn’t normally write about stuff like this, but I grew up with Space Invaders and I think it changed the video gaming world as we know it today. Well, it actually was the very beginning.

Ahhhh the memories…..

Europe’s biggest games convention has marked the event with a homage to the alien “shoot-em-up” as well as 500 exhibitors showing how far the industry has come since then.

The classic (I would say more cult) title first hit gaming arcades in 1978, setting players the challenge of shooting a swarm of hostile extra-terrestrials descending at an ever increasing pace, before they destroyed you.

Space Invaders has been immortalised by Guinness World Records as the number one arcade game of all time.

Game developer Taito is commemorating the game’s anniversary with a worldwide Space Invaders tournament, which will conclude on August 26th.

The Space Invaders shrine can be found here, where you can play it online also.

When I’m troubleshooting a Windows XP machine, I find myself almost always going into Device Manager to check the status of hardware devices.

But what if you want to find out information about devices that aren’t connected eg USB based devices?

Try this:

1. Go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties.
2. In the System Properties dialog box, select the Advanced tab and click the Environment Variables button.
3. In the Environment Variables dialog box, locate the System Variables panel and click New.
4. In the New System Variable dialog box, type DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES in the Variable Name text box and type 1 in the Variable Value text box.
5. Click OK twice.
6. To view the nonpresent devices, go to Start, right-click My Computer, and select Manage.
7. Click Device Manager, pull down the View menu, and select Show Hidden Devices.

WTF? Here’s a cool project I found that uses one of those slimline USB keys and a USB cable to make a cool and unique USB drive that you hopefully won’t lose.

There’s no real point to doing this other than to kill some time customizing your computer gear. It certainly look unique. Here’s the link with the full set of instructions.

A common way to lock your computer (assuming you are running XP) is to hit the Windows + L key simultaneously.

But what if you don’t have a Windows key on your keyboard? There are a couple of other ways to do it:

My choice is to create a shortcut on your desktop as you will probably use it over and over. Right click on an empty area of your desktop and click on new>shortcut. Enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation and click on next, name your shortcut and click finish. That’s it.
If you want to change the icon, right click the shortcut and go to properties>shortcut>change icon. Browse to the moricons.dll in your system32 folder to see a large number of cions to choose from.

A quick and dirty way to achieve the same result is clock on start>run and enter rundll32.exe user32.dll, LockWorkStation in the command dialog box.

If you have fast user switching enabled, another way is to bring up task manager, click on the shutdown menu, and select switch user. Same result.

Running P2P applications in Vista and ever see this message coming up? In your event viewer, the exact wording is ‘TCP/IP has reached the security limit imposed on the number of concurrent TCP connect attempts’.

Microsoft has implemented a change in the TCP/IP stack since XP SP2 to limit the number of ‘half-open’ (incomplete/syn packets) connection attempts per second to keep your computer from being used by dangerous programs such as worms that scan the internet to infect more systems.

I stumbled on this feature(?) only today as I don’t use Vista. Fortunately, if your P2P applications are suffering, there is a patch. You can download it from here.