This week DeskScapes 8 was released and while it is most famous for its ability to display animated wallpapers, I personally think of the animated wallpapers as an additional perk on top of the fact that it’s a really awesome way to manage and enhance normal Windows desktop backgrounds.

Its home page is https://www.stardock.com/products/deskscapes.

Multi-monitor support

If you look at DeskScapes 8’s main UI, you’ll notice a few things instantly. First, if you have multiple monitors, you might as well stop here and go get DeskScapes right now.  We’ll wait…

Got it? The ability to set different wallpapers on different monitors easily seems like something that should be part of Windows. But it’s not.  So if you are running multiple monitors and would like to just have different backgrounds then DeskScapes is a no-brainer.

Enhancing your existing wallpapers

I have a love/heat relationship with photograph-based desktop backgrounds. I spend all day in front of my computer and I like my desktop backgrounds to be something pretty. At the same time, I don’t want to be distracted by them.  That’s where DeskScapes comes in:

It has many different filters you can dynamically apply to your desktop backgrounds. One of my favorites is the porthole. By fading the background to black, any icons that might be on my desktop show up and if I have a few windows up, I’m not going to be distracted by a scene peeking around their edges.

Of course, there are many other effects you can apply as well on the fly such as color-based ones.

In this case, I downloaded a really cool background that was a bit “warm” (it was a brownish color). I wanted to alter its color to something cooler (a blue-color). No problem.

Sometimes you just want to combine a wallpaper with a good effect. For example, I downloaded this terrific winter scene and then combined it with an animated snowfall effect. Very relaxing on a cold Winter morning at work.

Just the ones I want

I’ve got a lot of cool art around my machine. Most of it wasn’t even imagined as being used as a desktop background. But with the effects features of DeskScapes, you can pretty much turn any graphic you have into a good background provided that it’s a sufficient resolution. That’s where DeskScapes comes in. 

So you tell DeskScapes to look in all your images folders on your computer or network (gotta love SkyDrive/Dropbox) and then just have it show the images that are sufficiently large enough to be used as a background.

And of course…

To show off the animated stuff I really need a video. And so… here you go!

I occasionally upload “stuff” to YouTube before I share it on the forums (and sometimes I don’t). So if you want to get a sneak peek of things going on, check out my YouTube channel.

-> Brad Wardell on YouTube

As we get more connected online, the haters of the world become more empowered. I am often astonished at some of the brazen behavior I see in comments and on forums by people who, one assumes, are functioning people in real life. 

I think a key ingredient is narcisism. i cant think of any other explanation for someone who puts effort into trying to upset other people while their own identities are just a bit of Google-Fu away. If you’ve ever read an article on someone before, there’s inevitably anonymous trolls who say unbelievably nasty things about them.  Of course, they do so because they think they're anonymous.

Imagine if their ugly behavior was quoted and attached to their “real name” when you Googled them? I suspect we’d see a change in behavior pretty quickly.

I have mixed feelings on anonymity on the Internet. On the one hand, I’ve seen people make threats against me, my wife and occasionally even against my kids. So I am very conscious of how vulnerable we are to the worst humanity has to offer.  On the other hand, I can’t help but notice that the worst behavior is usually done by people who think that they’re safe from retaliation because they think they’re anonymous.

So I’m not sure what should be done.  Almost everyone reading this has dealt (or at least observed) a persistent Internet troll. You can ban them but they’ll be back. As trolling becomes more common and increasingly nastier, it’s an issue that’s going to have to be addressed somehow.  Having seen the slow evolution of the Internet troll over the past 20 years, I can tell you, the ability to inflict harm on people is growing.  Sooner or later, it’s going to have to be dealt with.

About 1 week left before the first beta of Legendary Heroes.

Today our family dog, Bailey, turned two years old.  Thanks to the power of the Internet and Facebook we have been able to keep in touch with Bailey’s siblings.

Here’s Bailey with my daughter:

and in the snow:

and last summer with her ball:

Bailey’s Brother with his ball:

Bailey’s sister with her toys:

Bailey’s sister with her ball and at Halloween: (Scout)

And another one of Bailey’s brothers with his toy: (Kujo)

And another one of Bailey’s sisters: (Brocoli)

At Halloween, Bailey’s mom (left) and Bailey got to see each other:

(Bailey has a silly look)

They’re just such great dogs!

Two takeaways from the PS4:

1. GDDR-5 memory. This means a lot of bandwidth to communicate between assets and the CPU. A pretty big deal as it ensures that their CPU will be more fully utilized.

2. 64-bit. This is huge. Means you’ll be able to support megatextures and have vastly richer worlds to play in. More specifically, it’ll mean that it’ll support types of games that you couldn’t realistically do on a mobile device which keeps the iOS/Android games away. It also means that the games might be slightly cheaper to make. A lot of time is spent optimizing games to fit on current hardware and that’s very very expensive.

While some people will say it’s just a souped up PC, it doesn’t really matter. If I’m a game developer and I know that my minimum spec is this, I can create games that are simply unimaginable on the current PC.

I’ll be curious to find out how much L2 cache it has and a bit more on the GPU. Sounds like an AMD 7800 series level chip.

So I have a 20KW solar array. Love it.  But it has one big problem for me that is surprisingly hard/expensive to solve: If the grid power goes off, so does the solar array.

That’s because the solar array feeds into the grid with me taking what I need first.  But if the grid isn’t up, the solar array has to shut down because it is no longer connected to the “circuit”.  Besides that, you wouldn’t want to run your house where the power could go on and off randomly based on clouds moving in the sky.

The solution is to have a battery sink for the solar array. The solar panels feed the batteries and if the power goes off, the house uses the batteries until they run out with the solar array feeding the batteries as best they can.  However, it turns out that those batteries can be expensive. Very. Very expensive. As in tens of thousands of dollars expensive.

My house has a backup generator already in the event that power goes out. But in a true Zombie apocalypse scenario, my solar array would be worthless.

My dog Bailey turns 2 years old this week!

Bailey when we brought her home

Bailey recently

Do you have a pet? What do they look like?

I was reading a forum discussion regarding a car shop owner who lost his temper with a customer and berated them (hurled a bunch of profanity at them). The customer filed a suit against them for emotional distress. I couldn’t find a link to verify if this is even a real lawsuit but the discussion itself was illuminating.

One of the participants said that they hope that the car shop owner “gets taken to the cleaners”.

Really? This is the society these people want to see? Someone being mean to you is not a lottery ticket.  Thankfully, our system doesn’t work that way. At least not yet.

Obviously this hits home for me since I’ve had to deal with hyper-entitled people over the years who think because they’re the customer that they have an unlimited license to be abusive.  I could imagine some ticked off banned forum user one day suing us for “emotional distress” and finding plenty of people who hoped that they “took us to the cleaners”.

I sometimes wonder how many misunderstandings occur online due to people who don’t speak English as their native language interpreting dry humor as literal statements. 

I recently saw on a forum a discussion that quoted banter back and forth between myself and our PR rep. It goes something like this:

PR Rep: Got a 4.5 out of 5 on Game X!

Me: Oh no! That’ll wreck the Metacritic score – we want it to end up at 79. High enough for sales but low enough so we don’t have to give bonuses!

PR Rep: Stop! What is wrong with you?

Me: Same thing as when I had that case of Tourette's Syndrome

The dry humor part is the infamous rumor/fact that studios won’t get bonuses if the metacritic score is less than 80. But on the forum I saw, they were taking these statements literally. But the people doing so didn’t speak English as their first language.

Obviously, it’s possible they’re just…you know…dumb. But I wonder how much is lost in translation.