Wait, what?? That site has been up like, for years! That’s true but so far it was pretty much permanently under maintenance and never officially launched. Instead this blog acted as a main site for a very long time. But this is going to change from now as I’m going to slowly move over more and more to the top domain site.

So what will you find over at hexagonstar.com? The site will act as an outlet for indie game development and a release platform for games and software. Right now there is a small but fine selection of affiliate indie games that are being offered plus my free software releases and a few bits and pieces on RPG design writing. In the future I will hopefully concentrate more on writing some more about game design, RPG design, stats and game development geekdom topics as well as talking about the game engine I’m working on called “tetragon”, which is a huge thing btw.

I will leave H1DD3N.R350URC3 open to occasionally write about various topics here or post gaming videos etc. But my main focus on game design and development will move over to hexagonstar.com.

So head over to hexagonstar.com quickly! And remember to stay a while, stay forever!

You build your PC by yourself after checking on the web what components are of good quality and work well together. So after picking the motherboard, RAM, harddrive, PSU etc. etc. you assemble it all and after plugging in the new creation it boots up happily. You’ve owned five PC so far and four of them were built together by yourself. If something breaks you check information on the web about the problem (if you’re not already familiar with it), you soon know what component is broken, then you go buy a new one and replace the broken one and the PC works again. But the thing is: so far none of your four self-built PCs were ever broken!

Here’s how Mac repair works:

You buy a new Power Mac G5 from Apple. It works alright but after roughly 1.5 years it starts to get into trouble booting up. More often than not you push the power button in the morning but the Mac wont boot up. You search the web for infos on the problem and scarcely find something useful. After unplugging the power cord from the Mac, waiting for 30 minutes, holding the power button for six seconds (to reset something of unknown nature inside the Mac) it might boot again … for now. This goes on for about one or two months, sometimes the Mac boots rights away, but more often it doesn’t boot, not even after unplugging and waiting for 30 minutes five times.

Eventually you give in and call Apple’s repair service. Surprisingly the service person who is on the phone happens to be friendly (it’s usually not the case). One day later your Mac get’s picked up by the delivery guy and two days after that he brings it back promptly. Apple’s repair service tells you that they replaced the power supply (makes sense), the graphics card (??) and the DVD drive (???) in your Mac. You don’t bother too much about why they replaced the graphics card and the DVD drive because your Mac boots up again, that is … until some days later when the problem starts to appear again … one morning you switch on your Mac and instead of booting up it only makes a short power-on appearance and then shuts down again. You start wondering WTF Apple’s repair service actually repaired or if they instead roll dice to pick some arbitrary components to replace to make it look like an important repair! (Optionally: You throw away this PoS called Mac and buy a PC).

… This is what just happened to our (more specifically my wife’s) Power Mac. I’m sure you can imagine the frustration of  realizing that the problem is far from being gone, after believing that the machine was finally fixed. Instead the trouble starts all over and you’re at the mercy of Apple’s repair service because there’s no way to fix the hardware by yourself.

This just again proves for me why using a blackbox like a Mac is a bad deal and is just not worth the trouble. My wife would switch to PC in a second if only she could install and run Mac OSX flawlessly on it! But of course Apple only allows to run their OS on their crappy hardware. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy a Mac, they are way too overpriced anyway!

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Chrome installs right onto your system from the website and then takes over (or if you are cynical: steals) all the bookmarks, history, passwords etc. from Firefox (to make your life easier). It then opens with a slick and slender window that lacks all the tackiness of a plugin-convoluted Firefox. When opening a new tab it shows a neat history list with thumbnails of your most recent visited websites. Chrome starts up as fast as a finger snap! Maybe even faster! Can it get any better?

Starting to like what I see I went on to visit some of my favorite websites (the ones I usually have auto-opened in Firefox by using Tab Mix Plus). First let’s visit Lemon64! I’m a classic game nostalgican (hard to see by the look of this site huh?) so I like all those websites that are about old computers and old games. But what happens then? Chrome doesn’t seem to like that site very much but instead tells me that I should go visit other sites …

Ok, I thought, maybe some problem with the website. Let’s visit Lemon’s sister site Lemon Amiga …

… no go says Chrome! Slightly disgruntled I walk on to check out some other important sites and open mobygames.com, old-computers.com, gamedev.net and even iht.com. The result? Aw Snap!

Ok I said, this isn’t good! What about Flash Blogs? I went and tried some of the more famous Flash blogs’n'sites … bit-101.com, grant skinner, papervision3d, john grden, gotoandplay.it … the list goes on and on, Chrome forces the same design (and the same content) onto these sites, it looks like this:

… This is clearly too monotonous for my taste so I recon Chrome isn’t as shiny as it advertises. My sligthly slower starting Firefox with a kilo of plugins at least let’s me read the sites that I want to read so I’m back to that one until Chrome is not beta anymore (in 4 years?!?)

In case you’re wondering what happened on this site besides that it has been visually overhauled … two of my older blogs have now been merged with Hidden Resource. One, Dataleak, was my very first blog that I used for mainly writing about computer games, especially old ones. However Dataleak turned more and more into a abandoned net corpse and because there were quite some articles on it which I found have nostalgic value I decided to take them over to HDRS. Then there was Vista Tweaking, a blog I’ve started to post tweaks for Windows Vista. The few postings from that site have been consolidated into HDRS as well. I also had the idea on the back burner about starting an audio blog since audio production is one of my many interests. But a man has only so much time and maintaining three or four blogs is clearly a chore. Just think about all the updates, handling Spam etc.

For a while I’ve tried to write only about Flash- and ActionScript-related topics but my interests are broader than that. I could be what you call a Jack of all Trades … and a master of none, dooh (but hey I’m on the way). But who cares?! There’s nothing wrong with having many interests, quite the opposite! So here’s the all new Hidden Resource which from now will not only be my platform about programming but also audio and (mostly retro-) gaming. And since I sometimes take Photoshop or 3D modeling into my hands here’s a category for design as well. So here it is, the all new Hidden Resource now with extra topics! And in case this is all too much for your taste, there are categorized feeds available too, just pick your favorite, lean back and relax! There’s plenty of time!

Normally when Vista’s User Account Control (UAC) asks the user for a consent when launching an application that is deemed insecure, the desktop will fade dark while the consent window is shown. While I recommend to always leave UAC turned on, this desktop dimming can get annoying very quickly.
Fortunately this behavior can be disabled so that the consent window is still shown without dimming the whole desktop. To turn this off follow these steps …

1. Go to Start Menu/Control Panel and there double click the Administrative Tools icon.
2. Several new icons will appear. Double click the Local Security Policy icon and a new window with the same name opens.
3. In the left side of the window is an entry named Local Policies, double click it and it will unfold. Some new items will appear under it, click the item named Security Options.
4. In the right side of the window is now a long list of Policy options, scroll down until you find the one named User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation. Double click this item and a properties window will open.
5. In the properties window on the Local Security Setting tab are two options, Enabled and Disabled, click the Disabled option, then click Ok and you are done.