I know I haven’t posted for a while and I usually don’t post about movies, but this dropped today totally unexpected and as huge Alien fan, I have to talk about it. Because it looks freaking amazing! I know this is just a teaser trailer and there is plenty to f**k up in a full movie, but after awkward Prometheus and boring and confusing Covenant, from the looks of it, we’re back to roots with proper full on Alien movie and this one looks absolutely proper. Space? Check. Space station? Check. Small group of people? Check. Aliens? Check. Badass female protagonist? From the looks of it, check as well. It has all the good stuff and how they presented it in these few seconds was really awesome. Alien:Romulus is coming on 16th August 2024. How we haven’t heard about this before? This is just 4 months away! I freaking can’t wait!
Category Archives: News/Releases
Windows 11 Attestation finally fixed with Ryzen 5800X3D
Now, I don’t fully know what caused this, Microsoft, AMD or ASUS, but in my case on ASUS Strix X570-E motherboard with Ryzen 5800X3D, Windows 11 kept “complaining” about TPM security feature called “Attestation” being “Not supported” even though 5800X (regular non 3D) that I had before, supported it. Well, today I got notification that I have set up for my motherboard BIOS that new version is available. Okay, I check the ASUS support page and there is indeed a new BIOS update version 5003 for ASUS Strix X570-E which mentions firmware update for TPM subsystem. And that instantly got me thinking, is this it? So I made a screenshot of before and after update. And indeed, Attestation is now “Ready” the way it should be. I was also having issues with TPM just randomly not being detected in Windows 11 and after reboot, it was there. We’ll see if that was also fixed with this BIOS update. Hopefully, it is…
BIOS 4802
BIOS 5003
As you can see, the TPM firmware version now has newer date and Attestation status is now also “Ready”.
Since this is AGESA update, it means that this isn’t ASUS exclusive fix, it was sent out by AMD. Meaning if you’re experiencing similar issue and you understand why this feature is there, check out for latest BIOS update for your motherboard and update it if required. BIOS updates are good to have but usually not necessary and can brick your system so only do it if you understand how and what the risks are. Just a disclaimer.
Starfield Tweaker 1.0 released!
I’ve been playing Starfield since early release because I was so hooked into the hype and I absolutely love the game. What I don’t love so much is lack of certain control over the game. Specifically lack of FOV (Field of View) settings. But no more! Just like for Killing Floor 2 game, I’ve now created Starfield Tweaker, a tiny portable tool that allows you to adjust certain hidden or unavailable settings in Starfield game. Head to my Starfield Tweaker micro page down below and see what tweaks I’ve included!
Starfield Tweaker is now also added in “My Projects” menu above on my blog page where you can always find it directly.
Anti-fraud service Eye4Fraud hacked
Apparently this service got hacked per recent news. What’s the biggest irony is that they were suppose to keep customers safe from fraud and now, what I can only assume, their pure incompetence resulted in leak of over 16 million customer accounts information. This includes customer e-mails, physical addresses, phone numbers, partial credit card numbers and more.
More can be read here:
https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#Eye4Fraud
Adding extra insult to injury, users can’t do anything about it because they are some 3rd party no one asked to collect user data got all the user data and no one even knows what websites use this service behind the scenes. You may get a notification that your personal information was compromised in a security leak, but you pretty much can’t do anything about it because some unrelated 3rd party fucked up. Slow clap Eye4Fraud. You may just as well go bankrupt at this point, given that you failed at very thing you exist for…
Legacy WinAmp resurrected from the dead with latest version 5.9 !
It has been years since Winamp was a thing, but it seems it’s slowly coming back. No, it’s not the all new redesigned Winamp, but hey “just” (it actually happened in July 2022 but I somehow missed it) released latest version 5.9 that is still good old WinAmp, but with fixes and improvements for modern operating systems like Windows 11.
One of biggest pros of WinAmp was just absolutely wild library of skins and plugins of all sorts. From crazy high quality input plugins like Shibatch’s mpg123 to DSP processors and all sorts of wild output plugins that supported features no other player could. Like for example ASIO output, OpenAL output, WASAPI output way before it was a thing elsewhere and to insane audio enhancing plugins like QO Lab’s AudioBurst FX. Outputting audio to my Sound Blaster AE-9 with all the goodies at 32bit 96kHz makes music sound sooooooo sweet again even though input is same old MP3 format. Very nice.
WinAmp official download:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=458120
You can find a lot of old skins and plugins here:
I’ve also been providing a full mirror of the latest official WinAmp plugins and skins here:
My mirror of latest plugins and skins
QO Lab’s excellent upsampling audio enhancing plugin:
QO Labs AudioBurst Studio Sound FX
Updated ASIO Output plugin:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/winamp-asio-plugin/
Updated WASAPI Output plugin:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/out-yasapi/
Been using it for few hours and it’s actually still a very good player. Mostly because of plugins that are still being developed by many people.
Enjoy the nostalgia! 🙂
Firefox Translations, local machine learning translation extension
Mozilla has recently officially released their long running project that gives you the ability to translate webpages in a private way done entirely locally using machine learning. Nothing is transmitted anywhere, browser does all the translations entirely locally. It will download some support data and then perform translation locally on your system.
Here is a quick example of Mozilla Firefox 102 rendering German eBay (ebay.de) webpage and translating it into English on the fly…
It has a limited range of supported languages, but it supports all the major European ones and more are coming in the future.
You can download Firefox Translations extension here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/firefox-translations/
Enjoy!
Bitdefender Free antivirus resurrected because of concerns over Kaspersky’s ties to Kremlin
You may have noticed Bitdefender discontinued Bitdefender Free with beginning of year 2022. However, things changed as war in Ukraine happened and more and more concerns rose over Kaspersky’s ties to Kremlin. A lot of people are ditching Kaspersky in fear or just out of protest. Bitdefender, a Romanian security company decided to bring back their popular free solution for everyone who want antivirus protection, but can’t pay for full program or simply don’t need the features paid versions offer, particularly for those who ditched Kaspersky. I don’t know if that was their official statement, but it was clearly a motive to fill in the gap.
I present you the all new Bitdefender Free antivirus…
At first I wasn’t interested if they just brought back the old one, because it had so many issues and bugs they never managed to fix, that I just wasn’t willing to even try it. But then someone posted a screenshot that got me interested. It’s a complete redesign and from the looks of it, this alone fixed a lot of issues that existed before after I actually tried it.
It can still be just install and forget just like the old free version, but now you have some more settings under control and also no issues that I used to have before. Still requires registration, which is a bit annoying, but oh well, it’s free and can be used on 3 systems by 1 user.
I don’t think using Kaspersky is an issue, particularly if you’re a regular user and not a company or organization. But still, if you have concerns and don’t want to use anything else, Bitdefender has always been good performer.
Simple Shutdown Timer 2.0 released!
I’ve just released Simple Shutdown Timer 2.0. It’s a significant upgrade over my old Simple Shutdown Timer 1.0. You can find it under “My Projects” menu above or by clicking its micro page link below…
Simple Shutdown Timer micro page:
Gigabyte G27Q custom crosshairs pack
Some time ago I’ve bought myself Gigabyte G27Q monitor and it has a neat feature to create custom virtual crosshairs that act like an overlay. Main benefit is that you don’t need to create a rendered overlay or inject anything into games, making it friendly for online games as it’s entirely undetectable to anticheat systems. And can also be useful for single player games because it’s just so simple to enable and will work with any game. Sometimes games just have rubbish in-game crosshairs or you like to complement existing ones with custom one. Usually Diagonal one works well since it can fill the gaps of built-in crosshairs and can function as a guideline for example when character in game is sprinting and games usually disable crosshair. This way you always know exactly where you’ll be aiming when you stop sprinting for example. Call it cheating if you want, but it’s useful. We used to paint dots on monitors back in the day when none of this was available so why the heck not 😛
Since Gigabyte OSD Sidekick allows exporting of crosshairs, I thought, why not release them if anyone else wants them. So, here it is 🙂
You need to connect your Gigabyte G27Q monitor with USB cable and install Gigabyte OSD Sidekick. Then you can easily import these through OSD Sisdekick app. Or even create your own. Might even work with other Gigabyte monitors that have custom crosshairs support, but that is untested. If it doesn’t work, you can use the screenshots of crosshairs above to recreate them yourself and modify them to your liking.
Firefox Tweaker 2.9 with new Proton Interface support released!
I’ve just released new version of Firefox Tweaker 2.9 that can enable preview of Mozilla’s new Proton Interface. Proton is Mozilla’s redesigned interface for Firefox which is planned to be released to all users with Firefox 89. You can try it out now in Firefox 88. While some things are a bit weird, some are surprisingly better. Like the god awful oversized twitching URL bar which feels much better under Proton. Give it a try if you want.
The tweak controls several parameters at once. Parameters are listed under Help button of Proton interface and you can individually adjust them under about:config if you desire to do so. I’ve decided to pack them all under single checkbox for convenience purposes.
Micro page for more details:
https://rejzor.wordpress.com/firefox-tweaker/
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