The cliche "beauty in the eye of the beholder" is so overused but is so universal. A better phrase would be that value is in the eye of the beholder. This past week, Apple updated the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Apple is charging existing users $19.95 to get some of the new features. Thus ensued a lot of bitching and moaning about the price.  Maybe it's because I'm a sick, scummy, evil capitalist who eats babies when I'm not on here flaming web hippies but what is it with non-pr...

I like the look of Aero on Windows Vista but I can imagine skins that look better.  And even if my taste differs from yours, the important thing here is choice. That's what WindowBlinds delivers.

Just playing around with photos.

I tell ya, there's nothing better than spending an evening chit chatting with ones wife about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Even after all these years, I still enjoy her company just for the sake of talking about interesting topics.

One of the best and most underused features of WindowBlinds 6 is the colorizing feature. With WindowBlinds, you can color certain parts of the skin but not others in order to create multiple new styles that you can save for later. Here are two screenshots to show what I mean: Above is Elegance but with a more golden hue to it. Note that the close button is still red. It's not just a brute force hue shift. Here is Aero Executive changed to be grassy.

  DeskScapes 2.0 beta now available for Object Desktop users. Now all users of Windows Vista can get animated wallpaper.

WindowBlinds 6.02 is now available for download at www.windowblinds.net . WindowBlinds is a program that allows users of Windows XP or Windows Vista to change the visual style of the entire Windows GUI (task bar, Start menu, window frames, push buttons, scroll bars, you name it). Since October, when WindowBlinds 6 was first released, we have seen our biggest increase in the number of WindowBlinds users ever.  WindowBlinds 6 added native Windows Vista skinning (including Internet E...

Since the end of the Korean war, the two halves of the Korean peninsula have be free to pursue their own destiny. Communist North Korea pursued a centrally planned socialistic economy. South Korea pursued a capitalistic free market economy. So next time you're asked whether you support government run health care or other centrally planned initiatives, ask yourself how dark you want it to get? A little bit of socialism is like a little bit of death.

Constant CPU and hardweare usage even when just sitting there.

Internal game, I'm blue.  Great 4 on 4 game. I will say in all honesty, that Sins of a Solar Empire is the best multiplayer strategy game I've played since Total Annihilation.

    http://www.cad-comic.com/comic.php?d=20070331

Steve Parker (Neobond) and Marcel Klum (Redmak), the founders of Neowin, visited this week. Here's some pictures. From left: Marcel, Me, Steve. Marcel and Steve in front of Stardock building.   Steve and Marcel working on Neowin.

Sins of a Solar Empire is shaping up nicely. An RTS with turn-based level depth that allows users to manage huge empires in real-time without getting bogged down in micro management. Here are some screenshots from today's play. Each race gets its own technology tree. Tech trees are a feature from 4X strategy games. RTS's usually don't have them.  To keep micro management down, the techs have a cost associated with them but also require a certain number of labs to be built in ...

It was a good trip this year at CES but it is time to go. I've got so much to write, sorry that I haven't had more up lately but I've been so busy visiting booths that I haven't had time to actually post articles. Will address that shortly.

The ads for Sins of a Solar Empire of are starting to arrive in the magazines in a big way.  2-page spreads in PC Gamer and Games for Windows (CGW) are here. Moreover, the initial orders from retail have started to arrive. WalMart, Best Buy, EB, and GameStop are all on board.  Most gamers have no idea just how difficult it is to get a PC game onto store shelves (or any product for that matter). Next time you're at the store, look at the makers of most PC games.  They'...