...to do my regular computing tasks. You may be wondering why, so I will tell you. I have just ordered an Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 for my main computer, through a friend of my dads who gets a good discount on computer parts, and to help pay for it, I had to sell my GeForce 7800 GTX. I sold it to my friend Dave, for $200. Which is a great deal for him considering this card retails for $300, and it's great for me, because I got 66% of the retail price, which in my book isn't bad. We''ll just forget the fact that the price I originally paid for it was $630 for now, OK? :) The specific card I got is the Leadtek Winfast PX7950 GX2. My old 7800 GTX was also made by Leadtek, and it worked very well, and was cheap (Leadtek always seems to have the lowest prices.) Anyway, this new card is a killer. Basically, it's two GeForce 7900 GTXs bolted together and using a single PCI-E x16 slot. SLI on a single card technically. Nvidia plans to make it so you can connect two such cards together for quad-SLI. The drivers aren't ready yet though. So there you have it.

Another update: Just confirmed that the site does work in IE 7, and rather well. Microsoft finally got something right. To users of IE 5.x and 6.0, this is what you're missing:



Update: Users of browsers other than IE will have noticed a major change in the look of the site. Transparencies...without the transparency. I'll explain. A good friend of mine showed me a trick where you take a background image, make a copy of it, and lighten it to make it look like its being viewed through glass, and then have it as the background for areas you want to look translucent. It's a little more complicated than that, but I am not that great at explaining it. The great thing is, that unlike using the transparency properties in CSS like I used in the old theme, this method is valid CSS. The downside is, it doesn't work in IE 6 and below. And I'm not sure yet if it works in IE 7.

You have no doubt already noticed the new look, do you like it? :) It is heavily inspired by my new desktop theme that I posted about last. It is dark, and it is simple, like almost all of my themes. Simple looks good, simple is easy on the eyes, and simple is easy on my sanity :P I am working on a way to allow visitors to choose their own skin. I'll get back to you on that.

For new viewers, here is a screenshot of the old look:

Oh yes, this must be what bliss feels like. Finding a decent dark theme :D



Another screenshot

Here is a tarfile with all the theme components needed for this theme. Read below for some additional instructions.

This is in contrast to my old theme, which was stock Human



So anyway, the GTK theme is called Polycarbonate-dark, you can grab it here, the metacity theme was included with Polycarbonate-dark. The icon theme is called Humanazul, which you can get here. The background I got from some Windows theming site, I thought it was pretty cool. I also made a GDM, and login splash based on this background, and I modified my usplash boot splash so that it now has a greenish-blue hue to it. This one is a little harder to implement, here are the instructions:

First untar the tarfile to your home directory, and then run the following commands in a terminal:

sudo cp usplash-nexus.so /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-nexus.so

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-nexus.so /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-artwork.so

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)

To revert back to your old usplash, execute these commands:

sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-default.so /usr/lib/usplash/usplash-artwork.so

sudo dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-$(uname -r)

All in all, this is the most comprehensive theme I have ever assembled, and I am quite happy with it.

So, much has happened since my last update. First of all, I had my 17th birthday on June 30, got some cash from relatives, a couple presents, and a very expensive steak dinner at a classy restaurant :D

So I have also really been getting into webdesign and website administration for others. I setup and host a website for a Linux software project, Automatix. Now though, I am also involved in the actual coding of the software, as well as running the website. This website has it all, Joomla for the main homepage, a wiki, a blog (still unused), and a forum. It also has a Debian apt respository, but that is hosted on another server due to the enormous amount of bandwidth it consumes. The website alone is quite busy, seeing hundreds, if not thousands of hits per day. I need to upgrade my internet connection... Overall, this website, and the project has been quite fun, I really enjoy working on it.

Next up is one I just started. I'm basically liberating the website of Artimis Vergadin AKA Casey, Fire of Nocturne. It is a forum currently hosted on Invision Free, just like my forum, The Smoking Bolter was. But as soon as he purchases a database dump, we can move it to my server on its own copy of Invision Power Board. The site is a resource site, and as such has various articles about its subject, so it was only natural that we use a CMS to replace their current homepage. No offence meant towards it's designer, Tengu, but frames are so HTML 1.0, they must go. So the new homepage is currently at this address, until a domain is bought: fon.thenewagemedia.com. Hope you like it Casey :) I certainly have enjoyed setting it up.