Yep, TVTAD is back from the dead! It was dormant for a while, but now Kn00n has released an all new version, v1.00. You can download it at the official site.

For those who don’t know what TVTAD is, it’s a auto-downloader for torrent RSS feeds. You add as many torrent feeds to it as you want, pick some favorite TV shows, and it watches the feeds for your favorite shows and then automatically downloads the torrents and gives them to your BitTorrent client to download. It’s an awesome program.

Check out this thread if you’re looking for some TV torrent feeds: http://www.tvtad.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=10

Valve, the makers of Half-Life 2, have released “Lost Coast”, a mini-level designed to showcase their new HDR (High-Dyanmic Range) system. If you own Half-Life 2, just restart Steam (if you have it open right now that is) and then right-click HL2:LC and install it. :)

Oh, and here’s HDR off vs. on:

(ignore the orange and white talk bubble thing - it’s used to activate commentary in the level)

It may not seem like much, but you really notice it in-game. When you’re in a dark area and then go outside, everything is really bright and over the matter of a few seconds, your virtual eyes adjust and all is good. Oh, and yes, I realize HDR is in Day of Defeat: Source meaning many of you have still seen it, but Lost Coast is still cool as it features commentary from the makers. :D

Oh, and here’s another prettiness screenshot. :)

Sorry, seems Gravatar.com was down and my site was trying to update a cached Gravatar and this was causing major page timeouts here. Anyway, caching as been disabled for the time being and all should be better now. :)

Yep, that’s right, on Friday it was announced that some blond guy named Daniel Craig is going to be the next James Bond. Odd that he’s going to be blond as Bond is usually a brown haired guy, but hopefully he’ll be good. We’ll just have to wait and see though.

You can read the official press released right here.

I got tired of my old theme and I found one that I really liked, so I switched to it last night. Here’s the result:

And for those wanting the wallpaper of Jordan aka Katie Price (who I’m in love with :P), you can get it right here.

Yep, that’s right, a completely new version of the Steam client was just released. Here’s a small screenshot to give you an idea.

Just restart Steam and the update will be applied automatically! :)

What’s new:

You’ll notice some changes in the way Steam looks since the last update. Right now we’re working on what we call Steam 3 — a collection of new features that covers everything from server robustness to support for third-party games. The first major piece we’ve updated is the organization of the games list and the Steam store. One of our primary goals with this change is to accommodate a larger and more varied collection of games. We hope everyone likes the newer look and feel of Steam.

The next area we’re going to be focusing on is the Friends system. As such, Friends will not be available until the overhauled version is released. We will keep you informed of its progress.

Steam, like our games, is something we’re always working to evolve. This is the first step in what should be a fun year or so for Steam and the community.

Yay! The friends system will finally work! lol

Yet another cool thing from Google — “Google Reader”, a web-based feed reader. It’s very kickass, powerful, and of course free.

Check it out here: http://reader.google.com/

There is a bug with WordPress where if you have “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” enabled in your admin area, it doesn’t allow nested blockquotes (one inside the other) even though it’s valid code. Version 1.1 addresses the issue by removing any blockquotes from the quoted comment text if you have the above mentioned feature enabled.

If you have that feature enabled, you can snag the new version of the plugin on it’s homepage. Otherwise, there’s no real need to upgrade as this new version performs the same as the previous one. ;)

A new patch for Battlefield 2 has been released. New things include a new version of the classic Wake map (Wake 2007) as well as lots of bug fixes. Of course since we’re talking about EA and DICE here, they’ve also introduced lots of new bugs.

The biggest new one is that if you use the new name prefix system (meant for allowing players to add a clan tag), you can’t set it to blank, you can only change it to something else. So, don’t use the new prefix system! [edit] Fixed it. If you type some text into the prefix box and then delete it out via backspace, it seems to go away. [/edit]

Anyway, you can go download it here: http://files.filefront.com/Battlefield_2_v103_Patch/;4213295;;/fileinfo.html

Even though I’m already using Bad Behavior with blocks 99.99% of the bots who try to access my site, there is still the occasional person who manually spams my site. So, to totally lock ‘er down, I’ve installed Spam Karma 2 - Reloaded.

It’s a VERY sophisticated plugin that makes sure that no spam whatsoever gets onto my blog while not getting in the way of most comments (a few here and there are still put in my moderation queue as it’s not sure on them).

Anyway, if you run a WordPress powered blog, I highly recommend you install both Bad Bahavior and Spam Karma 2. It’s not hard, (very easy actually), and you won’t regret it. :)