WordPress 3.0 and Custom Post Types

This morning, I switched the theme on here, Beached, over from using meta fields to WordPress 3.0’s new custom post types. Aside from having to do a manual SQL query to covert the posts, it has worked wonderfully. This also enables me to have different permalinks for links (for example, this post is /92/wp3-custom-post-types/, while a link with the same title would be /link/wp3-custom-post-types/), and in the future, other fun stuff like separate feeds for links and posts, with one combined one. It’s definitely a very powerful feature.

TV Tuners

I have to say, I have definitely not had much luck with TV tuners so far. The first tuner I bought was internal, and thus, didn’t work once I woke my computer from sleep. For some reason it also started making my computer fail to boot.

My newer tuner is a USB tuner, yet it still appears to have the same problem, in that it doesn’t work after sleeping.

The advantage, however, is that I can just unplug it from one USB port, and straight into another. I ♥  hotplugging.

Why Steam Beats Pirating, Hands Down

Valve’s Steam is by far my favourite method of digital distribution for gaming. It is simply so easy to use and it’s getting better too, with the new UI beta being a massive improvement on the previous version of Steam.

Why is Steam so good? In case you’re not familiar with Steam, let me run you through the process of buying and playing a game:

  1. Browse to the game on the Steam store
  2. Click “Buy”
  3. Enter payment details
  4. Wait for the download to complete
  5. Play.

That’s it. No complicated installation to go through; no waiting while the game downloads the latest updates; nothing. Compare this to buying a game physically, where you have to install the game (usually swapping discs halfway through), download the latest updates, make sure PunkBuster1 (or similar) is up to date and usually insert the disc every time you want to play a game.

Even compared to pirating games, it’s so much easier. Torrents are usually slow because of the amount of other users downloading at the same time (seeds:peers ratio is usually low), while Steam’s content servers have always been exceeding fast for me (2Mb/s compared to 40kb/s for a comparable torrent). Additionally, simply finding a torrent is usually 10 minutes of searching itself.

Steam’s ease of use shows. Of the past 10 games I’ve played (excluding free ones), 9 of them I bought from Steam, and the other was Modern Warfare 2, which uses Steam.2

Steam is an absolute win for gamers everywhere. The ease of buying, downloading and playing is fantastic. I’m not aware of any other distribution method for games that is as easy to use.

  1. Don’t get me started on how much I despise PunkBuster. VAC is so much better. [↩]
  2. The only reason I bought it physically rather than via Steam is because I couldn’t be bothered downloading it. [↩]

I hate doing work for free. It’s fine if it’s a project I’m interested in, but when I do the work and then people complain, it annoys me. Sure, it may not be perfect, and I’m up for modifying it, but telling me (not asking) to redo it is unacceptable.

Using Hahlo4.1 With Prism

Since Jonnie Hallman is stopping development on DestroyTwitter (still my favourite twitter client ever), I thought I’d try out Hahlo. It appears to be a great Twitter client from what I’ve heard, and the developer is a fellow Australian!

As Hahlo is designed for phones (specifically the iPhone/iPod Touch), I figured it’s best to use it in Prism. Alas, two problems arose. Firstly, using oAuth opened the window in Firefox, and the window was the wrong size. I did a bit of digging, and found a way to fix this.

Open C:Users[user]AppDataRoamingWebAppsprism@prism.app, and drop the code from this gist into there.

Merry christmas!