No, really, I know this is annoying, even coming from a guy who spams his sounds a LOT. Apologies to anyone pissed off because of my sounds Anyways, in this post i’ll show you how to setup your computer so you can play sounds over Source games, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Half-Life, GMod, Zombies Panic, Insurgency… the list goes on.

There is two part for this, the software, and the setup in your game itself.

- There is only one thing you need to know about HLSS. The website says it works with the ORIGINAL Half-Life (1), but it will in fact work with newer games too. What this program does in reality is to copy a wav file into your game folder at the location where your game will read “voice_input.wav” as a replacement for your microphone input. (Source: Valve Wiki). The thing is that this never changed, even since the first Half-Life!

Also, note that games requires a VERY specific wav bitrate. As you can see here, Source-based games requires to have a wav recorded at 11025 Hz, mono, 16 bits. You can change all this in Audacity, and while you’re at it, you can crop your sound to keep the interesting part too.

- Onto the setup, in all goes around the same config for Steam-based games, which is:

alias hlss-START “voice_inputfromfile 1; voice_loopback 1; +voicerecord; alias ToggleWAV hlss-STOP”
alias hlss-STOP “voice_inputfromfile 0; voice_loopback 0; -voicerecord; alias ToggleWAV hlss-START”
alias ToggleWAV “hlss-START”
voice_fadeouttime 0

Now, all you need to do is to bind a key to ToggleWAV, and use it after you chose a sound from HLSS. For more infos/setups on different situations, see the HLSS website

As a last tip, if you want to rip youtube off and play that in a Steam game, you’d have to use Youtube Downloader to get the video, and FFMpeg to split the wav out of the video, using this command:

ffmpeg -i youtubevideo.flv MyNewWavFile.wav

Happy spammin’!

Yong Hwee from was kind enough to send me an invitation for Dropbox, which is currently a closed beta. And now it’s my turn to give away my invitations. Reply in here and you could grab one of my 9 5 one remaining invitations! Wait… I dont have any more invitations! You missed the party dude!! I’m leaving the comments section below open anyways.

I’ll let you make your own conclusions after watching the video at the front page of getdropbox.com, but theres a key point missing: there is no login/logout option in the running application. Once it’s opened, it’s already syncing the files without asking for anything. It seems rather insecure to me. Also, it seems impossible to change our dropbox syncable folder. It’s stuck under My Documents\Dropbox, and that’s it! It could work for most of the people, but i’ve partitioned my hard drive so my Windows partion has just enough space to run.

Otherwise, it’s really working out of the box. My guess is that they’re really pushing at that front, and it may kick ass once it’s out.

I decided to make a small but useful program with what i’ve learned so far from C and the Windows API.I have used a free version of xplorer² for some time, and i’ve been overusing one small but useful feature in that program, which, in a keystroke, copies the selected file path to the clipboard. I have liked this feature so much I wanted to add that in any file manager as a menu item in the right-click (aka contextual) menu.

So here’s my little app. I didnt named it, really, but let’s call it “File to clipboard”, for simplicity’s sake.

To use it, extract the executable anywhere, i’d recommend into \Program Files\ or \Windows\ . Execute it once directly to install the right-click menu element into the system. From on now, you can right-click any file an select “Copy path to clipboard” to.. surprisingly, copy the whole file path to the clipboard.

Let me rephrase: you only have to execute the program direcly once so you install the right-click menu into the system. Even if you have to execute it only once, it gets executed everytime you use the menu item “Copy path to clipboard”, so do not erase it.

Installation and usage: Download the zip file here, and copy filetocb.exe in a directory of your choice. I recommend Program Files or Windows, as stated above. Execute once to add the right-click menu item, and profit!

Tip: Holding Shift when clicking on “Copy path to clipboard” will instead copy a 8.3 (DOS) formatted path, if available. If there is no 8.3 path, it will revert to the long (standard/default) file path. Either way, an audio dignal (Windows’ “ding!”) will play, indicating you really copied a 8.3 path into the clipboard.

Open source, newbie friendly: in the zip file, there is a folder named “source”, which is my source files used to build filetocb.exe. I have fully documented main.c so if anyone wanted to learn abit how it works, they can do so. There is also a GIMP XCF file, used to make a simple Windows icon for the program.

Some (if not all) of these links can help you alot when debugging a broken Windows installation.

• Dependency walker: this free program will show you an hierarchical view of dependencies (DLL’s needed, what these DLLs needs in return, etc) for a given program. You can also view the dependencies for a DLL file, an OCX file, and god knows what else. What’s cooler, you can “trap” a program so it runs inside Dependency Walker, so you can view in real time what DLL it needs at a certain point. There may be others features, but I haven’t messed around too much.
• DLL Help database: Directly from Microsoft, this database lets you search from a file name, from a package name (Like Microsoft .NET Framework), and you can see some basic stats (file size, date, where it came from). Handy when you’re not sure if the DLL’s installed in your system are the good one or some fake installed by a spyware. It would be safe to assume that only Microsoft products are listed in this database.
• Process Library: Lets you search with an executable filename (like iexplore.exe) and this site will explain where it comes from. Ideal to locate running spyware/trojans or to identify unknown running processes.
• Process Explorer: This, along with Process Library above, will give you as much information as possible on running applications. Process Explorer is one of the programs created by the guys from SysInternals (which is now part of Microsoft), and is a replacement for the task manager, except that its a task manager on steroids. Just like dependency walker, you can get information about dll’s used, subprocesses running, and you can even see what files, directories and even TCP/IP ports is opened by a program! You can set it so it completly replaces the Windows Task Manager: even if you try to run “taskmgr.exe”, Process explorer will be launched instead. Quick tip: Ctrl+Shift+Escape will launch Task Manager (or Process Explorer if it overrides Task Manager) from anywhere inside Windows. Some programs that tries to block user input like Ctrl+Alt+Del doesnt know about this keyboard shortcut, so this one works 99.9% of the time.

Happy(ier) Windows debugging!

…and other Google products, like this experiment where you can browse around in the results entirely with your keyboard.

Why reinvent the wheel? Google decided (it seems) to use the very same keyboard shortcuts than in the (very) old but still used text editor vi. j and k to change lines, / to search, and g seems to be a combination key. In GMail you can type “g a” to go to your archives, whereas “g f” in vim will take the word around your cursor, assume it’s a file on your drive and try to open it.

As a sidenote, Google keyboard shortcuts seems to not work well on Opera, at least on Linux.

I just found Musikcube for Windows, which is a nice alternative to Apple iTunes.

I used to like iTunes back in the day, I used it although I know it was kind of bloated to start with. Since then, I was hooked on the fact I could manage all my music library from one app. This is something that, at least by default, is impossible with foobar2000 (which you should definately check out if you’re still stuck with some old Pentium 133), and unthinkable on Winamp (I never really migrated to Winamp 3/5, since it was a more heavy than Winamp 2, which I still (sometimes) rely on today)

I now run on KUbuntu for day-to-day tasks, and I really like amarok because of the similar “music library management” point of view.

Musikcube is one app that makes me want to switch back to Windows (why would I do that to start with?!). The download size is 2-ish Megabytes, and for that size you have an music player that goes straight to the point: music management. See the screenshot of the main window for example. All you need to do is to add some folder(s) or files, and you’re ready to go.

The only thing I don’t really like is how the Dynamic Playlists are made (see screenshot). To create dynamic playlists, you have to write in your own custom SQL statement that directly queries the Musikcube’s database. Personally, since I use alot of SQL stuff (language and databases) at work this is almost natural to me, but for the new user’s point of view who dont have to program, getting to know how to make Dynamic Playlist can be a pain. In the other hand, this translates into alot of flexibility.For example (see same screenshot), I can choose to display files that contains either “single” or “top40″ in it’s file path (in other words, I chose to pick files that are stored in either of those two directories) but not those that contains “electro” somewhere in the file path. Then I order the results by its track’s title.

For the rest, since this is a iTunes look-alike, you should be able to get your way around this app. Also, this app supports Vorbis (.OGG) files natively. This is a plus that kept me away from iTunes. Overall, this is a nice start, but the app isnt quite polished, and I wish there was a console somewhere so it could give me some reason why, for example, shoutcast streams fails to play (at the time I wrote this blog entry, when I tried to play a shoutcast stream that couldn’t connect Musikcube silently fails and does nothing afterwards to warn it’s user.). Otherwise, Musikcube can be extended using plugins, so there’s alot of possibilites for expansion.

Final rating: 8/10. Give it a spin!

Extras for dynamic playlist creation: SQLite “select” clause reference, fields that Musikcube use in it’s database