Holiday Christmas Santa Gift Certificates

 Two new Christmas styled gift certificates have been added to Gift Template, both are featuring Santa.

Holiday Santa Gift Certificate

Christmas Santa Gift Certificate

 

Holiday Christmas Gift Certificate

 New Holiday Christmas Gift Certificate added to GiftTemplate. It includes a Christmas tree in the background with some Christmas presents under it. This was image was generated using Stable Diffusion AI and edited to fit the gift voucher design. Can be used for personal gift uses or as a business gift certificate, free of charge with no watermarks, perfect for the holiday season.

New Christmas Gift Certificate

 A new winter Christmas Gift Certificate has been added to Gift Template. Simple and can be used for anything Christmas or holiday related during the xmas season.

Holiday or Christmas Gift Certificate Template

New Holiday Gift Certificate added to Gift Template. Very basic and can be used for Christmas or any other occasion.

Valentines Day Gift Certificate Template

A new Valentines Day Gift Certificate Template has been added to Gift Template. Fairly simple design with a rose in the background, can be used for other events and celebrations as well.

Best Christmas Gift Certificate

Added a new Christmas gift certificate template to GiftTemplate, make the Best Christmas Gift Certificate just in time for the holiday season. Has a Christmas tree with lights and some gifts under it.

Massage Gift Certificate & Photography Gift Certificate

Two new gift certificate templates added to Gift Template. A massage gift certificate template and a photography gift certificate.

Different Resolution Cloned Display NVIDIA Setup

One of the more annoying problems that I encounter after updating NVIDIA drivers on a Windows system is my settings partly reset, specifically having to re-clone my 1920x1080 Monitor with my 1376x768 TV (which upscales to 1080p) in order to fix overscan issues. I also often encounter an issue that breaks video playback when switching between the Monitor and the TV after a driver update. So as a reminder for myself, I'll document the steps I use to properly setup display cloning for different resolutions. From what I remember AMD handled this much better.

First I'll be updating my NVIDIA driver from 399.07 to 399.24 as an example, I typically download the new driver and install it on top of the old one. If you are having some issues, it is sometimes recommended to use something like DDU to fully remove the old driver before installing the new one. I only select the Graphic Driver and HD Audio Driver, while GeForce Experience is useful for ShadowPlay, I don't like the fact that you need to create an account and login, so I don't use it. I also don't feel a clean installation is needed, unless you have issues, as it resets everything to default not just cloned display settings.

After installation is complete I restart. I then turn on my secondary display (TV) and open NVIDIA Control Panel. Quickly it is evident that the TV has overscan issues and no way to adjust it on this cheap TV or within the NVIDIA settings as everything is blanked out. In order to adjust it you must first reset the display to extended display, make all your changes and then clone the Monitor to TV.

Now if you go into Change resolution and on the TV you can change the resolution or apply it again to reset everything. Then go into Adjust desktop size and position and Enable desktop resizing and click Resize, this will show the Resize adjustment panel on your secondary display (TV) to adjust for overscan/underscan.

I also disable inverse telecine for both displays under Adjust video image settings, as that seems to cause some issues with video playback.

All that is left to do now is to clone your primary source (Monitor) to your secondary source (TV) under Setup multiple displays and hit Apply. I found that if by mistake your secondary source is cloned to your primary, you will experience video playback issues when turning on the secondary or primary device while the other is on. To test this I turn off one display and play a video in something like VLC and then turn the other display, the video should switch audio source but otherwise continue playing, if it doesn't work then it will freeze (but may or may not continue to play audio).

After everything is setup I typically run unigine valley benchmark to check for any performance difference between the old and new drivers. It seems pretty clear that DX11 performance is slightly better in the newer 399.24 driver, compared to 399.07.

Spa Gift Certificate Voucher

Added a new Spa Gift Certificate Template to Gift Template.

Gift Template Birthday Gift Certificate

I've been learning Inkscape for the past week, I usually worked in photoshop with raster graphics, but I can now see the massive advantage that vector based graphics provide for design. Stayed up tonight and made a new gift certificate for Gift Template

Birthday Gift Certificate Template

I think I'll be using a lot more of inkscape in the future, while it has some bugs now and again, overall it's pretty easy to use and also completely free and opensource. Of course illustrator is the standard, but not sure if the cost/subscription is worth it unless you are using it professionally full time.

Bug: Chrome Logged Out From Most Websites Upon Being Closed

There is a major annoying bug occurring with Chrome Version 64.0.3282.119 (Official Build) which has not been resolved for nearly a week. The bug is related to Chrome failing to stay signed in with most websites. It appears to have something to do with cookies in newer versions of Chrome, in particular cookie creation. Some users may not have experienced it yet, as the cookies they have were created prior to the affected version and were migrated from version 63.

What is frustrating is there is very little information from developers about this Chrome logout issue. Further it is frustrating that due to the nature of Chrome, it is impossible to revert back to a previous version officially. In order to revert back to version 63, you must find the old installer and then force Chrome to prevent updating. It is unacceptable that no proper downgrade method exists and one must jump through hoops to make things work.

What makes this situation worse is that many websites are now using two factor authentication, in some cases each time you are logged out of your account, you need to follow the long and tedious process of authentication.

UPDATE #1: It appears that Chrome Canary Version 66 has fixed this issue.

UPDATE #2: Issue appears to be resolved in Chrome Version 64.0.3282.140 (Official Build)

Various Updates

Finally updated Gift Template & Energy Use Calculator to responsive design. Most interesting lesson that I learned is that a canvas element can be resized via CSS without affecting the pixel size of the given canvas, so simple but I never realized this until now.

Added a new simple Valentine Gift Certificate

A new article on the best electricity usage monitor (within the lower price range), the P3 P4400 Kill A Watt. Extremely useful for testing electronics for power usage. Used it extensively to test many different devices in the past while. Recently made a new Ryzen 7 system and used it to determine energy usage for overclocking and such, power meters are very convenient & far more accurate than any software tools. In case you are wondering Ryzen 7 1700 overclocked to 3.7GHz @ 1.15V, with a GTX 1060, 16GB DDR4, system uses about 60-65W on idle and 130-180W on gaming & benchmarking, with a 24 inch LED screen system stays below 200-210W on the heaviest benchmarks.

Change Color of Star Bookmark Button in Firefox

Under Firefox 57+ Quantum the Star Bookmark button you see in the URL bar has a default color which appears to be inherited from the system/somewhere? This color is used in other places like the download icon. I find this very annoying as I use this to check if something is finished downloading and the default blue color of star-button throws me off often.

You can modify the color using userChrome.css, here are the quick steps to do it.

For Windows go to C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\YOURPROFILE.default\chrome\ (you can type %appdata% to get part way there).

Create a userChrome.css file if you don't have one, and edit it in a text editor, add the following, save and restart Firefox.

#star-button[starred] {
  fill: orange !important;
}

You can change the color to something else by modifying the fill: orange part, or use #hexcode or rgb(0, 0, 0)

Should be like this now:

When you click the button the page bookmarked big star icon is still a different color however, I'm not sure what controls it, make a comment if you find the element that does.

For further editing open chrome://browser/skin/browser.css in firefox if you want to mess around some more, and apply any changes to your custom userChrome.css

Also check this site out for a few different changes, like making bookmark folder different colors: https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html

Christmas & Holiday Gift Certificate Templates

Some new free gift certificate templates added to GiftTemplate in time for Christmas and the holidays. A reindeer one standing next to a Christmas tree and a simple gift box one with a purple and yellow theme for other holidays or even birthdays and such.

Reindeer Christmas Gift Certificate Template

Holiday Gift Certificate Template

Halloween Gift Certificate

A new Halloween gift certificate has been added to GiftTemplate, I figure freaky clowns are all the rage these days so an evil clown was included on this years Halloween certificate.

Make a free certificate yourself with this free Clown Halloween Gift Certificate

Commander Keen with Dosbox & Business Gift Certificates

I wanted to play some old school commander keen so I used DosBox 0.74. However I didn't like how the default resolution looked for me and after sometime I figured out that editing the default dosbox-0.74.conf file got me the results I wanted. Which is fullscreen, but black bars on left and right with pixel perfect non-stretched rendering. This may not be the ideal or original way Keen was meant to be played, because originally it was stretched out, I believe it was 320x200 stretched to 320x240. But I prefer it this way.

[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=1920x1080
windowresolution=1920x1080
output=overlay
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=higher,normal
mapperfile=mapper.txt
usescancodes=true

[render]
frameskip=0
aspect=true
scaler=none

Another issue I had is getting my Xbox One DPad to be recognized in DosBox. The trick is to edit the .conf file with the following settings.

[joystick]
joysticktype=fcs
timed=false
autofire=false
swap34=false
buttonwrap=true

You can then use CTRL + F1 shortcut to remap the keys, I set my Xbox Controller DPad to arrow keys and it worked after.

Another tip is you can use F5 while in map mode to save the game in slots from 1-9.

In other news I added a couple of more basic gift certificates to GiftTemplate.

Business Gift Certificate 07

Business Gift Certificate 08

Also this blog is now over 10 years old, I'm not even sure why I started it but I guess just to document Linux stuff back in the day.

Make Free Christmas Gift Certificates

Two new Christmas gift certificate templates have been added to GiftTemplate.

A Christmas Gift Certificate with Santa styled in flat design & a classic designed Christmas Gift Certificate with Tree & Decorations in the background.

You can modify any information you need for the gift certificates, use them for gifts, vouchers or even Christmas coupons?

Here is an example, many other gift certificates available as well.

Turn Off Firefox HTML5 Video Fullscreen Fade Black Delay Effect

Firefox 42 adds a new fade to black delay effect when transitioning to and from fullscreen html5 videos, you'll notice it very quickly on YouTube. It's a security feature (I guess), but I find it very annoying as it adds unnecessary delay to watching videos so here is how to turn it off.

Go to about:config (in url bar)

Set both of these entries to 0 0 from 200 200

full-screen-api.transition-duration.enter 0 0
full-screen-api.transition-duration.leave 0 0

In the future (Firefox 43+) you'll be able to use full-screen-api.warning.timeout set to"0".

Hope that works for you, found via reddit.

Firefox HTML5 Video Fullscreen/Scaling/Resizing Fix

I encountered the most annoying issue on Firefox recently and found a way to fix it, hope it helps someone.

The issue: 
After updating to Firefox 37.0.1, all html5 video from sites like vimeo, embedded html5 videos and even youtube (if you have html5 enabled as playback), stopped properly scaling for fullscreen. You would hit fullscreen, but the video would not resize and you would see black borders/areas on half the screen, the video would stay the default size. Also scaling a page with html5 video via ctrl & + or - would not work either.

The solution:
The culprit is the setting layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled when set to FALSE, in about:config. You NEED to set it to TRUE to fix fullscreen scaling or resizing for html5 video.

To fix this problem go to your url bar in firefox, type about:config and press enter, you may get a "here be dragons" warning inside the browser, click "I'll be careful, I promise!"

Now search for layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled and make sure it is set to TRUE.

In order for this fix to work, make sure you restart firefox.

Notes:
Normally layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled is already set to true, however you may have set it to false at some point as advised by some forum posts to fix sluggish performance in firefox. Apparently I did just that a long time ago and forgot about it. Ever since Firefox 37, this setting appears to prevent correct resizing of video in firefox for fullscreen.

I really hope that this helps someone, it took me a while to figure this out. I tried searching and didn't find anything. I then ran firefox in safemode (by holding shift when launching firefox) and noticed fullscreen html5 video was working. I didn't want to make a new firefox profile, because I have a lot of things customized. So I started comparing line by line the about:config settings I had versus a default profile [ this can be done quicker by looking over prefs.js, which is inside your firefox profile, on windows it's normally under ...\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\YOURPROFILENAME ] Anyways I finally found the issue, after a lot of trial and error.

Holiday and Christmas Gift Certificates

New holiday themed gift certificate templates added to GiftTemplate.

A new Christmas Gift Certificate Template and a Holiday Gift Certificate Template

Just visit the links if you are interested in making Christmas or Holiday gift vouchers, you can enter any text you wish and create your own. There are also dozens of other templates you can use. Here are some examples of the new ones:

Movie and School Gift Certificates

Added 2 new gift certificates to GiftTemplate.

A back to school gift certificate template and a movie gift certificate template.

Debian Stream Wallpaper

Made another Debian wallpaper called Debian Stream, enjoy.

With Debian logo.

Without Debian logo.

As before Debian logo is licensed under "Debian Open Use Logo License" The rest of the artwork is licensed under Public Domain, feel free to edit and remix, credit would be nice but not required.

Blogger has max image size of 2048x1152, go to my deviantart to get the 3840x2160 versions.

Deviantart Page with Debian logo
Deviantart Page without Debian logo

Debian Violet Fluid Wallpaper

Messing around and created this wallpaper for Debian, that I mentioned earlier. Just going to release it now, hope you like it. I call it Debian Violet Fluid.

With Debian logo.

Without Debian logo.

The Debian logo is licensed under "Debian Open Use Logo License" The rest of the artwork is licensed under Public Domain, feel free to edit and remix, credit would be nice but not required.

Blogger appears to have a max size of 2048x1152, go to my deviantart.com pages to get the 3840x2160 versions if you need.

Deviantart Page with Debian logo
Deviantart Page without Debian logo

Slightly inspired by Ripple

Gift Certificates, Debian Wallpaper and Doom

A small update after a while.

Just made 2 new gift certificates for GiftTemplate. A mother's day gift certificate template and a father's day gift certificate.

Also I was messing around and came up with a Debian wallpaper, just a sneak peak for now. I'm considering if it's good enough to be used as the official theme, should I submit it?

Also made some custom stuff for doom/zdoom, but abandoned the project pretty quick due to lack of time. You can get all the new weapons and monster I made here, public domain for everyone.

Here is a video, 7 new weapons and a new enemy.

Calculating Energy Use & Cost

Visit EnergyUseCalculator.com

I developed a new site to calculate energy usage of various devices and household appliances. Energy use calculator has over 30 electricity calculators, which should help people figure out how much energy their devices are using and how much it is costing them.

 

My other site Gift Template which offers free gift certificate templates has been doing well, so I am hoping the new site will follow in its success.

Protox Mod Remod

This mod modifies most visible icons and effects in Assault Cube 1.1, this is a remod of my original protox mod. It also includes my high quality reskins.

You can download this mod at DeviantArt

DayZ GTA Version

I've recently discovered DayZ GTA Version, a multiplayer zombie survival mod for Multi Theft Auto GTA San Andreas. The game borrows many concepts from the DayZ ARMA2 mod and places them in the Grand Theft Auto San Andreas environment. There is currently one server that runs this mod and while it sometimes lags and there are a few glitches and bugs. The game is very interesting to explore and play. If you like GTA and zombies then I recommend you try it.

What is required:

1. GTA: San Andreas 1.0

• If you have a steam version of GTA: San Andreas or a new retail release/upgrade you will need to downgrade to San Andreas 1.0
• You may also need a no cd gta_sa.exe version if you have issues starting the game (I had issues with the retail version of the game and needed a no cd executable to fix it) The HOODLUM release no cd hlm-gtasa will work. gta_sa.exe MD5: 170b3a9108687b26da2d8901c6948a18 (use Google to find it)

2. Multi Theft Auto
 
3. After installing SA 1.0 and MTA, start Multi Theft Auto and connect to 176.65.141.184:22003

4. You will download about 12mb worth of resources and an additional 3mb map file, if the download is slow just wait it may take a few minutes. Each time you rejoin the server you will have to re-download the 3mb map file, but not the resource file.

5. Once connected create a username/password and login, you will then spawn in the game. If you leave the server you character will be saved, just remember your login info. If you die your character will re-spawn and you will lose all your items, you can try to go back to the location of your death and attempt to pick up your old items if they haven't been looted yet.

Screenshots:

Typical spawn point close to water, you spawn with 2 bandages and 1 painkiller. I've edited this screenshot to provide a quick description of the interface. You need to run away from spawns quick, there maybe other players in the area looking to kill you. Your priority in the beginning is to find a weapon, water and food. You can find these items by the entrances of buildings, on dead players or zombies.

Attacking a zombie with a knife, takes about 3 hits to take one down. Don't waste your time fighting them off with your fists, run away and find a weapon first. Zombies aren't hard to kill but can overwhelm you in tight spots.

After killing 5 zombies. Crouching makes you less visible to zombies. If you kill a few players your skin will turn into a bandit. Be careful around any other players, some are friendly most will try to kill you.

It's very difficult to take combat screenshots as combat requires full use of the keyboard and mouse. So these basic early game screenshots don't do justice to the gameplay, but trust me it's good.

DayZ GTA How-To Guide:

Basic Controls:

• WASD to move around and the mouse to aim and look around
• MOUSE1 to shoot/attack
• MOUSE2 aim/zoom weapons
• MIDDLE MOUSE to look behind or to pick up items/inventory over gear
• SHIFT to jump or climb obstacles
• SPACE to run
• C to crouch (zombies are less likely to attack from certain distance when crouching)
• J to open your inventory, right click an item and select an action to use it (e.g. select pizza, right click and select to eat it)
• TAB for score board
• F1 for group system
• F5 to close or open right side stats (leave it open it's useful)
• F11 to use map, you need to find a map first
• T for local chat (limited by distance) also press T and type /msg PlayerName Your Message to pm players (not limited by distance)
• O for global chat
• Z for radio chat (requires radio device, limited by distance)
• F to enter vehicles, G to enter as a passenger (vehicles are rare and require engine, tires and fuel)
• I for Infrared Vision (requires infrared goggles)
• N for Night Vision (requires night vision goggles)

Drinks: (used to quench thirst)

• Milk, Soda Bottle, Full Water Bottle
• Empty Water Bottle can be refilled in any lake/pool, go in to water until you are swimming and right click to refill

Food to feed hunger: (also restore a little health)

• Beans Can, Pasta Can: restores 200 blood
• Pizza, Burger: restores 300 blood
• Cooked Meat: restores 800 blood

Medical Supplies: (you spawn with 2 bandages and 1 painkiller)

• Bandage: stops bleeding
• Painkiller: stops screen shaking after taking a certain type of damage
• Morphine: used to fix broken bones
• Medkit: restores health (but not fully about 8000-9000 blood)
• Heat Pack: used to restore body temperature, rarely used since body temperature only drops after a very long time in water
• Blood Bag: restores full health (12000 blood), but requires another player to do a blood transfusion

Backpacks:

• Default: 10 spaces
• Small Backpack: 16 spaces
• Alice Backpack: 28 spaces
• Coyote Backpack: 36 spaces

Example of the Alice Backpack with 28 spaces to hold items.

Other:

• Map: shows your location and a full map of the game when you press F11 (no bp space used)
• GPS: shows a small location map in left bottom corner of your screen (no bp space used)
• Watch: shows time in top right corner (no bp space used)
• Lighter: requires wood and animal flesh to make cooked meat (no bp space used)
• Wood: requires lighter and animal flesh to make cooked meat
• Road Flare: used to create a strong visible light
• Infrared Goggles: Infrared vision, press I to enable/disable
• Night Vision Goggles: Night vision, press N to enable/disable
• Tent: used to store items
• Wire Fences: used to block off areas
• Toolbox: used to destroy a wire fence and to repair vehicles (unlimited use)
• Empty/Full Patrol Canister: fuel required for vehicles, can be refilled at gas stations
• Tires: multiple required for vehicles
• Engine: required for vehicles

Items with no use: (do not pick them up they just take backpack space)

• Scrubby Burgers
• Empty Soda Cans

Skins:

In this game you can use a few other player model skins, first you need to find them and then to equip them just place them into your backpack, right click and select equip. Your skin will auto-change if you kill enough players and become a bandit. You will also want to drop your standard skin if you plan to use another one as it takes up backpack space. There are 4 regular skins and 2 bandit skins available.

• Standard Skin: The default skin you spawn with, will change into a bandit skin if you kill players.
• Civilian Skin: Elderly veteran skin, will change into an arctic bandit skin if you kill players.
• Army Skin: Army soldier skin, some zombies use this skin as well.
• Sniper Skin: You will turn into a green Chewbacca.

Weapons:

You have primary and secondary weapons, all weapons except Knife and Katana require ammo. Two weapons can be equipped at the same time, use mouse scroll to change between equipped weapons and use inventory (J) + right click to equip weapons. You can carry as many weapons and ammo as your backpack allows.

Primary Weapons:

• Shotgun Ammo: Shotgun, Sawn-Off Shotgun, SPAZ-12 Combat Shotgun
• Assault Ammo: AK-47, M4
• Sniper Ammo: Country Rifle, Sniper Rifle
• Rocket Ammo: Rocket Launcher, Heat-Seeking RPG

Secondary Weapons:

• Melee: Knife, Katana
• Pistol Ammo: Pistol, Silenced Pistol, Desert Eagle
• SMG Ammo: UZI, TEC-9, MP5

There is also a Grenade, if I recall correctly it uses a special weapon slot.

More info about weapon stats: http://wiki.dayz-mta.net/index.php/Weapons

Basic Strategy:

You need to find a weapon as soon as possible, a knife or a katana is a good start. It will allow you to kill zombies, it takes about 3 hits to take out a zombie. You can run in a straight line do a 180 degree turn and strike them with a knife, then continue running past them, repeat until they are dead. Some zombies have loot. You should also look around building entrances and dead players.

After that you need to find some water and food. Water will drain slightly quicker than food. It takes a while for you to become thirsty or hungry to the point of draining health, but it is also important to make sure your essentials are covered. You should also look for a bigger backpack, it will allow you to collect more items, ultimate goal for a backpack is the coyote backpack. A map is also very good to have, you will have a good idea where to go. Certain areas are dominated by different groups of people, there are a lot of places to explore.

After this point focus on getting some guns and ammo and continue exploring. You may want to try to find a vehicle or infiltrate an area once you have the basics. This game is probably better enjoyed with a group of friends, but it might be hard to get everyone together in one area.

Keep in mind you will probably die a lot, so be careful around other people. Crouch and hide if you see someone, if they start shooting take cover or run away unless you have superior firepower and a good strategy for attack.

I also made an image guide for DayZ GTA version:

If you want a larger version of the image guide or if it needs to be updated you can download the PSD version here.

Hope you found this article useful and will give this game a try, I play by the name Protox in case you run in to me.