First a small addendum to my last post about the launch of the new gaming blog, "The cheese was innocent!", is that you can now access it via links from either the Links or Gaming pages. No need to search for that post every time you want to find the site!

With the release of WordPress 2.5 (the underlying platform for the main three sections of P-2006) it was time for some spring cleaning, bringing everything up to date and fixing a few kinks. As this is all under the hood stuff, little should be noticeable but a few new options are now available for me to use. First of all I recoded the sidebars to support "widgets" which are a more convenient way of adding features. In the short term it meant removing the tag cloud from the sidebar (but the full version is still available in the Tag Cloud page). Otherwise the process was fairly smooth, but let me know if you experience anything strange.

Others have discussed the changes in detail if you are interested or thinking about switching to WordPress. The big new change, however, is in how pictures are treated, with a mini gallery system now built into WordPress. With this you will now find that many of the photos alongside posts are thumbnails linking to larger versions, rather than forcing you to squint if you use a high resolution monitor! In the past I often avoided photos where too much detail was lost in shrinking them, whereas now I will not have to worry quite so much.

The first use of this feature is give you a quick tour of the flat since I realise I never put up a decent set of photos despite requests. I quickly snapped these with Kirsten's camera shortly before we left for Germany so that she could show her family:

One of the few minor perks gifted to users of the rather overpriced "Ultimate" flavour of Vista was that of animated wallpapers called "dreams". Although not an entirely novel concept, it was impressive in its low use of system resources since it made use of the fact the OS now has direct access to the computer's graphics card. Now this is available to all Vista users* through Stardock's DeskScapes. This is no cheap knock-off or mimicry either — Stardock are the people who developed the .DREAM format in the first place. Presumably their exclusivity period to Vista Ultimate has now expired.

DeskScapes is a fairly small application that integrates fully so that you can pick animated wallpapers through the usual wallpaper selection interface. The model appears to be that the free version will only allow specific bundled dreams while the paid version (around $20) will support scores of fantastic user-created downloads. The current preview release contains just 3, only one of which is worth using but it alone sells the concept with a beautiful sunset scene — imagine those blades of grass billowing gently in the breeze with the light playing realistically off the surface. Presumably the final version due later this month will include several more. The standalone price is low but I imagine most won't be willing to pay for such a focused application. However it will also form part of the Object Desktop package that allows complete customisation of virtually every element of the Windows interface.

Speaking of Stardock, one of their developers wrote an interesting article in response to the recent discussion about the state of PC gaming and the effect of piracy. Many major developers and publishers decry piracy as being the chief architect of the downfall of PC game development but Stardock, who deliberately distribute games without any form of DRM, argue otherwise, showing strong sales despite the ease with which the game could be copied. The suggestion is that if you treat your paying customers well, they will reward you. The pirates, meanwhile, should simply be ignored in all business decisions as falling outside the market.

* There appear to be limitations under Vista Basic since it cannot run Aero.

I have previously praised NOD32 as an antivirus solution. However I have always been hesitant to recommend it generally because its modular design resulted in a convoluted, complex interface. With today's new release that has all changed. Its new intuitive menu design means now everyone can experience one of the favourites of the tech savvy crowd for its low resource usage but strong protection.

One of the other nice things about their sales model is that once you purchase a subscription, not only does it give you access to virus definition updates (and these are incredibly fresh, with new updates often more than once a day) it also lets you upgrade the software itself to any new releases for free. I was happy to dump the Norton bohemoth over a year ago and with NOD32 going from strength to strength I'm certainly not looking back.