Ok so the parts arrived finally. While I love Newegg’s competitive prices the shipping factor usually dampens my enthusiasm, not only is shipping a bit more expensive but it is also slower since everything comes from the states even when ordering from the Canadian site.
Make Windows transparent for free with Glass2K.
So why would you want to make windows transparent, well put simply productivity. It works expecally well when viewing an image, be that photos or video, since the colours are less likely to blend with what you are doing on top. With text it becomes a little harder although it is trivial to decrease the transparency which allows you to easily to which peice of text is on top. Surprisingly this program is actually compatible with Windows Vista even though it was programmed for Windows 2000 and Windows XP . Performance wise it runs well although this is to be expected since it was written with much weaker computers in find vesus what we have today. In fact it stays at around three percent of my AMD 940 and uses 1.6MB of RAM. All together the productivity gains are comparable to getting a second monitor, if not a bit nicer since everything is kept in one field of view and Glass2K is free to boot!
www.smrsimple.com is done, I only need to add one or two more things but for the msot part it is done, now for it to stand the test of time.
[Older update:] Forget it. There will not be a crack for Cities XL. There simply is no reason for crackers to go to the effort. The protection used effectively turns even the single player version of the game into an MMO as far as crackablity is concerned. If you have a Cities XL torrent running at the moment, cancel it. You can either buy a legal copy or move on, yes yes I know “civil piracy is not illegal”, what else would you have me call it? I would suggest moving on, there is not much in regards to re-playability to Cities Xl as it is now, maybe they’ll revamp much of it, doubt it. Right now Monte Cristo has let their dreams of MMOhood get in the way of making what they should have, a fun and challenging city builder. Instead you get a giant ad for the “planet offer” also known as Xbox live style “online services”, really all it is good for is the global chat and trading “goods” . Oh I guess you also get a pretty map which is a bit exciting, until you realize that it is no more than a picture and has no effect on game play. Weep a bit and then move on and do something more productive, like say learning Japanese, or exploring the other side of the world. [/update]
I know that when I had troubles finding a key I check out the The Pirate Bay and Google to see if Cities XL had been cracked and released, that did me no good since there is no Cities XL crack even still I really wanted to play it. Well looking at the web searches that lead people to this site I can see that there are some other unfortunate souls willing to hit the torrents just to play Cities XL. Well I have some news for you, its not going to happen until a street release at least and liekly never for the planet offer. The current Cities XL requires not only net access to login but also a constant internet connection to play online. There is no offline so no hope of getting past the beta key requirement. If you do want to play the game I would suggest downloading the client while you are searching for beta keys. That way you are ready to go when you do get a beta key and you can also check out the in-game music which is stored in “Monte Cristo\Cities XL\Data\Sound\Music\XL”, I know this because before I got my key I searched the game’s files and found the music. So yeah stop searching for a cities xl crack, hack or leak and get back to looking for a beta key. Oh and any Cities XL Torrent you happen to run across will either be a repost of the same client you can already get from Monte Cristo or it will contain spyware/malware.
So while SMRsimple.com is not even feature complete yet I have gotten myself addicted to another game, Cities XL. The new fansite is not surprisingly citiesxlsimple.com Right now the game is still in closed bata and as a tester I’m under a NDA so there really isn’t much to do for the site. I may write up some things and then set it to release after the NDA lapses. I may also add a passworded section so that me and some other beta players can have some place of our own.
Big news! A crack is out and it works! Thanks to Nob Ody for alerting me to it. You can get it on isohunt here are the instructions:
I can tested it and it is virus free and works perfectly, the author has even included all the current patches.[Older update]
JDMans over at the Pirate Bay posted instructions on how to use the torrent with the Cities XL trial