denyerec.co.uk

I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 a little lately, and it’s most entertaining. As some of you may know, it being a Valve game, the option to “spraypaint” a tag onto the walls is present as it was in Counterstrike, however, creating these custom images for use can be a bit of a pain.

First of all, you’ll need something like Photoshop. GIMP will do, but these instructions are for Photoshop.
Next you’ll need VTF Edit, which you can get from the bottom of the VTF Edit website. It’s a lot cheaper than Photoshop…

• Now open Photoshop. Create a blank 256×256 RGB 8-bit image.
• Fill this image with mid-grey R 128, G 128, B 128.
• Create a new layer on top of this, and draw / add whatever you want to it. Delete from this layer any bits you want to be transparent in the final spray image
• Press CTRL and click the layer you’re drawing on in the layers pallete, this selects only what you’ve drawn onto the layer
• On the Channels tab, click the second button from the left to “Create alpha channel from selection”
• Go back to the layers tab. Click Layer->Flatten Image
• Now save the image as a TGA file, make sure Alpha Channels is ticked, hit OK and select “32 bit” if a little dialog pops up
• Open VTF Edit, go to File->Import and select your TGA file
• In the dialog that appears, uncheck “Generate Mipmaps” and leave everything else default. Alpha Format should read ‘DXT5′. Hit OK.
• To confirm that yout TGA alpha map worked OK, you can check View->Mask, which should turn on the alpha map preview
• Go to File->Save As and save the file

Once you’ve generated the VTF file you need to place it in two locations:

• \Steam\steamapps\ \team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos\
• \Steam\steamapps\ \team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos\UI\

If the folders don’t exist, then just create them. As far as I can tell, it is case sensitive, so watch out for that. When you’re all done with that, load TF2 and go to the Advanced tab on the options page and select your spray tag image.

Simple… 😉

Update:
Blagpuss points out that some users might need to add “_english” to the ‘tf’ portion of the path, this might vary for users with other regionalised copies too, so watch out for that.

Take a look at this video about nuking Iran. It’s really short and the speaker doesn’t use any long words, so I recommend it. I believe he’s right on the money and I believe that anyone who thinks that marching men into Iran when we’re already engaged in two insane conflicts is a good idea, is quite, quite mad and heinously irresponsible.

I just updated to the latest version of wordpress which powers this site. Nothing broke. I like it when that happens.

I also made the defaul font size a little larger. I’m getting old and the smaller text was making me dizzy…

My images are being stolen. This is beginning to piss me off.
The more hawk-eyed readers will notice that at the bottom of the gallery pages is a Creative Commons licence, which permits someone to use my photos for non-profit, if they simply attribute the original image to me. Not a tall order, to be honest. If I could use a Nikon D3 camera for the price of simply telling people I got it from Nikon, that would rock! And you know what, it would be easy to do, too, because the camera has “NIKON” stamped on the top in big letters. Peice of cake.

Oddly enough , my images have “M Denyer” on them, this lets people know that the person who took the photo is called, who’d have thunk it, M Denyer. (The M is for M, by the way.) You’d like to infer from this that such a person deeming my images fit for use would then have to simply display them, as-is, and the attribution part of the bargain is complete. Actually ZERO effort required. Literally, none. It’s actually harder to copy the image to your own FTP server than it is to hold up the attribution part of the bargain.

This is therefore why I get angry when thieving punks like this git running a website about a Jersey Water polo Club and another individual running some blog (I will not abuse this fellow human just yet, as I only hailled them this morning about the issue, so have yet to see how they respond. If they respond correctly, I will be crediting them with a link. If not, I’m going to get angry on their behinds.) use my images and go through the arduous trouble of attempting to conceal the copyright notice.

If you are a non-profit organisation and you leave my copyright notice intact, the images are FREE FOR USE. Get it? It’s clear these people are either compulsive kleptomaniacs for whom the thrill of the steal is the main event, or they’ve got some kind of learning disorder and simply cannot read. Given the fact that both of them have managed to author websites, even if not of any noteably great standard, I am lead to conclude that they are just plain old thieving bastards. Yeah that’s right, I said it.

Just for the record, the original photograph of the White Faced Saki and the Jersey Cow can be found in my gallery.

—–
Update – After lunch
Looks like the blog owner over at Quedat took my polite yet-ever-so-Britishly-aggressive message to heart and has reversed their copyright chop, to display the full image avec-copyright. One down and one to go! (That I know of…)

I have an EVGA 8800GTS OC 320mb.
I purchased it from Overclockers.co.uk and I urge anyone reading that they do not make the same mistake.

Overclockers firstly lied to me about the product, falsley advertising that it was elegible for the EVGA “Step Up” program, which it is not. The 90-day bullshit was even printed all over the box, something I was later informed was the result of EVGA shipping products in whatever boxes they had available. Way to go you theiving fraudsters. I don’t like being lied to, especially when the trained monkey retard on the end of the phone “umms” and “errs” blankley on the end of the phone when confronted with the facts. Maybe I just don’t get shitty enough with people on the phone to ‘get things done’, but I don’t see why one should have to resort to crude behaviour and legal threats. Maybe that’s how one has to take these pillocks on, I should make a note to try this in future…

Anyhow, the card is defunct. It causes glitching and crashing symptomatic of overeheating yet the temp sensors report everything to be normal. RMA time. Overclockers basically deny all knowledge of ever dealing with me, saying if it’s an EVGA product to RMA it direct to EVGA. EVGA initially say to try dealing with your supplier. Fat chance. So the arrogant arses at OCUK just say “Deal with EVGA” and provide me with a mobile number (!) for the only person in the UK working for EVGA. Great start. I call the guy who listens to me, seemingly ignores everything I say and gives me the email addresses of some people in Germany to contact.

I contact them.

Twice.

I get no responses. I don’t even get a response from the guy on the mobile phone. If i could rememeber the sodding number I’d put it up here for people to prank call and flagrantly abuse, because frankly they deserve it. I discover I can raise an RMA request by email, I try this but am once again ignored. I raise an RMA request using their RMA ticket system thingy, I am once again ignored. I receive NO feedback from EVGA about anything, at all. Basically they’re operating under the umbrella of “You were stupid enough to buy our product from a bunch of crooks, so hahahaha sucks to be you.” and are not uphlding any part of their warranty claim which, as far as I am aware, is illegal. It’s worth noting that EVGA Europe is based in Germany and all RMA requests need to be shipped back there, with ALL shipping costs (To and from) payable by the consumer. Not even EBuyer is this bad and it’s fairly plain how pissed off I am with their level of “Service”.

Do me a favour and boycott the punks at EVGA and the crooks over at Overclockers.co.uk. There are other more respectable and worthwhile computer suppliers like CCL who don’t lie, cheat and all out swindle you out of your hard-earned with dubious returns policies and inaccurate falsified advertising.

Even if EVGA ever do issue an RMA I just know I’m going to feel like Neville Chamberlain coming home from his pow-wow with Hitler, waving that pretty little appeasement paper.

Hitler was (an honourary…) German too. I wonder if EVGA inherited his customer service principles. Certainly bloody feels like it.

Turns out we had no idea where we were transferring on our way to Oz, and it turns out it was Hong Kong Crazy huge airport with mountains and chairlifts and clouds that sit on the mountains like little hats. It’s cool, though because we’re trapped in the airport for a mere 100 minutes we don’t actually get to see Hong Kong proper.

Mucho turbulance over India and the Russian mountains (Urals?) *again*, hate that bit.

More to follow from Australia.

(And Doug, if you’re reading, we’ll wave to everyone in the airport on the offchance you know them… 😉 )

Once again the window into our beloved Big BrotherState, the BBC, brings us a harrowing peice about two desperate and dangerous criminals, determined to endanger the lives of our beloved parliamentary doo-gooders.
Obadiah Marius was arrested under the “Serious and Organised Crime Act”, another one of those policies dashed through to provide blanket powers to the police under the guise of doing something useful to protect us from, well, Serious and Organised crime. He had in fact just gotten himself a little lost which, I’d always though, was allowable. It seems now however that “Inability to Navigate” has been added to the list of henoius and sinful crimes alongside “Speaking your mind near Whitehall”. Interestingly enough his girlfriend was released, though her name wasn’t. I wonder if Obadiah was “White British”, or perhaps his girlfriend? She was released, afterall, even though it’s well known that women can be at times both very serious and organised.

Don’t get me wrong, I think with the jokes the UK government is pulling off on a global scale they really do need that security, but do they genuinely believe that Obadiah Marius was either serious, or organised? Just make sure you don’t stop to ask a copper for directions in The Smoke any time soon, else you might find yourself sharing a cell with genuinely serious and organised criminals… 😉

Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher.

Because Supermarkets are dirty profit mongering whores.

Soon most butchers will be closed due to low profits, most grocers will have gone and most independant dairies crushed by supermarket demand. Most people nowadays have never eaten good bacon, know what should be in a sausage or even say “Hello” to the person behind the counter who serves them. it’s a joke, a sick tragedy and a loss that will not be recouped further down the line.

Don’t be retards. Buy Meat from your Local Butcher.