Summary

We talk with the guys from the REX Game Studios team, a cutting edge add-on creator for FSX and Prepar3D Flight Simulators, discuss the launch of Tvii, Google Maps, Mars organic compounds and more.

Many may have already figured out the secret to backing up or saving your Start Screen with Windows 8.  You spend loads of time getting it just right, but want to make sure that if all is lost you can restore it.  That is done by backing up the appsfolder.itemdata-ms file in your appdata\local\microsoft\windows folder and restoring as need be.  But what if you want to customize it so that every user on the machine sees the same Start Screen.  There is a way...

REX Latitude users, rejoice.  There is an update that adds a few new features and bug fixes to the Flight Simulator X / Prepar3D add-on that adds consequences to your flying experience helping you become a better virtual pilot.

Microsoft has just released their newest Office product, Office 2013.  Usually we think of something newer as being better, but in this case not entirely.  As I did briefly in our last podcast, in this article I’m going over some shortcomings of the new user interface (UI) of Office 2013 in greater detail.  This isn't an overall review on the product, rather just a warning if you are switching to Office 2013.  The warning is related to visual experience that you will get when using Office 2013, particularly that of Lync 2013 and Outlook.

Summary

We discuss Microsoft Office 2013 and its horrible UI interface, talk Holiday gift ideas ranging from Games to TVs and a look at the Dell T3600 Precision Workstation.

Summary 

We discuss Microsoft Office 2013 and its horrible UI interface, talk Holiday gift ideas ranging from Games to TVs and a look at the Dell T3600 Precision Workstation.

I have a TrackIR device which I use primarily with Flight Simulator X, and ran into an issue out of the blue.  Nothing was changed on my system and it was running fine previously, using version 5.1 of the software.  Suddenly when TrackIR would load it would simply say "error" in a dialogue box and then close.  To get past this error I discovered that the checkbox under OpenGL Settings called "Triple Buffering" was causing the issue.  Simply un-checking the box has made the error go away. 

Thus far, even at this writing, version 5.2 of their software has not fixed this glitch.  This was with my ATI 5850 card combined with Windows 8 x64 RTM (and the latest Windows updates).

If you want to see all your Windows 8 settings in one "Control Panel" style view, there is a real simple way to achieve this called the GodMode (windows 7 had a similar trick).  Simply right click anywhere on your desktop or in windows explorer, create a new folder.  Give it the following name:

All Settings .{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Now, when you double click that "folder" you are presented with the all settings view.  You can make a shortcut to this folder and pin it to Start or to the Taskbar as desired.