Patchou's Cabana

Spring is here! Among other things, this means it’s time to do some house cleaning and in my case, I decided it was time to re-organize my documents, photos, backups and the remaining 297,106 files of D:\ into something more useful. While doing just that, I stumbled upon an article I wrote many years ago for ffworld.com, a french web site dedicated to Final Fantasy games. Now that I have this personal blog site, I think I have a nice opportunity to post the article again. The text is about the first official Final Fantasy concert ever presented outside of Japan, during the E3 of 2004. It’s all written in french but it has some pictures ;).

Read “Concert de Final Fantasy à Los Angeles, 2004″ (french).

I’ve been a Media Center enthusiast for about a year now. It’s been a long time since I wanted to really give it a try and so far, I’ve been very pleased by the quality of this software and the amazing things you can do with it. One particular thing I’ve enjoyed doing recently is theming the interface so that it better fits with the rest of my home (I’m planning to run MC on a couple of HP Slate 500 stuck to the walls). While replacing images in the resources though, I kept on having issues with text coloring, especially with add-ons I use such as My Movies, Heatwave or DVBLink By default, those add-ons do not use the colors specified inside Media Center’s resources and with the release of Windows 7 SP1, the colors I wanted to customize in Media Center itself don’t even seem to work anymore when modified in the resource DLLs.

For all those reasons, I’ve developed and released a new software called Media Center Themer. It’s still pretty new and doesn’t do much but for anybody wanting to change the aspect of the text in their Media Center’s windows, including the text of most add-ons available, it should serve some purpose :). You can download the software, for free, in the projects section of this web site. All comments are welcomed :-).

My days with Messenger Plus! are now officially over. The Messenger Plus! Story article has been updated to close this chapter of my professional life.

Nothing lasts for ever, I’m glad I was there to witness Messenger Plus! reach so many people at its peak. The future of the software is now completely out of my control, I wish the new owners good luck with everything. My little Amélie is growing up, she’s two month old now and she needs all the time I can give her. For that reason, I’ll only be concentrating on small-scale projects this year (like Eorzea’s Guide). As usual, I have a lot of ideas for new projects/software and I hope I’ll have an opportunity to share some of them with you. Even if our meetings won’t be called “Messenger Plus! Meetings” anymore, there’s no reason why we couldn’t organize something like that this year, to share our memories and have some good old geek fun :-).

Whatever happens, don’t hesitate to contact me again via email or one of the many usual social networks. A good friend of mine from the community recently told me “don’t be a stranger” :  I certainly have no intention to be one, all the opposite :-).

After months of working on it during my free time, my new pet project is finally released, approved and available on BlackBerry App World! This new app has been designed exclusively for Final Fantasy 14 gamers. Use it to get help on more than a thousand official synthesis recipes available in game or to keep in touch with Eorzea’s news and world information while away from your computer.

More information about the features offered by Eorzea’s Guide can be found here on this site. If you own a BlackBerry and play Final Fantasy XIV, just search for “Eorzea” in your app store and give it a try. It’s entirely free :).

Hungry anybody?…

Coming soon