Moving out

Weird feeling.

Why are all the good ones taken?

They're good because they're taken. Go train your own.

Business ideas

• Short-range kinect to allow accurate gesture recognition in front of a monitor
• Software company developing physical simulations

Steam Update slow?

So I'm installing steam, and the update process the installer goes through is painfully slow. This is because the default server is getting pounded. You can't change which server it uses until it's fully installed.

Other sites advise deleting ClientRegistry.blob; I found that this didn't help. Another solution was to reset your external IP address by resetting your router; this was not possible.

Instead, you can trick Steam into trying different servers by killing its connections. Go get TCPView from the microsoft website and run it. Find the Steam connection to the update server (my Steam.exe had only one connection) and kill it. Steam will create a new connection and try to download from a different server.

You might have to kill the connection a few times before the Steam client finds a fast server. You'll know you've got a fast one when the Rcvd Bytes column starts going up fast -- it should get past 1,000,000 within a few seconds. Slow servers don't get past 10-20,000 within 20 seconds.

Fully installing steam requires downloading more than 90MiB . On the default server, at 10 kB/s, this would take about three hours.

Valve should really fix this. The server choosing/indexing needs a bit of fixing.