Overpaid parking fees

What happens when you overpaid your parking fees and there is not enough change in the Autopay station?



This is a question that crossed my mind, and my conclusion is that the machine will just reject your notes and insists on exact amount when it run out of coins. Apparently things can be done in a different way. I was paying for my parking on Sunday when I noticed that the Autopay machine took so much longer to process my ticket after I put in my note. Since there is no response from the machine, no message, nothing, I was getting a bit worried when the machine prompted me to get my 'change'. Funny things was, there is no coin; just a slip. I picked that up and it reads that I had overpaid and I should collect my change in the parking service booth.



Although it took me a while to find the parking service booth, I managed to get my change back. I might want to find out more about the system, but when I recall that paid tickets will be invalid in 15 minutes, I made a wise decision to finding my way to the nearest exit instead.

SandboxIE - Another way to avoid spyware and malware

Sandboxie uses another approach to protect you from spyware and malware: fooling the browser, and those nasty applications that hijacks your browser that changes has been written on the disk while there are not.



To quote from its FAQ section, What is Sandboxie:

Think of your PC as a piece of paper. Every program you run writes on
the paper. When you run your browser, it writes on the paper about
every site you visited. And any malware you come across will usually
try to write itself into the paper.

Traditional privacy and anti-malware software try to locate and
erase any writings they think you wouldn't want on the paper. Most of
the times they get it right. But first the makers of these solutions
must teach the solution what to look for on the paper, and also how to
erase it safely.

On the other hand, the Sandboxie sandbox works like a transparency
layer placed over the paper. Programs write on the transparency layer
and to them it looks like the real paper. When you delete the sandbox,
it's like removing the transparency layer, the unchanged, real paper is
revealed.

I like it quite much, as it adds another sense of security to me. The only issue is that I have to remind myself to move the files I downloaded into the "sandboxed" environment to my real environment every now and then. Of course I won't throw away my anti-spyware applications, but with Sandboxie I feel a little bit safer.

Classic Shoot'em up - Kobo Deluxe

I've been playing with this open source space shooter called Kobo Deluxe and believe me, it is insanely addictive. I have been playing it for the past two weeks and I just found myself stealing every possible chance to play this game.



The game play is simple: shoot everything and avoid everything. To pass a level, you have to destroy all the alien fortresses. Every fortresses has a core, which if you destroy it, the rest of the fortress will just collapse. Of course, typical cannon and alien spaceships are there to stop you. As you proceed through the 50 levels (what I heard, I am still stuck at level 44), the game is getting tougher and almost impossible.



The graphics and sounds are simple and nice. Besides being free, it can be played on various platforms such as Windows (95 to XP), Mac OS, Linux, Xbox, Palm and PocketPC, just to name a few. You can visit their download page to download of check it out whether your operating system is supported or not.



As for me, this is just the perfect game to kill a few minutes.