Awesome composition by TrueOneMoreUser with splicing Team Fortress 2 and ‘The Law Abiding Citizen’ trailer.
Check out his channel here for more of this works.

I say is that a hatless idling Irishman?

So a few days ago I booted up Team Fortress 2 after a mate asked me to check if my items were gone. Apparently because Valve had started to remove items gained by using Drunken F00l’s Idler Program which basically emulated you being connected to a Team Fortress 2 server.
Indeed I was greeted with the following:

Your account has been flagged for circumventing the item distribution system. We have removed the items that were illegally obtained. Future violations will result in the loss of all your items.

Valve had removed all the items I had gained using the idler which as two hats: The Heavy’s football helmet and the Glorious Officer’s Ushenka.
I am rather jarated off that Valve has all of a sudden pimp slapped a large percentage of its active Team Fortress 2 player base without stating its position on this matter months before this fiasco. The creator had emailed Valve about this months before asking for Valve’s opinion and also offered to voluntarily shut down operations if Valve requested, making it unforgivable for Valve to not have made an official post on their Team Fortress 2 blog warning idlers that its use was disapproved.

Instead of posting up a warning to all idler users Valve takes a different approach; it proceeds to take all items that idlers have gotten using the idler program, labelled them “Cheaters” and a final slap in the face, given all other users who did not use the idler program hats more specifically a “Halo” hat.
Now the community is in uproar about how Valve has handled this matter people who idled are not helping those with halos and those with halos refuse to help people who have idled. It has divided the community and many people have refused to play Team Fortress 2 ever again.
Although Valve has stated that only 3.5% of Team Fortress 2 owners were affected it seems that the number has been skewed as instead of being the number of active Team Fortress 2 players it is the number of people who own the game which it was bundled with The Orange Box. At its peak the idler server numbered roughly 10,000+ idlers at any given time, according to some users the number sits somewhere around the realm of 25-33.3% of the active player base has been affected by this fiasco.

Although I am unhappy my hats got taken away from me, I can still take solace in the fact that I can now see spies easily and snipers wearing the halo make easier headshot targets.

Edit: Fixed some expression mistakes and missing words.

I had requested a Force-a-Nature tee and a Team Fortress 2 coffee mug to be ordered for me.
Although I haven’t tried on the teeshirt, the coffee mug is simply awesome.Of all things the first thing I tried putting in it was beer, managing to fit 330ml of it with about probably 10~15ml to spare.
Anyways the mug is great  it feels solid, the handle has enough clearance so when you hold it you don’t burn your hand on the mug, the rather thick walls of the mug does help to keep its contents warm for a decent amount of time.
It’s also apparently big enough to perfectly dunk a Krispy Kreme donut into it.

So in conclusion; the Team Fortress 2 Coffee Mug besides being a rather good beer mug, performs its duty very well.
Keeping your cup of Joe warm for extended periods of time, allowing easy access for donuts, preventing burns on your knuckles and looking rather good on any geek or office worker’s desk.

You can get yourself one aswell from the the Valve Store here.

First you need to download a copy of SoftTH from the creator’s site here.

Download the latest release which is 1.08b during the time of writing.
After downloading you should end up with a zip file that resembles something like this.

Now place the files into the following directories:
In this case for Left 4 Dead.

Set 1:
SoftTH_hook.dll
SoftTH.cfg

Set 2:
d3d8.dll
d3d9.dll

The files from Set 1 go with the main game executable in:  steamapps > common > left 4 dead
While Set 2 files are to be placed into the ‘bin’ folder:  steamapps > common > left 4 dead > bin
The files if placed properly should look like the ones in the picture below.

Now grab a copy of my config file from here.
Copy, paste my configuration into the config file in your own directory.

You now need to set Left 4 Dead to actually run in your desired screen size.

1. Options > Video
2. Set Aspect Ratio to: Widescreen 16:9 (the game does not recognise the custom aspect ratio so it just puts it there)
3. Set your desired resolution.
4. Set Display Mode to Full Screen (This is important as Windows 7 does not seem to like windowed games being spread across many monitors)

With your settings set, restart the game it might start up and look weird but wait until it has gotten to the menus.

‘Alt-tab’ out and back in, it should fix it.

Now enjoy Left 4 Dead in triple monitor glory.

Just make sure your computer is up to scratch to be able to support three monitors.

The same steps can be applied to Team Fortress 2 to produce the same results.

Edit: I should have put this note in a while back.

Note: I do not guarantee that my config will work 100% with every setup as everyone’s hardware is different, so you may end up having to modify the config file so that it works with your setup.
This config file is designed to be compatible with three monitors that can display a native resolution of 1680×1050 only.
Anything else you must change the resolution settings in the config file to match your hardware otherwise this will not work.

Disclaimer: This information is provided as is and you may use it at your own risk.

Also don’t rip my tutorial if you post this anywhere make sure you give credit.

Update 5/04/2010: I’ve changed the SoftTH config file’s monitor detection to ‘auto’ this should alleviate the need to specify monitors as the hook will automatically detect them for you, though you will still need to run the main screen in the centre screen as per usual.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the ultimate showdown has begun...

After reading this article from Multimonitor.net showing that it was possible to get Team Fortress 2 to run on triple monitors with a program that emulates Matrox’s TripleHead2Go‘s functions – SoftTH.

I decided to give it a shot so after a good two hours of google, trial and error I finally got Team Fortress 2 working on my three Samsung 2243BWs.
It seemed to have a bit of difficulty running on Windows 7 Build 7077 so it took me a bit longer than anticipated.
Check out the test run on my Youtube video below.

You can give SoftTH a shot too, download it from the developer’s site.
Grab my config file from here, just copy paste the code into your config file and it should work.

Update 6/11/2010: The latest Team Fortress 2 update has broken SoftTH 1.08 and 1.09c, a workaround for this is to run TF2 in DirectX 8 with the command “-dxlevel 80″, you’ll lose quality but you can get your game on.