Stunning guitar rendition of Contra’s jungle theme

January 21st, 2009 •
Tags: Contra, game music, music, NES

One of my many geeky pleasures is listening to tracks from NES games. It’s unreal what the composers were able to accomplish given the primitive sound capabilities of the platform. The fact that a track can now be reimagined like this one and maintain lasting appeal is a testament to the vision of the original. If you’re into The Advantage and The Minibosses, you’re going to love this!

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix playable demo

January 21st, 2009 •
Tags: demo, flash, puzzle, Puzzle Quest, RPG

The original Puzzle Quest pioneered the puzzle/RPG hybrid bastard child genre. The game quickly became available on a multitude of platforms and was critically praised.

A couple of days back, a Flash-based demo of the next game in the PQ series—Galactric—which is playable in any browser that supports Flash. In case you were in your hole for the past day or two and missed the news, you can now try one of the puzzle battles for yourself to check it out without even having to download and install a program. The puzzle part of the game is very similar to the original. The blocks are not square so the movement of blocks after clearing a group isn’t as immediately evident as it was in the original. I’m sure I will come to understand which blocks will fill in the holes as I continue to play. It’s certainly enjoyable, but I hope the RPG elements of the game have some new twists over the original to really bring this sequel into its own. Check it out and post your comments on the demo!

If you still haven’t checked out the original Puzzle Quest, it is definitely one of the most addictive gaming experiences conceived in the last several years (possibly only bested in the addictiveness category by Peggle). My favorite edition is the Xbox Live Arcade version which offers online play and excellent graphics. I have heard the PSP version is an excellent mobile version, but some of the mobile versions suffer due to the fact that the game puts so much information on the screen. It is sometimes difficult for feeble mobile displays to cram everything onto the screen. Sad since it is perfectly suited to mobile play!

Automatically add lyrics for your iTunes tracks (for Mac)

January 21st, 2009 • 7 comments
Tags: Audio only, howto, itunes, lyrics, mac, music, tutorial

Reposted from me.raddevon.com.

I don’t have a lot of music in iTunes, but a lot of the music I have is not the easiest to automate lyrics downloads. There are a number of one-step automated solutions, but unless your collection is limited to Justin Timberlake, The Beatles, and Madonna, you may have trouble getting lyrics for all your songs. Even this method is imperfect, but it finds the most of anything I have tried.

First, you will need to make a stop by Doug’s AppleScripts. There are two scripts we need for this process: No Lyrics to Playlist and Needle Drop. The former is fairly self-explanatory; it makes a playlist of every track in your library without lyric information. The latter allows you to specify a number of seconds to play of each track in a given playlist. After invoking Needle Drop, it will load up and play each song in your playlist for the time you specify.

There is one more piece of software needed to complete the process: TunesTEXT. This is a dashboard widget that finds lyrics for the currently playing iTunes track and adds them to your library.

Now, we can put the pieces together. Install the dashboard widget by double-clicking on it. The scripts have to be installed manually. Unzip the downloads and drag the scripts into (your home folder)/Library/iTunes/Scripts/. Once everything is installed, start your iTunes. If iTunes is already open, you will have to close and re-open it so that it will pick up the new scripts.

Once iTunes has started, you should see the scripts you just installed in a menu on the menu bar that looks like an unfurled scroll . Switch to the music section of your library. Click the scroll and choose “No Lyrics to Playlist.” This script will take a minute to comb through your tracks to find those that have no lyrics. Now, you may have to clean this list a bit. If you have podcasts, they will also be included in the list. Sort the list by Genre and delete any tracks that you don’t want lyrics for (e.g. books, comedy, classical, podcasts).

Now, you should have a playlist with only the songs you want to search lyrics for. We can use Needle Drop to play just enough of each track so that TunesTEXT has time to find lyrics. I found that, on my connection, five seconds was plenty of time for the lyrics to be found. You may have to experiment to find the perfect balance. Especially if you have lots of music, you want to choose the shortest playtimes that are enough to find lyrics to reduce the time the search will take.

While still in the No Lyrics playlist, click the scroll and select the Needle Drop script. You will see a dialog box where you can enter the playtime for each track. Enter the time you determined was ideal for your setup (or just try five seconds—it worked for me!). Now, the tracks will begin to play, the lyrics will be searched and added by TunesTEXT, and all will be right with the world. Enjoy!

Share the net with FriendFeed

January 20th, 2009 •
Tags: friendfeed, google reader, sharing, Social Web

Reposted from me.raddevon.com.

Google Reader is a fantastic app. It is the perfect way to wrangle all those cool web sites your following into one easy location. I am able to take in far more information much more quickly and efficiently than I could by visiting each individual site. Google Reader also offers a sharing feature that allows user to easily broadcast their favorite items to other Reader users in their Gmail contacts list. Recently, Google added the ability to provide notes making the sharing even more robust. However, I now find myself re-sharing friends items with replies to their notes or my own notes or even e-mailing them a story they originally shared to give my two cents. As is the way of the web, there is a better way to carry on a conversation surrounding web content… and you don’t even have to ditch Google Reader to get there!

It’s called FriendFeed. It’s intended purpose is as an aggregator for the many social sites typical addicts (like you and I) participate in on a daily basis. That’s flickr, twitter, Netflix, Disqus, digg, reddit, YouTube, brightkite, del.icio.us, last.fm, Facebook, and LinkedIn, among others. However, the most important supported service for the purposes of this post is Google Reader.

For many of it’s supported services, FriendFeed is very selective in the content it chooses to add to your feed. In Google Reader, only your shared items will make it to the feed. It would be a bit overwhelming if all of everyone’s items were posted. Since only shared items make it, you will get only the best of your friends feed items.

Once you have configured FriendFeed to link to your Google Reader account, FriendFeed will periodically check for shared items and add them to your FriendFeed. You and your FriendFeed subscribers (Unlike twitter, when you add a FriendFeed user, you have “subscribed” to them.) will have the opportunity to interact with shared items in a number of ways: by commenting on them, liking them, or re-sharing them. The comment system is really where it’s at. In Google Reader, sharing is a one-way affair; I share an item (with a note if I so choose) and you look at it. In FriendFeed, I may share an item which can then foster an entire discussion around it by way of the comments. The commenting isn’t over after the initial posting. This is really a groundbreaking new facet of sharing Internet content.

FriendFeed has features that foster community. When you first get started, your page will be barren, but you will soon start to find friends as with other social networks. You can use the friend recommendation page to quickly find like-minded people to connect with. You may also browse the rooms which are spaces where users may share items with others with similar interests. You will find a room for Apple-loves, for gamers, social media buffs, and just about any other group you can think of. Feel free to create rooms around your own interests and start sharing.

On its surface, FriendFeed appears to be a very focused feed reader that delivers only your friends’ activities online. However, it is a fantastic community built around the wealth of content published daily on the Internet. Jump in and start talking! Also, be sure to subscribe to me!

Hi! I’m the new raddevon.com.

January 20th, 2009 •

Welcome to the new raddevon.com. Whereas, at this location you would formerly find the random ravings of a lunatic, you will now find the more-focused ramblings of said lunatic.
If you enjoyed my posts of whatever I wanted to write at the given time, you may still find those at me.raddevon.com. This site is now devoted to technology, the Internet, and gaming. If you’re into that sort of thing, please subscribe to the blog. I promise to deliver the goods straight to your favorite RSS reader (which is no doubt Google Reader… unless it isn’t). You’ll get a unique perspective on whatever tech news is breaking as well as insight into the gaming industry from a guy with no real expertise whatsoever aside from rabidly devouring nearly every hot new game that has come down the line for the past 22 years.

I want to give you cool stuff you may not see at every other tech site. In return, I want you to comment. Respond to me, argue with me, let me know what you want more of, comment with information I left out of the original post, or just comment with some pedantic grammar correction (you jerk).

Oh yeah. To get the ball rolling, I’m going to repost some things from my old site that may be relevent here. Don’t worry. This will not become a trend. There will otherwise never be any crossposting between this site and my personal one.

Enough of the introduction. If you are interested in writing a guest post, please send in your submissions. If I like it, I’ll post it on the blog with a plug for your own site (if you wish). Thanks for reading.