If English is not your native language you might have encountered some words that you did not know how to pronounce correctly. How would you pronounce zealously or eligibility for instance if you never heard the words before ? Even in the English language family words are pronounced differently depending on the region of the speaker. A Scott pronounces word different than someone from San Francisco.

Youtube Sunday it seems. We all know that Youtube likes to cooperate with everyone who looks a bit like authority and takes down videos pretty fast. It does not always have to be copyright infringement, it can also be original works of art that some authorities like the Turkish or Thai government want removed from Youtube pressuring the site with a countrywide ban. (man I love the Turkish interpretation of Democracy and free speech)

Now that is what I call a niche search engine. Youtube is big, sometimes to big to find what you are looking for. Peter created a simple interface to search over 150000 music videos that are currently hosted on Youtube. The videos are embedded in the page as well which makes it probably the fastest method to search for music videos on Youtube. I’m not exactly sure how he managed to get all those videos in this database or if he used a script to do it, lots of work nevertheless.

I forgot the weekend fun thread last Friday and promised myself that this would never happen again. Today I’m going to present a great arcade shooter called Veck Special Edition which looks and plays like a mix of many of the classic aracade games including Asteroids, Robotron 2084 and Smash Tv. This version is packed with 15 levels each lasting one minute. Every minute your spacecraft gets an weapon upgrade that makes it more powerful while at the same time more powerful enemies emerge that want to destroy you.

If you thought it would be fun to play games on the Nintendo Wii you should see the following Youtube videos to get an impression of what I consider ultimate fun. Developers have already been able to use basic applications like Google Earth in conjunction with the Wiimote and they finally managed to get some games working as well. All you need is a Wiimote, a Pc that has Bluetooth, some games that are supported and of course the software GlovePie.

Now ain’t that interesting ? You can use Google Maps to get directions from one location to another. It is most of the time pretty accurate displaying information about highways, signs, exits and so on to give you a good impression of the route that lies ahead. You can try it now and head over to the Google Maps website and use the Get Directions tab to enter a starting point and destination to see how the system works.

Media Create published up to date figures for hardware sales in Japan and the figures demonstrate a astounding success for the Nintendo Wii in Japan. Nintendo sold 1.041.975 Wii systems this year while Sony managed to sell 353.823 Playstation 3 gaming systems. Not to forget Microsoft with 79.013 in this year with their Xbox 360. It should be noted that Sony is loosing money with every system produced and sold while Nintendo gains money.

For the average user Microsoft Paint is just a basic image editor with limited functionality. It never occured to me that artists could great pro images even with such a basic image editor. I probably would never get in contact with works of those artists if video sites such as Youtube would not exist. Thankfully they do exist and I was able to select some handpicked images that have been created with the Microsoft Paint image editor.

A reader of my blog recommended a great music download site with the name ElectroBel, a free underground electronic music community site. The mp3 music that can be found on Electrobel can be listened to online or downloaded as mp3 files to your own computer. Every single song has been created by a member of the music community and released under Creative Commons.

My participation in both the Joost and Bablegum beta phase has taught me several things about those social TV over Internet clients: They do add interactivity to the TV experience. Users can chat about a TV show they are viewing at that moment or rate shows for instance. Both TV clients have one big disadvantage though that weighs much more than the new interactivity. Joost and Bablegum stream pre-recorded tv shows only, at least in this stage. There is absolutely no live content and the content that is currently offered is considered by many as B-Movie content.

Widescreen monitors become more and more common these days which run on native resolutions like 1400 x 1050, 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200. Many applications, especially games do not support the native resolutions of widescreen monitors and it is also extremely difficulty to find wallpapers that do not need to be stretched. I did find a resource that has a compilation of wallpapers for widescreen monitors offering the resolutions mentioned above

Karaoke and Karaoke software is becoming more and more popular since Sony decided to release the first Singstar Playstation 2 Karaoke game. Even friends who never heard of the Playstation 2 before were fascinated by those Karaoke games and some even bought a Playstation 2 only for those games. In case you did not know, Karaoke means that someone sings the song while only the instruments play in the background. This is tremendous fun especially in conjunction with cold beer.

I thought my dual computer monitor lineup would be something spectacular, how wrong I was. Everton from Connected Internet posted an article today that has an image of an incredible looking computer monitor lineup. The linup consists of one 30” center flat screen monitor and five 20.1” perimeter flat screens that surround the center lcd monitor. This computer monitor setup needs special multi-monitor software of course that makes it possible to choose what you display on all the single flat screen monitors. Take a look at the image first to get a better impression.

Back then when I started writing articles for ghacks I was writing about a freeware game that blew my mind. The game was called Mono and had such an addictive fascinating gameplay that I played it for endless hours. The creators of Mono developed a new game which is called Echoes that uses many of the addicting elements that made Mono famous. Echoes is an Asteroids clone on steroids. That is probably the best way to explain the basic principle of the game. The developers put it that way when they describe Echoes: “Yeah, it’s a bit like Asteroids hyperactive, drug crazed brother displayed in blur-o-vision© and viewed through psychedelic sunglasses in a cheap nightclub.”

Since I’m running the wallpaper changer application non-stop on my computer I’m always on the lookout for more wallpapers that would fit nicely in my rotation. One site that I discovered reading the Donation Coders Blog is called Desktopography and describes itself as an exhibition of natural designer wallpapers. There have been exhibitions in the last three years with a total of 75 beautiful wallpapers. All wallpapers can be downloaded from the site free of charge and most are offered in different sizes.

A new version of the Internet TV application Joost has been released yesterday. The first thing that struck me was that I had to uninstall Joost 0.85 before I could install the new Joost version. If that was not bad enough I had to create a new account because Joost changed to a new user system. Signup was hassle free though. There have not been many changes to the system as far as I can tell, one new feature seems to be the so called channel catalog which displays all the channels that can be added to view in Joost.

Many gamers think that the Dreamcast was the best gaming system of the last generation. It featured many unique games that never made an appearance on other systems. I sold my Dreamcast a while ago but still have a few games here that I did not sell with the system. Games like Samba de Amigo or the incredible Soul Calibur made a big impact on the gaming community. Yesterday NullDC was released which is a Dreamcast emulator for PC. It is supposed to be the emulator with the most playable titles running Dreamcast games at full speed.

Wiikey is one of the modchips that are available for Nintendo’s Wii gaming system. The modchip Wiikey is able to play backups from the same region which means Wiikey can play backed up PAL games on European systems and backed up NTSC games on Japanese and US Wii systems. It is possible to play Japanese games on US Wii systems and vice versa but it is currently not possible to play all NTSC games on European Wii systems with Wiikey. You can also play backed up and imported Gamecube games with Wiikey as well as Gamecube homebrew discs.

If you ever wanted to access your mp3 collection remotely the Winamp Remote Plugin which is currently in beta status might be exactly what you are looking for. Once setup you can access your music collection from any web browser using a normal Internet connection. The computer with the music collection that streams the content has to be connected to the Internet as well. Just download and install the Winamp Remote Plugin and create a new account. This is important that only you, and everyone who is having the username and password, is able to connect and listen to your music collection.

Tails Gear is one of those Japanese arcade shooters that make it pretty difficulty for average gamers to see more of the game than just a few levels. If you ever played games like Ikaruga you know what I mean, they live of extreme amounts of enemies and bullets that they send your way and you have to move the ship more than carefully to avoid death. Graphics are excellent as is the gameplay, you always see some kind of sequences when you finish a level and move on to the next. One of the interesting features of the game are the satellites of your ship that shoot on their own and can stay in a place for tactical reasons.

The free social music networking site Jamendo announced today that they have distributed more than one million downloads of albums that are freely available using bittorrent technology. Only albums that have been fully distributed have been counted or as they put it: “this figure is the minimum indicative number of the total of complete albums we have distributed so far”. This is a huge success for sites that believe that drm free music sites can and will succeed in the long run. Jamendo has an incredible download rate of more than 200000 albums every month and the figure is increasing with each passing month.

Jabbits is a interesting new interactive website that is supposed to be the worlds first interactive video website. It could be described as some type of video answers website where one user posts a question and all others reply to it. The major difference to normal written conversations is that everything is recorded on video and can be accessed through Jabbits. There are actually three types of questions on Jabbits: Public, Research and Private questions. Public questions come from normal visitors who would like an answer to a question whereas research questions are added by companies who pay the users that answer the question that they ask. Private questions can only be answered by users who have been invited by the creator of the question to answer it.

You might know that Youtube held a video awards voting on their site for the last five days were everyone was able to vote for their favorite videos that Youtube preselected. Ten entries were shown and you could assign spots from 1 to 10 to them. Now, after all votes have been cast Youtube presents the Winners of the 2006 Video Awards in the categories Most Creative, Best Comedy, Best Commentary, Best Series, Best Music Video, Most Inspirational and Most Adorable. The videos below are in the same order in case you are wondering.

I do like futuristic looking demonstrations of technologies that will play a big role in the coming years. One demonstration that I found absolutely fascinating is a Photoshop multitouch image editing one. Working with small screens and a mouse plus keyboard combination is the current state of the art when it comes to image editing. It becomes problematic in a number of way including working in a team. It is also not natural to use a mouse to draw and edit images. Multitouch image editing uses a natural flow and offers a bigger detailed view of the image at hand.

Many users tend to use wallpapers to customize the look and feel of their operating system. Wallpapers come in all sizes and shapes but have one thing in common, they are normally image files that have a size of 100K and more. This is probably not a problem for most new computers but when you have a old machine you might want to fight for every byte that you can save somewhere. The alternative to those wallpapers are tiny wallpapers that have the exact same effect. Sure, they do not show objects or people but they are still nice to look at.

Naac reminds me a little bit of Smash Tv. It is a pretty straightforward top down shooter that can be downloaded from the developers homepage. You start with a handgun and have to defeat all aliens that emerge from different sides of the screen. The game would be incredibly boring if it would not feature power ups, better weapons, different types of aliens and even boss aliens that require strategy to defeat. It is absolutely crucial that you pick up the power ups and better weapons when they emerge randomly on the screen. It would otherwise become impossible to defeat the hordes of aliens at later stages.

Europeans get a weaker software emulation of Playstation 2 and Playstation 1 titles compared to the hardware emulation that Japanese and American Playstation 3 owners enjoyed. It was not known – until now – how good, or shall I say bad, the software emulation worked and how many games could be played at all. Sony wants to cut down on manufacturing costs and Europeans are the first to witness the ill effects. The Playstation 3 costs more and plays less, would not call that a bargain but the crazy Brits will surely buy the PS3 nevertheless.

Gutenberg was a German inventor most famous for inventing movable type printing around 1450 in Germany revolutionizing European print-making. Project Gutenberg offers more than 20000 free Ebooks for download and has a audiobook section as well. The audiobook section of Project Gutenberg offers a great list of free audiobooks in various languages with the emphasize on English audiobooks. Please note that all audiobooks are read by humans, some audiobook sites offer books read by computers instead. Human read audiobooks are of a higher quality.

EzTakes is a movie store that offers DRM free DVD downloads. You may watch and burn the downloaded DVD movies as often as you want without restrictions or additional payments. The format of the movies is the standard DVD format with a VIDEO_TS folder. DVD Covers and prints will be downloaded automatically as well completing the movie download process. Most other movie stores, like Amazon Unbox, restrict usage of the downloaded movie files and make it impossible to burn the movies on DVDs that can be watched using a standalone DVD player.

Moby, James Blunt, Metallica, Jack Johnson and Madonna. That is only a sample of the artists that you can find on Sideload. Sideload basically searches the internet for free mp3 files that are for example used for promotions or available on the artists websites. Those mp3 files get indexed by Sideload and can then be found using the Sideload search. The homepage of Sideload already lists about 100 mp3 files that can be instantly listened to. Just click on the little green > icon to play the song that you want to listen to.

I loved to play games like Streets of Rage and Final Fight in the arcades with a friend. It was tremendous fun to several punks at once with the character that you have chosen to play. A nice feature was the character selection screen before you start a game. Would you select a quick guy who was faster but would not hit that hard, or would you rather select the slow brawler that hit harder ? Streets of Rage Remake offers six playable and two unlockable characters to chose from. All vary in power, technique, speed, jump and stamina.

Right from the beginning Shadowflare reminds me of probably the greatest action rpg game of all time – Diablo 2. The perspektive, game mechanics and even graphics look really similar and are really good for a freeware game. You control a nameless warrior who starts in a small remote village. A dog companion that can be commanded is always at your side and you receive the first task from the commander of that village.

The tv companies in your country decided that it is not worth to show all the games on free tv ? I always have the feeling that my time gets punished the most by this decision because i rarely have the opportunity to watch live games on tv. One great way of seeing the football games with no additional costs at all is to rely on a tv streaming application that uses p2p data transfer methods to stream the content.

Rectable looks so damn futuristic that I had a hard time believing it was a concept of our time. The reactable hardware is based on a translucent round table. A video camera situated beneath, continuously analyzes the table surface, tracking the nature, position and orientation of the objects that are distributed on its surface, representing the components of a classic modular synthesizer. These objects are passive without any sensors or actuators, users interact by moving them, changing their position, their orientation or their faces (in the case of volumetric objects).

It was only a matter of time until someone put youtube clones on the web that did not concentrate on movies but on other files such as documents. Scribd is one of the first sites that gives its users the opportunity to upload – or even bulk upload – many types of documents including pdf, txt and doc. Every single document can be downloaded in the same three formats even without being logged in, much similar to youtube.

Yesterday a story about building a gaming pc for $800 hit the digg frontpage and soon became popular throughout the world wide web. The system looks quite impressive if you consider the budget and makes a good impression at first glance. There are however some questions that arise which I would like to address. But lets do a quick view of the system in question first. They have chosen a Core 2 Duo E6300 cpu from Intel, 1 gigabyte of PC-6400 Ram, a Geforce 7600 GT, a 160 gigabyte hard drive from Seagate, Antec case with 400W power supply, mouse, keyboard, soundcard and Windows XP Home.

Most people don’t ever think that it is possible that free and legal torrent websites exist, they automatically assume that torrents equal illegality. The list of then free and legal torrent sites proves this assumption wrong. NewTeeVee did a great job of compiling the list which is just a tiny fraction of the whole torrent scene. I still think that it is a good beginning to show others who do not know that much about bittorrent that there are indeed legal applications.

There are several ways to watch tv online. You can download episodes from video portals, use p2p networks to download shows, use p2p clients that stream tv in real time and use websites that do the same. The demand for and resources to do so are ever growing and it becomes quite a task to keep an overview over the best possibilities.

I never thought it would be possible to create Line Rider movies with such great detail. The artwork is without doubt one of the best that I ever saw in a Line Rider movie. Next to that is the excellent choice of music and the playful choreography which makes it a pleasure to watch. If you never heard about Line Reader before make sure you check out this movie and try to create a movie by yourself, it is pure fun.

It is Friday again, time for the game of the weekend. This time I have a great beat em up game for you that reminds me a little bit of the game Power Stone for the Dreamcast. Little Fighters offers an astonishing amount of game modes starting by the usual 1v1 battles which can also be played as team battles with up to eight characters. Stage mode puts the human player against waves of opponents who become stronger over time and championship mode features a tournament.

Babelgum and Joost are two services that try to deliver tv content to your computer using peer to peer technology. Both services seem to have the same aim to make the transition from watching shows on your television to watching shows on the internet as fluent as possible. There is no configuration involved, all that is needed is the Bablegum or Joost client and a broadband connection to the internet.

I’m a participant of the Joost beta best and have currently one free beta invite that I can freely give away to one of my readers. I will be getting more invites as the Joost beta progresses and will give them away as well. I probably should start to describe the service that Joost offers before I announce how you can win the beta invitation to Joost.

I’m really fond of wallpapers and always looking for great sites that offer many of them. I do rotate them every 15 minutes on my Windows desktop which looks and feels great. Whenever I come upon a new wallpaper site that offers quality wallpapers without – to much – spam and ads I post it here at ghacks because I know that many of my readers also love wallpapers. The following site offers more than 8000 high quality wallpapers, the only bad thing about it is that it only displays eight of them per page.

Many wallpaper websites can be classified as spammy. They have to many ads, some use popups and other means of making a quick buck. Good wallpaper sites are therefor rare and deserve to be mentioned in an article. The over 1000 abstract wallpaper on a single page website offers what its page title suggests, a good way of viewing and downloading some or even all of the wallpapers offered on that page.

Now that is what I call a bargain. Europeans do not only have to wait longer for the Playstation 3 to hit the shelves they also get a crippled PS3 that has reduced backwards compatibility. And the best of all ? They pay even more for the package. I was not sure what to make of the story that Everton posted today on his connected internet blog, he missed to cite a source for his story entitled: “Playstation 3 To Have Less Backwards Compatibility in Europe” and I immediately performed a search to find out what was going on.

Maniac Mansion was a special adventure that introduced a new way to interact with the environment. It was famous for its humor, the choice of characters and storyline. I remember that I had so much fun playing it with a friend on my good old C-64 exploring every inch of the game. Well, Lucasarts decided to make money with the Star Wars franchise instead of making great games which is rather unfortunate for fans of classic Lucasarts adventures.

There are so many hot or not picture voting sites out there that cover almost any subject imaginable but a video voting site that uses the same system is new to me. DizKiz pulls videos from youtube and lets the user vote for or against the videos. The majority of videos that they pull are funny ones – especially commercials, blunders, fakes and homemade fun movies.

Codehunters is a impressive work of computer art which was produced by Stateless Films for MTV Asia. It is a seven minutes long intro to the ongoing MTV Asia project Codehunters. The prolog introduces several characters of the Codehunters universe to the audience. The animation looks beautiful and I would suggest that you download the high resolution version if which could take some time to download.

It is currently possible to buy two modchips for the Nintendo Wii gaming system with another one becoming available every day now. The available modchips are called Wiinja and cyclowiz, the one that comes out soon Wiikey. All three are connected to the Wii drive and prevent that the drive reports whether a original or copied disk has been entered. This however has the disadvantage that those chips will not be able to defeat the region code of the games.

Ballistic is a addictive 3D maze type of game that reminds me a little bit of games like Marble Madness. The game Ballistic however brings some new elements to the “move ball to exit” type of games. First, the environment is fully 3D compared to the two dimensions of the other games. Second you do not move the ball(s) but the complete level and the ball just follows the laws of physics.