I do not know why some users swear on iTunes and prefer to use it as their main software for their music collection. The biggest drawback in my opinion is that iTunes was designed to only work with iPods and not other mp3 players from different manufacturers. I personally think that it is a bit way of to install iTunes if you do not own an iPod but apparently some users are doing it.
It is Friday again and as usual I'm writing about one great game for the weekend that will keep you occupied for hours or even days. This time it is another Tower Defense type of game. These games have become extremely popular in the online community and we will most likely see a lot of those games in the next months.
Vector TD is a better Tower Defense game. Your objective is to destroy the enemy vectors before they can reach the exit of the level. You loose one life for every vector that reaches the exit. The game ends when you have no lives left or when you beat all the levels of the game.
A word of caution before I start the article. If you are easily offended by strong language or a minor you should stop reading right now and read some other articles on my site. No Good TV is a Internet TV portal that looks and feels a lot like the Joost or Bablegum with the difference that No Good TV is a web application.
All you need is your browser to view the shows. The layout of the site is rather chaotic and it takes a while to get used to it - well, unless you like to watch MTV a lot. It really reminds me of the shows that are shown on MTV all the time these days. You can select to view various channels such as Down and Dirty, Dirty Music Videos or Reel Junkies.
It seems that you only need a crazy idea, record everything on video and upload it to Youtube to become famous. Five friends from France decided to record their (successful) attempts of throwing empty cans into trashbins and upload this video to Youtube.
They released two videos on Youtube. Their second one received more than 1.500.000 million views which is pretty impressive. I think one reason for the success of the two movies are that it everyone is able to try it by himself and see how difficulty it is to aim and throw the can to hit the trashbin. The videos are well done and enjoyable, have fun watching them..
I'm not that interested in the HD format war because I do not have a television that is HD Ready and do not plan to buy one in the near future. Maybe that is one of the reasons why I feel a little bit lost about the success or failure of HD-DVD and Blue-Ray players and movies.
I thought that I'm going to discuss it with each of you. What are your thoughts about both formats ? Do you think that Blue-Ray is in the lead, maybe because of the boost after the release of the Playstation 3 by Sony ? Or is it the HD-DVD format that you think will win this war.
I'm sometimes wondering if the companies leak betas on purpose to create news about their upcoming products or if this is just the way it goes in the software business. A beta version of the upcoming Real Player 11 has been leaked and everyone may download it as of know from the official real website.
More Tunes monitors various music players such as iTunes, Winamp and Windows Media Player and fetches information like Artist, Album, Genre and Year about songs that are currently played. The data that has been fetched can then be used to repair or edit the ID3 tags of the song and rename it as well.
This one is for those of you, who have a website and would like to display the contents of a RSS feed on that website. It does not really matter if you want to display your own feeds on a different part of your blog or feeds from other websites. FeedFlash is a nice service that takes feed urls and places them in a nice looking and scrollable widget that can be embedded into websites.
The joy that Apple decided to sell DRM free music on their popular iTunes plattform was overshadowed by two elements. The first one was that the DRM free songs would cost $0.30 more which could not really be explained. The second element was discovered after users were actually able to purchase drm free songs at iTunes.
Account information, namely name of buyer and account name, remained as information in the DRM free files. While this should not be a problem for everyone some users would have at least preferred to receive information about this before making the purchases.
Grooveshark is a new social music website that is currently in closed alpha stage. I was able to get an invitation to the system and would like to write about it here at ghacks and also give out some invites to Grooveshark to a handful of lucky readers.
Grooveshark works basically the following way. You start an application on your computer and decide which music folders you want to share with the community. This application has to be running in the background to be able to share and listen to the music on the Grooveshark website.
When I was a child I played Risk many times with my friends. I could not get enough of this game. We even created our own house rules to make the game more exciting. I have been playing JRisk every now and then since it was released and think that it is a nice Risk clone with some great features.
What I really like about is that you have the choice to either download it or play it on the developers website. You do need Java to play the game but this should be installed on most computers anyway. The version that can be downloaded should be best suited for most users because it plays definitely faster and has an option to save and load games.
I would like to share a really nice and easy way to rip any kind of audio from videos and save the audio in mp3 format. This is a great way of adding music to your collection for instance or to get podcast like shows by ripping the audio from documentations or other videos.
Genbeta are reporting that you can get a free version of the Divx Pro suite for a limited amount of time. All you need to do is go to Windows download or Mac download and download the divx pro software. You are asked for an email address during installation which will be used to send the Divx pro key to. You probably want to uncheck the "I would also like to receive" offers.
I enjoyed the original Lemmings game on my Commodore Amiga 500 but lost interest when the series evolved. Let me explain the rules in case you never heard about Lemmings before. Your task is to complete all the levels of the game by directing enough Lemmings from the entrance of the level into the level exit.
The sites Torrentfreak and Beautiful Crime announced an Anti-DRM T-Shirt competition a while ago and all entries to the competition have been posted on the Torrentfreak website. All 46 T-Shirt designs can be seen and everyone may vote for their favorite T-Shirt design. Who would have thought that this competition would get such a large amount of entrants ?
You can find some really clever designs among the 46 and I would like to display the five designs that I liked the most here at Ghacks. Just head over to the Torrentfreak website to take a look at all of the designs. The winning design will receive a price of $250, the second one of $100 and the third a price of $50.
People are crazy about watching videos on Youtube, Metacafe & Co. but the videos there are in most cases either entertaining or kinda crappy. In my opinion, it's a little hard to find really good or useful videos in this jungle if you're not searching for something specific or don't get a suggestion or link from another website.
You probably want to learn something new sometimes and in such case vivid video tutorials are many times more appreciated than written tutorials.
Online Music Recorder is a web service brought to you by the team that also created the Online TV Recorder web application. The music service basically records songs from Internet radio stations for you which you can download once they are available. Due to legal concerns you can only download songs that have been recorded since you joined the service and actively stated that you want them to record songs for you.
This means that you create a large library of songs over time. Hundreds of songs are added daily to the list of recorded songs which are kept for an infinite amount of time. The music that you download from Online Music Recorder is encrypted and you need a special software that decrypts the music using your username and password that you use when logging into the website.
Trackmania Nations is a free racing game for Windows that distinguishes itself from normal racing games by introducing a number of additional elements to the tracks. Do you remember Stunt Car Racer for instance ? The game where you were driving through loopings and made big jumps across the screen.
This game introduces all those elements again to a racing game but provides normal tracks as well. You may start with the 90 solo missions that remind me a little bit of the Gran Turismo missions. They are divided into Beginner, Advanced and Expert Training missions and award medals if you beat the tracks in a certain amount of time. This alone is very challenging.
Many users were quite happy when Apple announced that they would be selling drm free music at their iTunes online store. It would finally be possible to make one purchase and be able to play the music in your car, mp3 player, computer and other devices. Prices for the drm free music were set higher than for music with drm which did not get the bad feedback that I expected it to get.
CD-Wow is a online CD, DVD and games shop that operates from Hong Kong. They ship free of charge worldwide and offer some of the lowest prices in the business. They achieve this by (legally) buying the media in countries like Hong Kong and selling them to Europeans and Americans who are happy to pay a lower price for the media while still being able to enjoy the English version of a CD, DVD or game.
CD-Wow for instance was the third largest online CD retailer in Great Britain in 2005 after Amazon and Play. The companies that produce the media sure love globalisation when it means that they can produce their goods in a country like China for a fraction of the costs that it would cost them in a European country or in America.
It seems to me that Podcasts are popular amongst a certain (geeky) user group but ignored by the rest of the Internet. Honestly, when was the last time that you have listened to a Podcast ? I have to admit that I'm also not listening to Podcasts mainly because the lack of time but also because of the difficulty to find Podcasts that are interesting enough.
Youloud tries to make at least the second concern irrelevant. It lists a lot of Podcasts in their directory offering features, newest, most popular and top favorite Podcasts.
If you are looking for a great roleplaying game for the weekend you should definitely take a look at the excellent Last Scenario game. It reminds me a lot of those old SNES and Sega Genesis roleplaying games that were so much fun to play back then.
Last Scenario puts you in charge of a self proclaimed town protector named Hilbert who is nothing more than a boy at the beginning of the game who is soon to become the savior of the world. If this sounds a little bit to cliched for your taste you should wait and see how the story unfolds.
I was always a little bit obsessed with Ninjas since the first Shinobi game by Sega. This continued with Tenchu on the Playstation and numerous Ninja games and movies. It was always my childhood dream to become a stealthy deadly assassin, hehe. Well, I found a nice - but short - flash game that lets you play, I think you guessed it already, a Ninja.
You have to make it through ten levels to rescue a woman (princess, geisha ?). To do this you have to cross the levels and beat all the enemy guards who are defending the captured woman. You only have a limited assortment of techniques at your disposable. Amongst them are the infamous wallrun, the backflip and the quick short slash.
The following fix should help users who do have problems with some virtual console games for the Nintendo Wii that display only a black screen after starting them while the sound remains normal. This does not work in all occasions but should work if you get the Wii menu when you press Home and works only for games that received an update for the interlaced mode.
Try out the following to see if this fixes the issue. Start the game normally until you see the black screen. Connect the Nunchuck to the Wiimote and press Home to see the menu options. Now press A + 2 + Z together which should result in a short "ping-like" sound.
This should have activated the interlaced mode. Leave the menu and you should see the normal game screen and not the black screen anymore. To change the mode again press A + 1 + Z using the same method as above.
A robots.txt tells the search engine robots about the directories and files that should be indexed on a website. A wrongly edited robots.txt file could mean that search engine robots are not crawling your website anymore with the result that new articles will not be indexed in the search engine index.
This can be quite devastating especially for webmasters who do earn their living from their websites. It takes up to two weeks until changes can be seen when you edit the robots.txt file which is way to long if you made a mistake.
Here is something that I found on Youtube and thought that it looked incredibly entertaining. We all know the drill that we are forced to watch dozens of advertisements in cinemas before the movies start which becomes increasingly boring if you go to the cinemas regularly. The title of the video is Human Joysticks (NewsBreaker Live interactive cinema game) which describes exactly what this is all about. Take some motion sensing cameras, a breakout video game, a big screen and an enthusiastic crowd and you are about to witness the funniest breakout game of all times.
The first news about Microsoft possibly banning modified Xbox 360 consoles from the Xbox Live service started to emerge yesterday in some known Xbox 360 forums. It is possible to modify the firmware of the Xbox 360 drive to be able to play backups which of course includes pirated games. There has been no official confirmation from Microsoft about this issue but the frequency of the posts can only lead to the conclusion that Microsoft is actually banning Xbox 360 systems with modded firmwares.
I grew up playing boardgames like Risk, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit and witnessed that board games evolved almost as much as computer games did. I would like to introduce one of my favorite online boardgames websites where you can play about 50 excellent boardgames online. Boardgames include Settlers of Catan, Carcassone and Thurn and Taxis. All boardgames of the year and of course playable in multiplayer.
I think it is really fascinating that Coca Cola is doing another major promotion in Europe teaming up once again with iTunes and giving away 2 billion songs on iTunes along with other goodies such as tickets to concerts and iPods for codes that can be found in Coca Cola bottles. You had to use four codes to be able to download one song from iTunes in the last promotion and the new one will surely use the system as well. It should be noted that only selected songs could be downloaded in the last promotion.
After introducing Teachertube just a few days earlier I received an email pointing me to Vidipedia which is a video encyclopedia, basically Wikipedia with Videos. The principle is of course the same. You search for a phrase or browse a category on Vidipedia and one or more results are shown on the next page. If a single result exists it will be shown in video player mode which loads and plays the video automatically.
I really enjoy the shows from this guy. He is reviewing all those bad video games that came out for classic gaming systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. It is pure fun to see how he bashes the video games into oblivion showing lots of in game footage. The technique behind his videos is getting better as well which makes it a pleasure to watch his rants. Be advised that this is not really suitable for minors.
When I first saw the Vpod.tv homepage I thought I was seeing a Joost light version on the web. A fullscreen video of the infamous nunchuck guy was shown followed by several others. A menu would appear when I moved the mouse cursor over the lower region of the website showing the next videos on line and giving me some options to switch channels, skip videos and to open a secondary menu with more options.
If you are looking for a rather unique clock you should take a look at the so called Rnd_Time Infinite Wall Clock. The Rnd_Time stands of course for Random Time but it is not the time that is shown randomly but the placement of the hours on the walls. The hours can be placed randomly on the wall while the clock is still displaying the correct time. It could be hard to tell the time but it sure looks unique. You do get 12 blocks that display the hours from 1 to 12 and another block for the clock hands.
Let me introduce Stumbleupon and Digg first in case you never heard of this services before. (must be living on the moon for a couple of years, uhm ?) Every user may post and vote for articles on Digg. New articles are kept in the Upcoming Stories section for a maximum of 24 hours. If the article receives enough votes in that time it will be transferred to the frontpage and drive incredible traffic to the website where the article is hosted. If the votes are not sufficient it will be removed and can only be reached using the site search.
Finding great flash games is not as easy as it sounds. I found the game The Last Stand at the donation coder blog and was blown away by the gameplay. It looks like your typical shoot all incoming enemies type of games also known as base defender gamers. At second look it introduces several strategic elements that make every approach different. You have to defend your barricades against Zombies at night and search for better weapons and other survivors at daylight. The goal is to hold out as long as possible and hope that someday a rescue team will come and get you out of this situation.
If you thought that you would be starring at those boring LCD or Plasma displays for the next ten years you will now be proven wrong. Some displays look incredible cool. I personally would love to lay my hands on the Samsung 12mm thick LCD display, the Toshiba Interactive 3D Display and the Touchless Touchscreen. I decided to only include my favorites from the ten future display technologies and suggest that you head out to the original website who posted the list to see the others.
If you like to think about the unexplainable, the mysterious, the paranormal you are one of the users who might find Disclose.tv very interesting. Like Mulder and Scully from X-Files you can delve into this site and take a look at the videos that they offer. On the technical site Disclose.tv is a pretty good Youtube clone serving only their niche. The site does offer videos and pictures as well as a forum and other ways to communicate with the community. The biggest video category so far is the Aliens & Ufology category with 234 videos followed by Paranormal with 80 videos and Spirituality with 31.
I'm presenting a new game as usual on Fridays and this time it is Bontago. Bontago is a real time strategy game that can be played against computers or human opponents. Players start evenly on the area and can place blocks to expand their reach from their current position. The task of the game is to encompass all flags that are placed in the level. The initial area of control for a player can be expanded by adding new blocks to the territory under control. The height of the blocks that you can place on top of each others determines how far the influence is expanded.
Par2 Files are common on the Usenet today.They are not that common on the Internet in general and I can't think of a location where I encountered them except for the Usenet. Par2 Files can be used to repair broken archives. That is the basic explanation of course, the technical is a little bit more complicated. Lets use a example to make it clearer. Let us assume that you have downloaded a number of rar files (.rar, r01, r02 and so on) that can be unpacked to create the file test.avi which has a size of 700 Megabytes.
When you first start a blog and you’re slowly building your audience and your traffic, your site’s uptime/availability is not something that you often think about. When your audience is still small and your blog is down for one or two or even ten hours it really doesn’t matter that much, as the potential number of people who might have tried to visit and failed is small, and most of them at that point are friends or are somehow connected to you and will likely come back again.
Once you have grown your traffic to a fairly decent amount, however, downtimes that affect your site are a complete different story, a nuisance that can mean that hundreds of people are unable to get to your site, most of whom are likely to never come back again. In my experience, even when my hosting company promised 99.8% uptime, this began to increasingly seem like meaningless marketing hype when I started getting emails from friends and strangers alike informing me that my site was down at such and such an hour (many of which downtimes occurred in the early am hours when I wouldn’t have been online anyway).
