links for 2007-11-28
Squeezebox
We have had a iPod in our kitchen for a while. The iHome IH36 keeps the iPod off the counter, while providing amplified speakers. Unfortunately, I haven’t been completly happy with this solution. The problem is with the iPod it self, and not the iHome.
The iPod only presents a static view of your music. In order to refresh it, you need to connect it to your computer. The staleness problem isn’t the only issue that I have.
I don’t have time to create playlists for the iPod, so most often, I just play all of the content in shuffled order. But this has the problem of playing music that I have no interest in (i.e. Holiday or Children’s music). But even if I avoided that content the mixes are random, so it is hard to get into the music.
I have been looking at the Sqeezebox for a while as a way to solve this problem. In addition to playing our whole library of content, it can connect to the network for other sources of music. For example, through their SqueezeNetwork, it can play (and create) Pandora radio streams. Pandora stations are very good collections of music that relate to one of your songs or artists.
Ragtime Call of Duty
This is pretty funny. The developers of Call of Duty 4 added a cheat mode that lets you play the game like it were a ragtime movie.
[via Wired]
Verizon Voyager walkthough video
This post has a pretty good walkthrough of the Verizon Voyager. I am trying to decide between this phone and the Samsung SCH-i760.
links for 2007-11-19
The future of Halo
This is pretty funny:
Android
The Android platform looks like it could result in some very cool phones. Here is a brief demo that Google posted:
When I get a chance, I will take a look at the SDK.
[via Google Blogoscoped]
Wii Carnival Games
I picked up Wii Carnival Games because I though that it would be a good
game for our kids. It isn’t. It is a pretty bad game. There are some
things wrong with it.
When you play, you have to create a new
avatar, where you can customize the body and clothing. Unfortunately,
you can just pick your Mii, and have to waste time creating a new one
that is not usable anywhere else.
Also, even though the game is rated E, young kids will not be able
to win or even score with most of the games, so they get extremely
frustrated.
I wouldn’t recommend that you buy this game.
links for 2007-11-12
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Blocking the Facebook javascript beacon
reCAPTCHA
I just heard of reCAPTCHA. This is a very interesting spin on CAPTCHAs. Accoring to their web site, 60 million captchas are solved every day. reCAPTCHA uses part of the effort to "scan" books.
A reCAPTCHA captcha contains a word that OCR didn’t find a match when scanning books from the Internet Archive. In addition to the word that is not recognized, a successfully scanned word is displayed. The captcha is considered successfully entered if the known word is entered, and then the answer for the unknown word is added to a database. If enough people enter an unknown word with the same answer, then the probability of the answer being correct goes up.
There are several plugins for blogging systems, as well as a PHP api.
