TECH - a Web Word Processor that many can use at once

writely

If you like writing but can't afford a quality word processor because you dropped all your loot on bandwidth, then I would recommend Writely. It's a cross platform app that loads in from the web instead of your hardrive and two of my favorite features is it's free and that you can give access to your document by just adding them to a list. Once they have access, they can also modify the document. Great for group writing for stuff that requires such things.

Official Description:
· Nothing to download -- your browser is all you need.
· Collaborate just by entering people's e-mail addresses.
· Publish on the web or post to your blog with a click.
· Pick exactly who can access your documents.
· Upload from Word/OpenOffice & save to your desktop.
· Edit your documents anytime, from anywhere.

Would this be, how you say, "web 2.0"?

TECH - Dreamstation Video Game Show podcast

Dreamstation

Todays STANLY is the Dreamstation Video Game Show. I've been meaning to blog this for a while now, but failed my last three attempts because of bad "copy/paste" skills. Since I've spent a lot of time trying to find a good quality video game show, I can honestly say that these guys are by far the best. It might be because they are all older than 13 but more than likely it's because they are well informed, do the show for fun, and have a great time doing it. Some of my favorite segments are the weekly rants on Florida Lawyer, video game opponent and all round nut-case, Jack Thompson, who they refer to as "Bumblefoot" (since they don't want to give him any more attention than he deserves) and another ongoing segment is "Video Game Death" where they report on how somewhere in the world, someone died a video game related death. There are also tons of inside jokes that carry over from week to week that just seem to get funnier each time you hear them. I'd write more but I have to go to Home Despot to pick up some felt padding, some duct tape and a torch wrench (don't ask)

Official Description: The DreamStation.cc Video Game Show is a weekly podcast bringing you the latest PlayStation 2, GameCube, Xbox, PSP, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, PC, PS3, Nintendo Revolution, Xbox 360, and other video game news, reviews, interviews, rumors, rants, and more.

Don't be a fool, subscribe and enjoy!

MUSIC - sweet free album with PSP magazine download

Kill Your FM

"Kill Your FM" is an electronic 'zine for the PSP that covers new music. The benny is that you don't need a PSP to enjoy the free music that goes along with it. The mag is a series of images (JPEGS) but that can be read on any computer update: the images are formatted for the PSP to be read with the PSP turned on it's side, as a result, the images on your computer look sideways and the music (mp3) is holed up in a seperate folder that you can enjoy in any player. The tunes range from punk, hardcore, hip hop and more. Here's the official description for this issue:

82 packed pages of quality music journalism and awesome aesthetics, including:

-Interview w/ Derek Sivers, creator of CDBaby.com
-The Thieves: Prophets In The Cathedral Of Rock?
-FM Killers: Pandora & 15 Megs Of Fame
-1920’s Jazz vs. Modern Day Hardcore: More similarities than you think!
-Happy Birthday! The MP3 Turns 10
-A Popular Donkey, Episode III (and a whole lot more)

And of course, excellent indie rock, hard rock, and hip hop tracks from the bands we feature! Free, and legal.

I’ll let the issue do the rest of the talking. Major thanks to the entire staff for helping me crank this one out. Please enjoy, and leave feedback!

download and enjoy!

TECH - podcasts - ANCESTOR podio book

ANCESTOR

After speaking to a bunch of folks about podcasting, I've discovered that the biggest problem people have with this new medium is finding good quality podcasts to listen to. I've decided to start bloggin the podcasts I've found and really like. I'll call this, the Podcasts I Really Like or STANLY for short". Todays STANLY is ANCESTOR! it's a podiobook read by the author, Scott Sigler. A sci-fi thriller about biotech gone terribly wrong. It starts off with a bunch of scientists trying to home grow organs for those in need of a replacement, then it quickly turns into Alien with cows. The science is deep but not baffling and the pace is zippy, even in the slow sections. He releases a chapter once a week, every Sunday or Monday night. and each chapter times out to be about 45 minutes long. Subscribe and enjoy.

ANIMATION - Spidy Battles Doc Oc in legovision (stop animation)

Spider-Man: The Peril of Doc Ock (2004)

This is possibly the best, if not only, lego stop motion animation I've witnessed to date. The comedy that comes across with these lego blocks is quite amazing and the the shots are simply cinematic. The accompanying music is also excellent. Done by Spite Your Face Productions Ltd, commisioned by Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios/The Lego Group to accompany the release of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. Watch Spidey and doc Oc battle it out in a giant New York City made of legos!

VIDEO GAMES - real life video interpretation of mortal kombat

Mortal Kombat LA PELICULA

These two knuckle-heads did an excellent job of recreating the classic Mortal Kombat video game in real life video, sans game, complete with floaty power bars and faux fatality!

VIDEO GAMES - Play PSP online with Tunneling Software

Tunneling Into PSP

IGN explains "Tunneling, for those who have never had to resort to desperate measures in order to play great multiplayer games like the first Halo or Mario Kart: Double Dash online, is a system where a home PC acts as a middleman between your game system and the internet. It intercepts from the game the LAN (or, in this case, wireless LAN) signal on the PC and sends it across the internet to another player using the same tunneling software for his game. With such a system, players would be able to unofficially play any multiplayer PSP title with WiFi LAN multiplayer online against any other player with the same system. Kai (the XLink software) even features a buddy list and other features for finding other tunneled players to game against. It's not quite the same as the online plan that Sony's hoping to use (the official solution would allow players to play anywhere, since their servers would be hosting the game -- with tunnels, players would have to be near or in WiFi range of their LAN-running computer with the tunnel software), but it's worked with other consoles in the past, and as of this writing, there isn't much reason to expect tunneling with PSP not to work."

Ken Edwards says"Not only is there a Windows Kai client, but they have Mac OSX Terminal and GUI versions as well. "

Ken's article has the links necessary to get you started. Mac users be forwarned, unless you have an Airport Extreme to make it all work, your boned.

ANIMATION - insanely twisted superstitials

insanely twisted

Michel Gagne says "Here is the first series of interstitials featuring "Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets" that I created for Nickelodeon's 2005 "Halloween Shriekin Weekend". These are the "Director's Cuts" and are not necessarily the ones shown on the network. All the spots were completely animated in Flash. No other software was used for the animation."

I've checked these out and can honestly say that they are sweet, and when I say sweet, I mean awesome.

TECH - RSS feeder for your iPod

Pod2Go

If you've ever had a palm device and used AvantGo, you'll immediately know what this new software does. If not, then basically, Pod2go allows you to select a bunch of text content from the web and have it dumped onto your iPod for future reading.

Once you open the software for the first time, you can set your own RSS feeds or select a bunch of feeds from a pre-existing list that Pod2go supplies. The list is comprised of RSS feeds broken down into various categories such as news, weather, horoscopes, gas prices, directions... You can also set any text docs from your hard drive to appear in your iPod and Pod2go will create a iPod compatible version of your text doc and automatically stick it onto your iPod during the next sync. It's pretty slick in howit does this. The iPod "notes reader" app has some limited html functionality built into it. Pod2go takes advantage of this and prepares a new directory in your "notes" folder then dumps text files into. If a text file exceeds 4k (the limit a note can be on the iPod) Pod2go will break it up into one or more files and link them together using "Next" and "Previous". Simple but effective.

Besides keeping me company while giving birth to a food baby, another great feature is that you can have your safari bookmarks synced up to the iPod as well. This comes in handy for when I'm at work and can't exactly remember link I found the previous night. I just connect the iPod to my computer and pull the link from there.

TECH - Headphone Ear Protection Hack

headphone hack

This low-tech hack requires only the smallest bit of knowledge about wiring and absolutely no expertise beyond that whatsoever. The completed product is a combination of earmuff style ear protectors and audio headphones, allowing the user to listen to music or any other audio imput with hearing protection (I hook it up to my iPod or a guitar player's output feed to I can sinc up to the music while drumming). This is useful for mowing the lawn, or working on a project the requires both ear protection and background tunes. (Check the link for instructions)

At first I thought this was a silly thing to do, until I realized that I spend upwards of 6 hours a weekend annoying my neighbors with noisy lawn equipment and making myself deaf in the process. I had a pair of ear protectors lying around and a decent pair of behind-the-ear sony headphones I no longer used. I also had a real old pair of broken hi-fi system headphones from the mid 70's that I could never use because it had a gigantor plug that didn't fit not any of my music players. It had sweet head padding across the top of the set as well as some shiny hole grommets that came in useful for putting together my version of the hacked headphones. I ripped apart the two existing headphones. I used the speakers and the wires from the sony and the padding and grommets from the oldy-timers. I drilled holes into the ear protectors, removed the padding, soldered up some wire and crammed everything together. Because of the padding, I was able to snake the wire from one ear cup across the top, to the other ear cup which allowed me to have only one wire dangling down to the mp3 player which makes the new earmuffs surprisingly tangle-free.

How do they work? Pretty good. The actual speakers sit about an inch and a half from the ear inside the padded cup so they don't really crank, but because of all of the padding inside of the ear-protectors, they don't need to be loud. The ear-protectors do a great job of muffling all of the outside sound and I'm left with pleasant music. But my neighbors, they still hate me.

WEB - word recognition turned on th thwart spam posters

I've just been machine-spammed. I won't mention the company name since they don't deserve any advertising from me, but as a result of having to remove 15 posts from the same spammer, I've decided to turn on blogspots word recognition for posters. It's cake to deal with if your a human, but it has a tendency to baffle the machines (for now)

OT - Pumpkin

This is a picture of our pumpkin. I took one with the flash and with the flash off. No-flash wins. It looks much scarier that way for sure.

OT - Scarekid

We made a scare kid to keep the neighborhood whipper snappers from smashing our pumpkin (not shown)

HALLOWEEN - Speed Racer: Racer X Costume

Speed Racer: Racer X Muscle Costume (ADULT)

i've got nothing to say

TECH - OSX, album covers for your tunes in iTunes

Fetch-Art-for-iTunes

Fetch Art for iTunes is a small program that will fetch album art for one or more songs using Amazon's XML interface, allow you to preview the art that was found, and add the art you want to iTunes. The program is controlled through the iTunes Script menu: once it is installed, album art can be downloaded by selecting one or more songs in iTunes and choosing "Fetch Art" from the Script menu.

TECH - get off the phone with these online pre recorded effects

sorry, gotta go!

saw this on rocketboom. Sorrygottago is a site that has a slew of sound effects that will get you off the phone with that chatterbox on the other line.

ART - make skins and get paid

DecalGirl 10 percent

If you have some design skills, you could potentially earn a couple of extra bucks creating designs to be put on high quality skins which in turn get put on console games, macs and iPods. Decalgirls, creators of said said skins, says "We're actively looking for talented artists to work with to develop new and exclusive skin designs for all major consoles. If your artwork is used on one or more of our skins, we'll pay you a 10% royalty (via PayPal) on any sales of the items and provide a special "gallery" URL for you to use to promote your designs. a twelve dollar skin will get you a cool dollar twenty.

TECH - iPod nano accessories

iPod nano cases roll out in force

An article by playlistmag has thoroughly rounded up a bunch of iPod nano cases for preventing the cute little irresistible bastards from getting all scratched up. Funky cloud cases (not shown above) green grassy textured cases, (shown above) and the article even links off to a bendy-man case, (not shown above) Links galore all up ins. If you have a nano-nano, it's well worth a read.

VIDEO GAMES - Jack Thompson, AKA Bumblefoot, under investigation

Jack Thompson

LOL I called the FBA, and I was on hold for 20 minutes, and once I got a rep, as soon as I said Jack Thompson, she sighed loudly and goes, "Dear Lord, what has this man done? That's all we've heard today all day long!" and I told her that I had faxed a 3 page letter detailing the exact complaint, and she said that it would help alot and she will go get the fax. I'm on hold again. Awesome.

What's all the hub-ub about? Read this ...

Anti-game activist Jack Thompson under investigatio

OT - wilma and cauncun

The good news is my moms got word out that she's ok, the bad news, her town is pretty banged up. The coming weeks will tell just how bad the devastation in. With that said, on with the posts.