Archive for Entertainment category
Confusing co-workers, family and friends for fun
Everybody enjoys a good laugh and there are some fun simple things that can confuse your co-workers, family or friends for a few minutes.
Here’s a few tricks that may… or may not cause some amusement. Just make sure you step in before they need to call their IT support guy!
Simulated operating system crash
An operating system crash sends a shiver up the most confident of spines.
Windows Blue Screen of Death
Install the SysInternals teams BlueScreen Screen Saver complete with genuine looking reboot sequence.
Mac OS X Kernel Panic
Try out Doomlaser’s Kernel Panic Screensaver although be prepared for genuine confusion at their first exposure to an operating system crash ;-)
Confused keyboard
If they are a hunt-and-peck typist confuse them by swapping a few keys around on their keyboard (make sure it lets you pull the tops off, some of them don’t and leaving them with a broken keyboard isn’t fun at all).
An alternative if the keyboard doesn’t allow you to remove the key tops or if they’re a touch-typist is to change the keyboard map to one similar but not the same. Favourites include US for Brits and and British for Americans if you want something very subtle that may take a few hours to be noticed (when they hit some symbols, pound signs etc.) or German for something a bit quicker (W and Z reversed).
Head to the Windows Control Panel or Mac System Preferences to activate.
Permanent hourglass (Windows)
A simple trick that just involves heading into Control Panel > Mouse Properties then choosing the Pointers tab and double clicking on Normal Select. From there choose hourglas.ani
Google goes abroad
Google remembers which language you you last used so simply head to something like http://www.google.com/ru (Russian), http://www.google.com/cy (Welsh) or http://www.google.com/fr (French) then close the Window and walk away.
Any further visits will show in that language, even searches made from the built-in boxes of Internet Explorer and Firefox. To set back head to http://www.google.com/en (English) or whatever language you normally use.
Swap short cuts (Windows)
Choose properties on either the desktop, start-menu or quick launch icon they use to launch their favourite applications and change the target to a different but perhaps similar application. i.e. iTunes and Windows Media, Word and WordPad, Excel and PowerPoint. They’ll probably think they hit the wrong icon or that something has messed up the file associations.
Change the display gamma
Head into Control Panel > Display (Windows) or System Preferences > Display (Mac) and adjust the gamma or colour profile for their display. No amount of fiddling with the displays brightness or contrast settings will get it quite back to how it was.
Jeff Atwood has futher suggestions for people who don’t lock their machines. Remember kids, Windows Key + L is your friend.
[)amien
Seven ideas for topping up your iPod
It’s been almost two years since I last blogged on what content I was feeding my iPod so here’s an update on what’s keeping mine fresh.
Music you don’t know the name of
If you get a song in your head you’d like but don’t know what it is then Midomi might be what you are looking for.
The site takes 10 seconds or more of your attempts at singing or humming the track and then tries to match it against the songs it knows about. The catalogue isn’t particularly comprehensive right now but it has a reasonable selection of tracks. You can also help it improve results by singing a fragment of a song that it will use for matching providing you don’t mind anyone being able to listen to it.
Educational tracks for free
This May Apple launched iTunes U – a section of the iTunes Store featuring free educational content from various US colleges and universities.
The tracks are mostly unedited and lack polish but some of the content covers everything from philosophy to economics and technology so there should be something to interest you.
Audio books for free
- Simply Audiobooks have a small selection their library available for free as well as a rental club and purchasing options that ship physical media. The download club option is not compatible with the iPod. (Microsoft’s PlaysForSure is worst name ever – it doesn’t play on the iPod or Microsoft’s own Zune)
- LibriVox use volunteers to record chapters of books available in the public domain and put the completed audio books up in mp3 and ogg formats. The quality of speaker can be variable and the content spans classical literature.
Podcasts for free
The podcast scene just keeps growing but finding what suits you can be tricky. My favourites currently include:
- BBC Focus podcast of the popular monthly science and technology magazine
- DotNetRocks developer podcast with guests including Phil Hack, Rob Conery, Jeff Atwood, Scott Guthrie and Miguel de Icaza
- Productive Talk – an 8-episode podcast with David Allen on the subject of Getting Things Done (GTD)
Improve audio quality with iTunes Plus
Apple’s plan to remove digital rights management (DRM) whilst increasing audio quality on iTunes gains momentum with music publishers each day – no doubt enticed on by the increased margin and ability to get an extra few pence or cents from existing owners.
Besides the crisper sound and larger file sizes the other noticeable difference is that iTunes music sharing works with these tracks (Sharing protected AAC involves an authorisation landmine).
Head to the Tunes Plus link in the Quick Links box at the top right of the main store page. You should see an option to upgrade your library if any tracks can be upgraded but bear in mind it’s an all-tracks-or-nothing deal that costs £0.20 per track.
Watch your DVDs
Why not take a DVD you like, or better yet one you haven’t yet seen, with you on your iPod Video.
There are a number of tools to help you with the job of copying from DVD into an iPod friendly format but Handbrake is free, cross-platform and easy to use. As a bonus it also includes presets for other portable video devices such as the PlayStation Portable.
Watch YouTube
Why should iPhone owners have all the phone when the iPod Video is perfectly capable of watching YouTube content providing you upload it to your iPod before you set out.
There are a number of tools to do the download & conversion job but DVDVideoSoft’s one for Windows works quite well. For the Mac the latest 1.9 version of Squared 5 would appear to do the job but I haven’t yet tried it.
[)amien
My Rock Band dream set list
Harmonix are taking submissions of ideas for songs in Rock Band. I thought I’d go one stage further and put together an entire dream list using the following criteria:
- Ideal for the four instruments (Drummer, Singer, Guitarists) – no Bittersweet Symphony
- Well known enough that you all feel the music – no obscure bands or tracks
- Attention keeping – no massive 2-minute intros or solos
- Killer guitar track – this is rock after all!
- Not previously featured on Guitar Hero I or II
- Variety – no band more than once plus a mix of 80s, 90s and 00s
So here it is…
1. Opening Licks
- The Passenger – Iggy Pop
- I Predict a Riot – Kasier Chiefs
- Bad Medicine – Bon Jovi
- Wonderwall – Oasis
- All Right Now – Free
2. Amp-Warmers
- Money For Nothing – Dire Straights
- Let Me Entertain You – Robbie Williams
- Paradise City – Guns ‘n Roses
- Somebody Told Me – The Killers
- It’s Been Awhile – Staind
3. String-Snappers
- Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana
- Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Green Day
- Going Down/Love in an Elevator – Aerosmith
- Bohemian Like You – The Dandy Warhols
- Holy Water – Bad Company
4. Thrash and Burn
- Summer of 69 – Bryan Adams
- Eye of the Tiger – Survivor
- Darts of Pleasure – Franz Ferdinand
- Inside – Stiltskin
- Sk8er Boi – Avril Lavigne
5. Return of the Shred
- Poison – Alice Cooper
- All The Small Things – Blink-182
- Walk This Way – Run DMC
- Danger! High Voltage – Electric Six
- In The End – Linkin Park
Okay so there is no way they’d ever put so many great tracks in one game – they’d be worried you’d not buy the next one to get more tracks and so we’ll get second-rate filler just like the record companies have been doing with albums for years.
Most of these are available at the iTunes store so enjoy my first iMix entitled Dream Rock Band.
[)amien
Hiding secrets behind the law – DRM, AACS and the 16-byte key
It surprises and annoys me when I hear of individuals or companies trying to use the law to hide secrets. Surprise at the sheer stupidity and annoyance that tax payers money is used in the process.
The latest secret under suppression is a short 16-byte key which locks away the content on HD-DVD discs that only licensed software and hardware can play it back and prevent you from making copies.
This type of protection used to be called copy-protection but these days it goes under the equally unpopular name of "Digital Rights Management (DRM)". It enforce the copyright holders rights whilst denying you yours and does it in such a way that in some countries re-asserting your legal rights means you end up breaking others.
The AACS Licencing Authority believe they can now protect by law what they failed to protect using technology. This is particularly amusing because their predecessor, the DVD-CCA, failed on both counts when the encryption on DVD was broken in 1999 by an enterprising trio. Apple gets it and is going down the DRM-free route and not treating their customers like criminals.
Basing an entire business model on keeping a sequence of characters secret defies belief and thinking you can wipe the secret off the face of the internet once it’s out is laughable especially when you consider the infinite number of ways you could represent it. The AACS are at it anyway with take down notices to the likes of Digg and others. Amusingly the take down notice itself includes the ‘magic key’.
Alternative 16-byte sequence where each byte is an offset on the previous one is "09 F0 18 F1 9B D7 6F 78 7D 69 15 6F 9E F3 32 38" which if run through the following program yields a certain magic key.
class Program {
static void Main(string[] argv) {
byte b = 0;
string key = string.Empty;
foreach(string a in argv) {
b += byte.Parse(a, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber);
key += string.Format("{0:x2} ", b);
}
System.Console.WriteLine(key);
}
}[)amien