Why isn’t there a dubstep remix of the Fraggle Rock Theme?

I’m dis­ap­pointed in you, Inter­net. There’s dub­step remixes for prac­ti­cally every song in exis­tence except, evi­dently, the Frag­gle Rock Theme , for which my Google search turned up zero results.

The Wub Machine to the rescue:

The Wub Machine is a free app that lets you eas­ily cre­ate dub­step (or Elec­tro House or Drum & Bass) style remixes of any song just by drag­ging and drop­ping an MP3 into the interface.

It’s no Skrillex , but it gets the job done.

Fur­ther Listening:

• Pinky and The Brain Dub­step
• Tetris Dub­step
• Thriller Dub­step
• Mor­tal Kom­bat Dub­step
• Super Mario Dub­step

The ‘Reading Glove’ Project = Real Life Adventure Games?

Via  Scoop.it  —  Shezcrafti

Have you ever wished it was pos­si­ble to play point-and-click style adven­ture games in real life–using real loca­tions and real objects? (No? Am I the only one?) The Read­ing Glove is an amaz­ing tech­no­log­i­cal research project that might make “real life adven­ture games” a real­ity one day.

If read­ing a book or watch­ing a movie in 3D isn’t immer­sive enough for you to get a kick out of mys­tery sto­ries, The Read­ing Glove might be just what the doc­tor ordered. Com­prised of a rec­om­mender (a dis­play), objects and a glove, The Read­ing Glove sys­tem enables users to expe­ri­ence a whole new level of sto­ry­telling by being part of the story. Users pick up objects which then trig­ger a non-linear nar­ra­tive that clues them in on what objects they have to pick up next in order to move the story for­ward. Think of it as a point and click adven­ture – except that you’ll be a char­ac­ter in the game as opposed to a per­son behind the screen.

Via ubergizmo.com

But how does it work?   The Read­ing Glove  is an adap­tive, tan­gi­ble sto­ry­telling sys­tem con­sist­ing of a custom-built wear­able RFID reader glove used to inter­act with a set of tagged objects and a table­top dis­play.  Here’s what it looks like up close:

The Read­ing Glove  is a col­lab­o­ra­tive project between  Karen Tan­nen­baum  and her hus­band  Josh Tan­nen­baum , both PhD stu­dents of the School for Inter­ac­tive Arts & Tech­nol­ogy (SIAT) at Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity. Karen’s research inter­ests include arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing, tan­gi­ble com­put­ing, inter­ac­tion design, design phi­los­o­phy and design fic­tions. (I don’t even know what some of those terms mean, but it sounds impressive!)

“We wanted to see what hap­pened when we gave peo­ple a story that was embed­ded on real, phys­i­cal objects that could be played with and moved around. Our orig­i­nal vision was an entire room that told a story when you explored it, respond­ing to objects you touched or moved via light and sound responses — sort of like a haunted house, but intended to tell a spe­cific nar­ra­tive rather than just be spooky,” Tan­nen­baum explained in a recent inter­view with O’Reilly Media.

Here’s a video of Karen and her team demon­strat­ing The Read­ing Glove  with a sam­ple mys­tery puz­zle game about espi­onage and betrayal:

You gotta admit this is freak­ing cool, even if you’re not a fan of adven­ture games.  If The Read­ing Glove tech­nol­ogy were per­fected and its capa­bil­i­ties real­ized by game devel­op­ers and cre­ative sto­ry­tellers, just imag­ine the potential.

Power Mushroom Social Media Icon Set Inspired by Super Mario Bros.

I’ve been want­ing some new social media icons for my blog to match the 8-bit theme I have going on, but couldn’t find any­thing decent.  So I decided to cre­ate my own!  The power mush­room from Super Mario was an obvi­ous choice.  I only needed a few icons, but I loved how they turned out so much that I decided to make a whole match­ing set—and give them away for free to you, the good peo­ple of the interwebz.

The Power Mush­room Social Media Icon Collection

(scroll down for down­load link)

Details & Terms of Use

My col­lec­tion con­tains 20 dif­fer­ent designs in trans­par­ent PNG for­mat, in two dif­fer­ent sizes :  large (80 x 80) and small (40 x 40).

Here’s what’s included:  Blog­ger, Deli­cious, DeviantArt, Face­book, Flickr, Gmail, Google+, LinkedIn, Pin­ter­est, Red­dit, RSS, Skype, Spo­tify, Stum­ble­Upon, Tech­no­rati, Tum­blr, Twit­ter, Vimeo, Word­Press, and YouTube.

Please feel free to use these icons how­ever you wish!  If you want to fea­ture this col­lec­tion on your site or blog, all I ask is that you please link back to this page . I also love com­ments, tweets, +1’s & Likes. ;-)

Download

Down­load the Power Mush­room Social Media Icon Col­lec­tion from RapidShare

Mouse Without Borders vs. ShareMouse for Windows Keyboard and Mouse Sharing

I recently recon­fig­ured my desk into a multi-workstation setup, using both my lap­top and desk­top side-by-side, plus an extra mon­i­tor. Hav­ing three screens* to con­tend with, switch­ing between two sets of key­boards and mice just doesn’t cut it.  In my efforts to find an eas­ier solu­tion, I recently had the oppor­tu­nity to try both Share­Mouse and Mouse With­out Bor­ders.  (Feel free to skip ahead if you just want to know which one is bet­ter, in my hum­ble opinion.)

(*Yes, that’s my nerdy triple Hunger Games wall­pa­per you’re see­ing)

ShareMouse

To try to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion, I first found and installed a “free­ware” pro­gram called Share­Mouse .  Share­Mouse uses your exist­ing local area net­work con­nec­tion to trans­mit key­board input and mouse cur­sor move­ments between mul­ti­ple com­put­ers.  You install it on each com­puter you want to con­trol, des­ig­nate which com­puter is the server (the one con­trol­ling the oth­ers),  then adjust set­tings to con­fig­ure your mon­i­tor arrange­ment.  It also allows for con­ve­nient drag-and-drop file shar­ing between con­nected com­put­ers that have Share­Mouse installed.

The “free” ver­sion of Share­Mouse worked great—except for the fact that it inex­plic­a­bly stopped work­ing alto­gether for me after only two weeks.  I got an error mes­sage telling me the “beta” trial period has expired, and to con­tinue using Share­Mouse I would have to “down­load the lat­est ver­sion.”  Which, of course, I did.  And after going through the motions of unin­stalling and re-installing, I still  got the same error mes­sage upon try­ing to launch the program.

Sus­pi­cious, I went to ShareMouse’s web­site and started comb­ing through the FAQs, where I found this:

“Per­sonal home use.”  I fit that descrip­tion.  So far so good.  But that still doesn’t explain why Share­Mouse stopped work­ing.  After click­ing the link, I found this:

Well now,  that changes things a bit, doesn’t it?  I’m only using two com­put­ers, but I’m using more than two mon­i­tors if  my lap­top screen is counted.  Also, I have soft­ware “which is typ­i­cally used in pro­fes­sional envi­ron­ments” installed, e.g. Adobe.  But I won­der what else counts?  Does the Microsoft Office suite count?  That’s cer­tainly typ­i­cal of pro­fes­sional envi­ron­ments.  What other soft­ware is included in that sneaky “etc.”?  The Share­Mouse pol­icy also seems to equate “pro­fes­sional users” with “power users,” although you have to drill deep into the FAQ to fig­ure that out.

So basi­cally, the rea­son Share­Mouse stopped work­ing for me, with­out warn­ing, is because the soft­ware deter­mined that I fit their vague def­i­n­i­tion of either a pro­fes­sional user or a power user.  It would have been nice if Share­Mouse informed me of all of the “gotchas” before I installed their “free­ware” soft­ware and got really used to it!  After wast­ing sev­eral hours of my life try­ing to fig­ure out why the blasted thing wasn’t work­ing, I finally got fed up and started look­ing for other solutions.

(By the way, if you do decide to pur­chase a license for the full-blown ver­sion of Share­Mouse, another “gotcha” is that a sep­a­rate $24.95 license is required for EACH com­puter run­ning Share­Mouse.  And since Share­Mouse is pretty much worthless/unnecessary for single-computer setups, why would you EVER pur­chase just one licence?  So the real price of Share­Mouse is $49.90 for a two-computer setup).

Mouse With­out Borders

For us Win­dows users, thank­fully there is a very use­ful and 100% FREE piece of soft­ware called Mouse With­out Bor­ders  from the Microsoft Garage.  It essen­tially does all the same things Share­Mouse does, except its func­tion­al­ity is lim­ited to Windows-based PCs.  It’s much eas­ier to install and use.  Instead of hav­ing to install it on all your com­put­ers and then hav­ing to mess with cum­ber­some con­fig­u­ra­tion set­tings, Mouse With­out Bor­ders works automag­i­cally after a sim­ple prompt:

Basi­cally all you have to do is install it on both PCs, and enter a sim­ple code to begin shar­ing.  You can down­load Mouse With­out bor­ders right here .

tl;dr

For Win­dows users in need of a dead-simple key­board and mouse shar­ing solu­tion, Mouse With­out Bor­ders is supe­rior to Share­Mouse and doesn’t try to bait and switch you into buy­ing a paid ver­sion.  You can down­load Mouse With­out bor­ders  right here .

5 Reasons to Ditch iTunes and Get Spotify Premium

Spo­tify is the wildly pop­u­lar music stream­ing ser­vice that took Europe by storm with its “any track, any time, any­where” con­cept, and just recently launched here in the States.  I was beyond thrilled when I heard Spo­tify was com­ing to the U.S. and even more so when the invite code showed up in my inbox (cur­rently the ser­vice is invite-only).  Spotify’s library cur­rently con­sists of 15 mil­lion tracks, and is grow­ing by approx­i­mately 10,000 tracks per day.

As a heavy con­sumer of dig­i­tal music who said “good­bye” to phys­i­cal media a long time ago, I’m always on the look­out for the best solu­tion to man­age and access my ever-growing music col­lec­tion.  Until I dis­cov­ered Spo­tify, iTunes was such a solu­tion for me (and I’m not even a Mac user).  Now, I real­ize com­par­ing Spo­tify to iTunes is rather like com­par­ing apples to oranges because iTunes is not a stream­ing music ser­vice, nor does iTunes only deliver music.  The two ser­vices can cer­tainly co-exist peace­fully as there is a strong demand for what both plat­forms do.  How­ever, for my needs and the way I con­sume music, I’ve decided that the bet­ter solu­tion is Spotify.

Here are five rea­sons why:

1. It’s Super Affordable

Spo­tify Pre­mium only costs $9.99/month and is essen­tially an all-access pass to all the music and fea­tures Spo­tify offers, with zero adver­tise­ments and streamed in pre­mium qual­ity.  If that still sounds too expen­sive, Spo­tify also has an Unlim­ited account for $4.99/month which gets you unlim­ited stream­ing music with no ads.  A basic Spo­tify account is 100% free, but you’ll be served both audio and ban­ner ads while using the ser­vice, plus the song library is lim­ited and you won’t have access to all the fea­tures that make Spo­tify so great, like mobile streaming.

Spo­tify Pre­mium is the only level of the ser­vice that really com­pares to iTunes, so that’s what I’m focus­ing on for the pur­pose of this blog post.  It boils down to this:  For $9.99/month you could have unlim­ited instant access to all of the music in Spotify’s library (as well as your own) from any­where, or, for the same amount, you could down­load 10 songs from iTunes to keep for good.

2. A Netflix-Like Expe­ri­ence for Music

Spotify’s inter­face is clean, sim­ple and fast —the ben­e­fit of a native appli­ca­tion ver­sus a web-based one.  The music tracks are pre­sented along­side album art, track infor­ma­tion, artist biogra­phies, a pop­u­lar­ity meter (based on num­ber of plays), and related artists.  Load­ing up a new song is as sim­ple as double-clicking on any track you see, and in my expe­ri­ence, it all hap­pens light­ning fast.  It’s easy to search for music by artist, song, or album name and sort the results by the same para­me­ters (as well as oth­ers).  The Related Artists fea­ture is a great dis­cov­ery tool that serves up music sim­i­lar to the artist you’re cur­rently viewing/listening to.  The over­all Spo­tify expe­ri­ence is stream­lined and incred­i­bly easy to use, mak­ing it a breeze to hop around from artist to artist, track to track and play any­thing you want on a whim.

3. Lis­ten From Anywhere

Lis­ten­ing on mul­ti­ple com­put­ers and devices is easy, as Spotify’s light­weight client is avail­able for Win­dows and Mac , with a Linux ver­sion in the works (cur­rently avail­able as a pre­view).  Spo­tify Pre­mium users gain access to the Spo­tify mobile app that’s avail­able for iPhone, Android, Win­dows phones, Palms, and Sym­bians.  There is no com­pli­cated sync­ing, import­ing, or other non­sense to deal with because all of the music lives within Spo­tify. It’s sim­ply there, ready to be played from any device.

4. Effort­lessly Man­age Your Per­sonal Music Library

If, like me, you have hun­dreds of gigs of music files liv­ing on your PC or an exter­nal hard­drive, Spo­tify can man­age and play them as part of your music library as well—all with­out any effort on your part.  Even with­out doing any­thing, Spo­tify auto­mat­i­cally finds music files on your PC and makes them avail­able in your library.  If you have an exter­nal har­rdrive or some other USB device, you can point Spo­tify to those sources to import your music files, which are inte­grated seam­lessly into Spo­tify and made avail­able for stream­ing (even while offline), search­ing, incor­po­rat­ing into your playlists, and social shar­ing.  You can even import your iTunes library.  Spo­tify is even nice enough to auto­mat­i­cally fill in any miss­ing music file info with Gra­cenote.  (By the way, Spo­tify imported my entire 150GB+ music col­lec­tion in about 2 min­utes flat, com­pared to the lit­er­ally HOURS of wait time I’ve expe­ri­enced with iTunes.)  In short, Spo­tify makes your entire music library—not just the Spo­tify library—easily acces­si­ble from anywhere.

5. Built-In Social Sharing

Unlike iTunes, Spo­tify doesn’t try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to socially shar­ing your music.  With built-in shar­ing fea­tures, you’ll never have to leave Spo­tify to tell your friends what you’re lis­ten­ing to.  Shar­ing your music is as easy as con­nect­ing your Face­book and Twit­ter accounts.  From then on, you can right-click on any track (or an entire playlist) within Spo­tify and choose “Share To…” for a sim­ple pop-up menu of options.  Are any of your friends using Spo­tify? Add them to your Peo­ple list and you’ll be able to see their pub­lished playlists, Top Artists, and Top Tracks (based on num­ber of plays).  You can even sub­scribe to other people’s playlists so you’ll always have access to their lat­est addi­tions and favorites.

Conclusion

If you’re mar­ried to the con­cept of own­ing your music out­right by indi­vid­u­ally pay­ing for every track you want to lis­ten to a la iTunes, Spo­tify prob­a­bly won’t be your cup of tea.  Spo­tify Pre­mium deliv­ers more of a Netflix-like expe­ri­ence where you’re essen­tially pay­ing a small monthly fee for unlim­ited access to mil­lions of songs, with the added ben­e­fit of being able to man­age your entire per­sonal music library and lis­ten to it from any­where.  As a ser­vice, Spo­tify doesn’t try to be all things to all peo­ple, but this is one of its strengths; for exam­ple, there are far bet­ter ser­vices out there for dis­cov­er­ing new music or noti­fy­ing you of new releases.  By focus­ing mainly on one thing and doing it really well—that is, giv­ing you fast, sim­ple, and afford­able access to as much music as possible—Spotify, quite frankly, kicks the asses of most other online music services.