This is a series of posts I’m going to make. Every Friday (for an decided period!) I’ll post up a small tip that might help you with your every day tech.
Today’s tip is for Firefox:
If you ever wish you had a search plug-in for the website you’re on, you might be able to get one quicker than you think.
Some websites have already made a search plug in available from their own site. Click the drop-down list of search engines in Firefox, if there’s any available you’ll see some entries at the bottom of your list, prefixed with the word “Add”. See here
I am an avid netcast viewer (I’m using the word “view” as a blanket term for watching or listening). Content produced by individuals on the internet has really taken over my viewing habits. There is very little broadcast TV & radio I listen to now, compared to what I watch and listen to from the internet.
There are two key benefits to internet delivered content compared to broadcast content. First is that it is on-demand; you view it when you choose. Secondly, you are able to enter search requests for what you want to view. You cannot search within individual shows, but you can search the text describing individual shows.
Next, some shows that I get are nice little 7 to 15 minute episodes that take very little time out of my day to view. Although, some shows are bohemouth 50 to 100 minute shows. Not only do these provide a headache for either finding a long enough slot in my day to view or for remembering where I stopped listening each time, but it’s also pretty hard to find an any specific moment with content I may need to refer to.
However, there is something that netcast producers can do, and are starting to do, to cure this problem. CBC Radio’s science show, “Quirks & Quarks” is usually over an hour long. However, when their netcast comes out every week, it is split into 5 or 6 parts, one for each section of the show. Also, the popular Linux netcast, “The Linux Action Show” is also just about to start doing a similar thing. Rather than doing their usual long format show. They will be producing short, on the fly shows to cover the latest news as and when it come out.
I think this approach to long-format internet multimedia content is excellent and provides a number of benefits to viewers:
Easy to keep track of where you’re upto in a long show.
Allows you to delete the parts you’ve listened to as you go.
Makes the content more searchable.
This post has been written in response to the following blog posts:
This is the first time I’ve done a game review. I’ll be honest, I don’t really get new games. Although I have started using Steam as a games platform, partly because I prefer not to deal with physical media. One day, as I loaded up Steam to play Team Fortress 2, the Steam news page popped up with an alert to a game available for pre-order, something called “AudioSurf” [Wikipedia].
AudioSurf is a music visualisation game. If you’re like me, then the idea of standing in front of a TV with a toy guitar for something like Guitar Hero makes you cringe. AudioSurf is different though, besides the music visualisation, AudioSurf feels like the result of a wild one night stand between F-Zero and Columns. The audio visualisation comes by means of determining the course’s speed and curvature, and density of blocks. As the music’s tempo slows down you tend to climb up hill, as if you’re on a roller coaster. Then when the tempo speeds up you’re going down hill, and fast! For particularly intense periods in the music, you get treated to a psychedelic tunnel of light.
When you first play the game you are taken through a helpful set of video tutorials, which give you an idea of what you’re doing. My first impression when I started playing was “WOW”. Not because of the graphics, but because of the speed and intensity of the experience. As you’ll have gathered, I liked this, I liked it a lot. Your basic view is a three lane highway with a “hard shoulder” on each side. The central three lanes are littered with different coloured blocks. You have to hit the blocks with your car, which then register as coloured squares in a grid beneath your car. Making patterns of three or more blocks scores you points and makes them disappear. Blocks which were above the ones you’ve just made disappear fall down in a Tetris/Columns fashion, hopefully to make new like-colour patterns.
After racing to your first few tracks, you get to unlock “characters”. Characters in this games are different sorts of racing cars. Each have different abilities, which gives you very different styles of game play. For instance, there’s the “Picker” with which you can scoop up blocks by pressing your left mouse button, then drop them with your right mouse button. There’s the “Pusher” with which you can push blocks into neighbouring lanes with your left or right mouse buttons. These different cars also have difficulty related variants, at “Casual”, “Pro”, and “Elite” levels. There is also a co-operative type car for a two player mode, but I haven’t found anyone to play this with yet . Given that we’re living in the social web age, there are also internet wide high-score tables to compare yourself against. The latter makes it all the more surprising to me that you can’t play the cooperative mode with a friend elsewhere via the internet.
We haven’t even covered the most attractive features yet though! The biggest selling point of this game to me was that you can use all of your own music. AudioSurf can play MP3, OGG, FLAC, M4A, WMA. It can even pull music from your iTunes library, if you have one. If you’re not pulling from iTunes, you are given a simple file navigator to choose your music from. This level of freedom is a welcome breath of fresh air. The other very attractive feature of this game is that it only cost 5 UK Pounds to order on Steam.
Overall, AudioSurf is a highly original game with fantastic graphics. Most of all though, it is fun, which is something games tend to miss these days. It’s too early to say whether this game is relying on its novelty value instead of longevity. Although for £5, a novelty game isn’t that painful. My only other possible concern with this game is that, I hope it isn’t some elaborate industry ploy to spy on what music we all have. All that said, and putting my tinfoil hat aside, I am happy with my purchase and I recommend it.
Finally, here is a video of me playing the game (excuse the poor camera work):
Since this blog was officially launched I made sure I at least got one major article posted, that being the VX Revolution review. Hopefully, next week will follow up with a steady flow of content. That being the case, I thought it would be good to let you know what to expect.
In terms of upcoming material, I have some old material from my LiveJournal which I shall be reposting here (and deleting from the LiveJournal). Although some of those pieces are actually so long, that I am breaking them ~500 word sections and serialising them. Also, as mentioned before, I am also researching a piece about social bookmarking. I will probably not publish that until the older material has gone out first. Between now and then, I’m considering whether to try and get this upcoming story (when it’s done) published on a bigger site. In which case I probably won’t post it here, but I shall certainly post a link to it. If it does get posted here, I may well serialise that too.
I have some other types of serialised content in mind, but you’ll just have to wait and see!
I want to become a good, and well read, blogger, and I know that my personal qualities tick all but one of the boxes to achieve it. The one short coming I do have is that I am not a consistent writer, I have patches where I will produce a lot of material, and then long periods of nothing. So, I am hoping that the scheduled publishing facility in WordPress will help smooth out my output, and make the reading of my material more satisfying for you.
P.S.
As and when I do any major work on the blog itself, I shall still post about it. Not only do I like to have a record of what I’ve done, but I also like to think that blogging about blogging could be of interest to other people who are starting out like I am.
Even though we’ve officially launched, I’m still tweaking around the look of this blog. Do expect this sort of thing to continue for, like, ever
Anyway here’s what I’ve done to save you going crazy looking for differences:
I’ve set up with Feedburner and edited the theme to point at my Feedburner feeds accordingly. I’ve done three Feedburner feeds, one for the blog, one for comments and the other for my Friendfeed. You can access them all via your browser’s feed auto-discovery system. I’ve also linked the Feedburner feed of the blog into the big Subscribe link in the top right of this theme.
I’ve expanded the set of Web2.0 icon links in that sidebar widget over there, top-right. I’ve now split them up into named categories, and I’ve also added a couple of badges underneath.
Speaking of badges in the top widget. The contact me page has gone. The contact page was merely displaying my Retaggrcard, so I’ve now put an image link which you can click to display said card. It seemed a worthwhile trade, a static page for a sidebar badge. Let me know if you think it’s cluttered.
The “About” page has been renamed to “About David”, for obvious reasons.
I’ve also suspended the “miniBlog” page, which displayed the entries of my Friendfeed. I haven’t deleted it, merely marked it as “pending review”. I wasn’t sure if the page was too unweidly to make sense of. I also reasoned that if someone knew enough about current web services to know what a Friendfeed was, then they could just click the icon in my sidebar and go directly to my Friendfeed page, rather than seeing a much rougher Javascript rendered version on my site.
So all in all, I’m two static pages down, and just up a little by some sidebar clutter
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google
Flickr
YouTube
RSS
. Given that we’re living in the social web age, there are also internet wide high-score tables to compare yourself against. The latter makes it all the more surprising to me that you can’t play the cooperative mode with a friend elsewhere via the internet.
