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Rollercoaster Rush for iPod Touch review

December 25th, 2009 by Calvert Kennedy | No Comments | Filed in Apps

Rollercoaster rush is truly one of the greater games for the iTouch. It has several levels to keep you busy, and many achievements that you can obtain through the game-play.  It also has two versions: a themed christmas version, and a regular version.

The controls vary but are always simple. You either tap or tilt the iPod in the direction you want to go.  Although the graphics are somewhat cartoony, they do the job quite well and add appeal to the game.  This game is great for all ages and runs smoothly during gameplay, except it crashed once during the 3 hour period I tested it for.

The game takes about an hour to beat, and a ton of time to unlock all the acievments for.  This is a great game, and I recommend it for anybody who likes a bit of a challenge, and who also has an iPod touch.  It’s free!  How can you go wrong?

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Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player and Winamp

October 17th, 2009 by Craig McBrine | 2 Comments | Filed in Apps, Music

There is a neat new plugin out that is available for Windows Media Player and Winamp.   With this new plugin, the lyrics for the song you are playing will appear on your screen! You don’t have to aimlessly search for lyrics anymore!

If for some reason the plugin cannot find the lyrics (as it is in the Beta stage) you can insert and save your own! Check it out at http://www.lyricsplugin.com/

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Firefox 3.5 Windows 7 Jumplists with Winfox

October 15th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | No Comments | Filed in Apps
Google Chrome's Jumplist

Google Chrome's Jumplist

Winfox Jumplist

Jumplists are one of the  most hyped features of the new Windows 7 – they are neat little shortcut menus on the new Windows 7 taskbar.

Firefox is one of the late-comers when it comes to supporting Jumplists – both Internet Explorer and Google Chrome already support them.  Firefox version 3.7 will support them, along with including a new glass/aero optimized theme.  But if you can’t wait till then, you can use Winfox.

Winfox, albeit buggy, enables jumplists for Firefox, allowing you to open new windows and tabs easily, and access your favorite sites, and even pin your most visited sites to the jumplist for easy access.

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Quick Fraction Reducer

October 1st, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 1 Comment | Filed in Apps, Online

If you’re looking for a quick web app to reduce your fractions, here’s one that I find quite helpful:

Fraction Reducer 2.0

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Automatically download TV Shows using TED

July 18th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 6 Comments | Filed in Apps, Piracy

TED is a program that automatically searches for new episodes of your favorite tv shows on RSS feeds and then automatically downloads them and opens them in your Torrent client of choice to download.

This program’s pretty handy if you want to use your computer sort of as a PVR but instead, just automatically download the shows off the internet.

You can select shows from a list of preset shows, click subscribe and then Ted will automatically download the show the next time a new episode comes on the RSS feed.

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TuxGuitar – Play, Create and Read Guitar tabs

July 9th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 3 Comments | Filed in Apps, Music, Online, Tech

TuxGuitar is an exellent piece of software I recently discovered.

It is completely open-source and reads and creates Guitar Tablature files. It even is compatible with the file format used by the commercial software Guitar Pro 5, allowing it to read and write to files that software can understand.

It’s the perfect solution to get those song ideas that are stuck in your head onto paper so you don’t lose them.

Also, if you ever go on www.ultimate-guitar.com and see Guitar Pro tabs, then this can read them, so you can read the tab as the song is playing.

Download it Now! and give it a try.

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Make a Webcam Timelapse Easily

June 18th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 2 Comments | Filed in Apps, How Tos, Tech

Wanted to make a timelapse of you doing something, such as putting lego blocks together or eating a cheesecake?  Now you can, and quite easily too, with the Timershot Powertoy for XP.

Requirements

  • Windows XP (I’m not sure that the Timershot powertoy works on vista – this is only tested with XP)
  • Timershot Powertoy
  • Windows Movie Maker (included with XP)
  • USB Webcam / USB Digital Camera

Steps

  1. Download the Powertoy and install it – pretty straightforward.
  2. Go to Start Menu > All Programs > Powertoys for Windows XP > Timershot and launch the application.
  3. The program will most likely start taking pictures right away.  Don’t worry about it.  Just set the capture rate as one picture every second, and set it not to just take one photo and replace that one, but to take individual photos each time, and so that way you’ll end up with the “frames” for your timelapse.
  4. Set a folder for the pictures to go into (not just your desktop – that will be messy !!! Remember , it takes 1 picture every second!!
  5. Now, point the webcam where you want it to take the timelapse , and away you go!
  6. Open up Windows Movie Maker (Start, All Programs, Windows Movie Maker)
  7. Go to the Tools menu, click Options, and click the Advanced tab.
  8. In the “Default Durations” section, decrease the Picture Duration to the lowest amount possible, and click OK.
  9. In the Capture Video section inside the “Movie Tasks” pane, click Import Pictures.
  10. Go to the folder you saved all your timelapse photos into, and import all the photos in that folder.
  11. Now, highlight all the pictures in the “Collections” pane (which is just right of the “Movie Tasks” pane) by pressing Ctrl + A, and then drag them to the timeline / storyboard below.
  12. In the Edit Movie section of the “Movie Tasks” pane, click View Video Effects (or just Effects, in Vista).
  13. Now, in the timeline / storyboard, click one of the pictures and press Ctrl + A to select all the pictures.
  14. In the “effects” window, click on “Speed Up” and hit “CTRL + D” to apply it to all the frames you have selected.If everything went correctly, each frame will now have a star at the bottom, indicating it has an effect paired with the frame. You can hit CTRL + D as many times as you want, if the video is still too slow.
  15. Now just hit Ctrl + P to save your movie, and share it with your friends or upload it to YouTube!

You can view  a couple sample timelapses I made myself:

Making Lego Structure

Cleaning up Lego Timelapse

Enjoy! Thanks to onlinephototutorials.com for the “Speed Up” enhancement to this tutorial.   Also, thanks to Microsoft for their great Windows XP Timershot PowerToy.
Jul 25th 2008
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Time lapse videos show motion over a long period of time. Set the camera on a tripod, switch it to manual focus, and you’re pretty much done. The hardest part is finding interesting things that will change over time, clearly. Many things change over time, in that you take one photo and they’re gone the next. However, things like clouds or stars are interesting as they move fluidly.

The goal of this tutorial is not taking the photos to make the timelapse, rather assembling the photos into a timelapse of high quality. Step One Before importing, set Windows Movie Maker’s “default image duration” to it’s fastest setting of 0.125 at “Tools > Options > Advanced”. First, you must import the necessary images into Windows Movie Maker. Hit “CTRL + I” and navigate to the folder where they are stored. Since Windows Movie Maker doesn’t support RAW or sizes about 1080p [1920x1080], I suggest you set your camera to the smallest JPEG size at “fine” or “high” quality. This means it won’t take as long to import all the images to your computer, it’ll take less space, and Windows Movie Maker will be faster. Import the JPEGs Step Two Under the “imported media” window, click on an image and hit CTRL + A to select all. Hold and drag the images into the timeline or storyboard at the bottom of the screen. Drag to Storyboard Step Three At the left hand pane, select the “effects” option under the “edit” category. Select "Effects" Now, at the bottom of the screen, select the “Storyboard” view. Select one of the images and hit “CTRL + A” to select all. Select "Show Storyboard" and select all

Step Four

In the “effects” window, click on “Speed Up” and hit “CTRL + D” to apply it to all the frames you have selected.

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Fast Dial – Clone of Opera’s Speed Dial

May 29th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 4 Comments | Filed in Apps, Offline, Tech

Fast Dial displays a list of thumbnails of your favorite sites in new tabs.  It is a sleek, easy way to access you favorite sites with each new tab you open.  Opera, an excellent browser, first pioneered this feature, along with it’s famous sidebar.  Opera’s Speed Dial looks a bit different from Fast dial, but Fast Dial still gets the job done.  Fast Dial also has a little search box at the top of the page, which is a nice added touch.

Download Fast Dial

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Sync Your Files with Dropbox

May 25th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 4 Comments | Filed in Apps, Online, Tech

Secure backup, sync, sharing made easy

Dropbox is an easy way to both backup files and share them at the same time, with any computers you have Dropbox installed onto.  It doesn’t matter where those computers are, they all get a copy of that file.

As it states on the home page, it syncs your files online and with other computers.  It’s like a central sharing folder.

There are free and paid options available for dropbox.  Should you choose to get dropbox for free, you get 2 GB of space to store your stuff.

For $9.99 per month or $99.00 per year, you can get 50 GB of secure storage.
Pay $9.99 per month or $99.00 per year to get a roomy 100 GB of storage.

There is also an amazing bonus most people don’t know about:  they have a referral system where, you as well as the other person you are referring will get 250 MB extra space for each person you are referring, for example:  if I refer you we each get 250 mb more space.  You can do this until you have a total of 5 GB total space – more than enough to store and transfer decently sized files.

Please use my referral link and when you sign up initially you will get 250 MB extra space.

Join Dropbox (referral link)

Join Dropbox (without my referral link)

Thanks to Alexander Momchilov for the inital referal to this service :D .
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Flash in Firefox without Admin Privileges

May 20th, 2009 by Connor McBrine-Ellis | 6 Comments | Filed in Apps, How Tos, Offline, Tech

If you’re trying to either install Adobe Flash into a Firefox install on a computer you don’t have admin rights on, or install it into Portable Firefox, then you’re probably having trouble.  The solution is relatively simple considering Adobe Flash runs off of only just two files!  Just copy those files and you’re set.

Download the flash installer, then use a program such as WinRAR or PeaZip to “extract the .EXE file”.

Then find the files flashplayer.xpt and NPSWF32.dll which you already extracted, and copy those to the folder Moziilla Firefox/plugins.

Restart Firefox, and it’s really as simple as that!

Another option if for some reason this doesn’t work though it should, is to download this extension and install it inside firefox: http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/xpi/current/flashplayer-win.xpi

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