iTunes Chuck

Seems that the 1st episode of Chuck's 2nd season is being offered free on iTunes. Go... and give into the Chuck. Downing mine now...

New Wifi Printer

This is a pic of the Lexmark X4530 All-in-one Wifi Printer Copier Scanner. Just got one - did the setup, and now two computers are printing to it. Still have to play with the copier thing and the scanner thing, but so far, I am liking it. The cool thing is after you get it set up, you can move it wherever you want it, as it connects via wifi. Cool!

Chuck Again

Spent the day "Chucking".

Hulu has a video of the cast of Chuck at Comicon 2008

And YouTube has video of Chuck promo that they played at Comicon (looks like it got ganked via cell phone camera - not too bad, though): Chuck - A Look At Season 2

And there is much behind the scenes and Chucklore available at Zachary-Levi.com.

I still like the Chuck.

Chuck Season 2 Preview

Lucky, I guess - just hit Hulu and noticed that the season opener of Chuck is online right now - and I don't think it has aired yet. Good episode, too. You can look for it in the Chuck section of Hulu - it's called "Sneak Peek : Chuck Versus The First Date". I likes the Chuck!

Liz's Exile

This is the cover of Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" - I had heard that the album was a song for song reply to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Mainstreet" album and that was due to be re-released in time for the 15th anniversary of it's original debut. Hmmm... For me, that's intriguing enough for me to want to give it a listen. I did my usual for music that I had no clue as to what it would be like - I listened to the 30 second rips that the stores (online and otherwise) have on their demo machinima. Hmmm... I found a copy or two in the wild (big stores want $$$, mang!) but passed them by.

Anyway, as I was searching around the net, I found a bootleg someone posted of the 2008-06-23 show at the Filmore where she did the whole album live, tune for tune. OK recording - audience based - not from the board, so there is a bit of "chatter".

Then searched around a bit for more info on the infamous Liz - if I caught it correctly, her career sprang from a series of cassettes she recorded at the house, her and a guitar, and were passed to friends. They eventually made their way to some record producer and things happened. Anyway, the legendary cassettes became known as the Girly Sound tapes - and I busted out some GoogleFu and found the tapes at GirlySound.com.

Listening to the Girly Sound tapes now, but I find it refreshing to hear something this raw. Some of the tunes are on other projects (even the aforementioned Guyville) - I wish I could do something like this. For how raw they are - they exist. Whenever I try to do something creative, I want perfection, so my usual outcome is nada. Liz has much more sack than I - and that is always an intriguing listen.

DownThemAll

I like using the Firefox add-on DownThemAll to download stuff in bulk from the web, such as live bluegrass shows from The Internet Archive. I have been playing with the lossless versions of the shows, notably the ".flac" format. Flac is a lossless audio compression algorithm, which means that it should sound identical to the original recording. Mp3 and the such are lossy formats that make an audio file sound worse than the original.

Anyway, I was trying to use DownThemAll to nail the .flac files, but the file filters trigger on most of the files, as the word "flac" is in the filename somewhere on ALL of them. I had to play with regular expressions, but you can weed them out by hitting the fast filtering mode and inputting this:

/\.flac$/

It basically means to weed out the files that END WITH .flac.

Nailing a Hit and Run Bluegrass Show as we speak.

I hope this helps somebody else out - this was way frustrating.

Irked and Vexed

This is a screenshot of the Windows version of a game called Irked. Irked is a clone of an old Palm Pilot game called Vexed. I mentioned it in the last post, but there is now a version of it for the iPod Touch & iPhone (it is called Vexed on the Touch and can be purchased at the app store for 99 cents). Love the game, have played it on Palm, Pocket PC, Windows, and now the Touch. Basically, you slide blocks around and when similar blocks touch, they disappear. Slide them around till all blocks are gone and then a new puzzle appears. Sounds simple, but it is greatly challenging. Level 30 of the original classic levels still smokes me. Took me 4 days of block sliding the first time I was challenged by it. Yes! Nice undo feature, reset, hint... and lots of additional level packs to keep you playing for a very long time.

There is also a javascript based Vexed here.

Geek Week

Recycled Eee PC pic from the last post. I have been eying the netbooks hard lately and I can say I honestly would like to have one... but I don't NEED one, so I am getting my head around the electronics I already have and making the most of them. I do have some "stuff" - the original half gig iPod Shuffle, the original iPod Touch, and my Vista-laced Aspire laptop.

The laptop got worked over last weekend. I had an out of body experience where I found myself booting into the factory restore program and wiped the hard drive clean. From there, I had an update fest, then an uninstall fest, and then it was time to put "me" in. And what do I install?

Firefox - a great, secure web browser.

Avast antivirus, free for home use.

Spybot Search & Destroy - spyware detection at it's finest.

OpenOffice - the (mostly) compatible Office program suite.

Irfan View - the image viewer. Batch resizing, minor tweaks, and a fast image viewer.

Also am playing with Artweaver - a Photoshop like graphics program. So far its looking very good.

I then installed iTunes 8 (have to to use the iPod Touch), and then I got the update to the Touch (2.1). So far, I have not experienced the "Vista Blue Screen Of Death" that others are complaining about - lucky me. My favorite Touch apps are Stanza (textfile reader), Wikipanion (Wikipedia interface), Vexed (sliding blocks game - had it on the Palm, Pocket PC, and there is a Windows version, as well - great game), Wifinder (wifi sniffer), iSpades (card game - got into it in Germany) and a simple solitaire game. Add my music, the YouTube player, and a few videos I have, and you have a great little traveler that can keep you entertained and informed.

Interestingly, Notepad - the Windows text editor that has been there since Windows 3.X, finally can handle files greater than 32k in size. Not sure - might have been able to do that for a long time - I have always used Editpad Lite for textfiles because the tabbed interface is spot on to how I work. Used it for years.

Gas - just as a point - here in NC the gas went from $3.65 to $3.99 as I was riding past. Stopped just as they were getting ready to jack the price. I have heard that the gas price is now up to $5.49 (7 hours later). Hmmm...