[Games] Three online games for Friday
Swoop-to-Nuts (link)Collect acorns to keep yourself alive, grab the stars high in the sky to score big points. This game has rather strange controls: move your mouse to the right to let the squirrel dive (to gain speed) and move it to the left to gain heigth (but lose speed).
Ball Revamped 4 (
link)
Make your way through obstacles and powerups as you try to guide your ball to the level exit. That sounds easy, but after level 54 it gets really hard.
Tower Defence (
link)
Defend your castle against evil "monsters" by building towers that shoot ice, fire and nature beams. The monsters become stronger every time they attack.
Labels: game, games, online gaming
[Download] Free SingStar clone for your PC
Do you want to try SingStar without having to buy a PS2? Then UltraStar might be worth looking at. As you can see on the screen shot, the interface really looks very similar to SingStar and it works like SingStar too.
There's a disadvantage though: you'll have to search the songs that the program uses yourself. You can get some songs
here. If it's not there, you'll have to
make it yourself, which that's not easy at all. Needless to say that downloading these songs is illegal if you don't have a legal copy of the song in your possession.
Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultrastar/Labels: free, freeware, games, karoake, music, PS2, sing, SingStar, song, songs
[Download] Floola: another iTunes+iPod alternative
Are you sick of using iTunes? Then Floola could be the tool you're looking for. Floola is an iTunes+iPod alternative that is also computer-independent. Just copy the program file to the root of your iPod, and you're good to go. It supports music, play counts, smart playlists, ratings, advanced iTunes settings such as "Skip when shuffling" and more.
Floola has one major disadvantage though: like many of these tools, Floola doesn't support podcasts yet. I also have to warn you that once you start using Floola to synchronize your iPod, you cannot revert to iTunes without losing changes that you've committed after switching to Floola. This is the case with almost any iTunes+iPod alternative and is Apple's fault.
ConclusionIf you don't need support for podcasts, this is an iPod manager that I would really recommend. Keep in mind however that once you switch to Floola, it's not easy to go back to iTunes.
Website: http://www.floola.com/Available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
Demonstration videoLabels: Floola, iPod, iTunes, iTunes alternative, manage, music, synchronize
[Tip] Extracting a frame from a movie for free
A tip in the "You never know when you'll need it" category:
If you want to extract a frame from a certain movie file, you don't need commercial software to do this. In fact: you don't need any software at all! Just open any movie in Windows Media Player, press CTRL+I and save the image to your hard disk. This small feature is available in Windows Media Player 9 and later.
Source: Digital InspirationLabels: convert, extract, frame, image, movie, Windows Media Player
[Linux] Sharing Thunderbird with Windows
If you switch a lot between Windows and Linux, you probably hate having to delete the same mail on both operating systems. Well, there's a solution for that. You'll have to do some manual work, but once it's set up, it works like a charm.
Here's what you need to do:
- Make sure that you can access your Windows partition from Linux.
- Start Thunderbird in Linux using root privileges*.
- Close the wizard and the program.
- Go to your Windows profile folder and search for prefs.js. Copy that file to your Linux profile folder (it's located in /root/.thunderbird/[something].default).
- Open prefs.js.
- Change the paths in prefs.js to paths that can be accessed from within Linux. Example: C:\Something\ could become /media/windows1/Something/.
- Remove any line that contains [ProfD].
- Reopen Thunderbird using root privileges*.
That's it. After doing this, you should be able to access your Windows Thunderbird mail using Linux. If you find this explanation too difficult, you might want to read the
article source. Although this may also work for Firefox, I haven't tested this.
* You need root privileges because you have to be able to read and write to your Windows profile folder.Labels: Linux, Mozilla, OS, profile, profiles, share, sharing, software, Thunderbird, Windows
Swoop-to-Nuts (link)
