Archive for February 2008
When I see decent songs announced as Guitar Hero downloadable content, it saddens me. Like today, they announced a No Doubt song pack that I would’ve bought in a heartbeat if it were for Rock Band. Mandie loves herself some No Doubt, you see. But there’s no point in me downloading it for Guitar Hero so she can sit there and watch me play it.
I wonder how long it will take until Activision comes out with their own Rock Band equivalent? I can’t see people being satisfied with just playing the guitar for much longer, especially after they’ve gotten a taste of Rock Band goodness.
Speaking of Rock Band, J. Gomez put together a video, uploaded it to YouTube and now you and everyone else you know can watch it.
Some nice fellow e-mailed Jon Tackabury to let him know that one of the sites he was hosting was INFECTED with badness. Sadly, it turns out that it was the world’s #1 frequently updated mega-blog, SockWorld. I had figured that Google hated me because of all my comment spam, but I guess there was a security hole in the version of WordPress that I was running, and someone (or… something…) was able to edit a post to include some shady javascript. I don’t know what that Javascript did, or what it was all about, but it’s been removed from the Ban Hammer post. So, yeah. We aren’t as dangerous as we used to be.
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MediaPortal – The Bruce Springsteen of Media Front-ends
1 Comment | Posted by SockBoy in Uncategorized
I’ve written about my love of Windows Media Centre before. I will not link to those stories because that’s not ‘who I am’ or ‘what I’m about’. Let it be known, though, that ever since I bought my HDTV, my relationship with WMC has deteriorated due to the fact that a) it doesn’t record HD content off of my set top box, so I have to download the HD versions of the shows we watch and b) it does a horrible job of displaying these downloaded TV shows. What use is a fancy-ass interface if all of your shows are showing up like house-s04e10-x264-ctu-tunafish-REPACK.mkv. Intuitive, friends, it is not. I can refer to you as a friend, right? I’m not overstepping any bounds? Good. I am glad.
This weekend, I said to myself ‘There has got to be a better way!’. And so I became a man on a mission. I looked into alternatives and came across Media Portal – The Working Man’s Media Front-End. The default feature-set looked like fairly standard fare, but if you peel back the layers a bit, look into some of the skins and plug-ins, you’ll find that Media Portal is perhaps the answer to everything you’ve ever wished for.
Remember when you were a kid, and you thought ‘If I ever met a genie and he would grant me 3 wishes, I’d wish for more wishes!’. That’s Media Portal. It’s more wishes in a 26.7 MB download.
If you’re a chronic TV show downloader like myself, make sure you grab the MP TV Series plug-in. Once you set it up, all you need to do is point it at the directory where you keep all of your fine television shows and it will take care of the rest. Using some sort of ‘magical algorithm’ it reads the files, parses out the name of the show and what episode / season it’s in and grabs TV show information from The TV DB. The end result is something that looks like this. Maybe I’ll do my own screenshots sometime (probably not).
It also does a really great job of organizing downloaded movies. It automatically grabs lots of info from imdb, including the cover art. The result is a fancy-looking movie browser that will be sure to impress anyone who cares about things like that.
There are other plug-ins that I haven’t tried yet, like My Emulators (ooh!) and My Pornography (scandalous!). It all makes me want to upgrade my Media Centre into something a bit more capable with more storage, but that will have to wait until later.
It looks like Nestle has added some much-needed additional meat to their Hot Pockets brand of stuffed sandwiches. Check out the link:
Also, while you’re there, definitely check out the Hot Pockets Dojo, where you can train with the Hot Pocket master and learn more about Hot Pockets, perhaps even send a Hot Pocket-themed e-card to a close friend or relative. Really, take your time there. I would say that if you’re not eating Hot Pockets at any point in the day, you should be on the Hot Pockets Dojo interacting with Hot Pockets games, downloads, avatars, etc.
http://www.hotpocketsdojo.com/
