Add "Scam" to Your Searches When Checking out a Business, Product, or Web Site [Search Techniques]

Add "Scam" to Your Searches When Checking out a Business, Product, or Web Site [Search Techniques]: "

People often turn to services like Yelp or Amazon to see what people think about a business, product, or web site, but to cut straight to complaints that may not have made it everywhere, reader MrYdobon adds one word to his searches. More »

"

DAVE'S TAKE: Yeah I do this a lot whenever I think something's shady.

Mufin Player Pro

Give-away and Video Review: Mufin Player Pro: "
Filed under: Audio, Features

Mufin Player Pro is a desktop music player that has all of the features you've come to expect and one that you probably haven't; it can map out your entire music collection as a 'visual cloud,' which lets you slice and dice your tunes in some very interesting ways.
At the heart of Mufin is a sophisticated music identification engine that scans all of your tracks and isolates a variety of musical properties for each, such as percussion, 'mood' (sad to happy), instrumentation, and many others. Once it knows your library, you can use it to find similar tracks (a la iTunes' 'Genius playlist'). You can also use it to visualize your music in ways that iTunes doesn't come close to.
I was very impressed by Vision and spent quite some time playing around with it. I created a fairly extensive video review of the software, which you can watch after the jump. It's worth seeing in action; a textual explanation does not do this feature justice.
Mufin comes in two flavors: Free and Pro.

Tarma InstallMate: "06/04/10 - Make installer for your programs."

Holy Crap.

The hardest videogame boss I've ever seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQZuidKexBQ

Japanese shmups (shoot-em-ups) always had the credit for being ridiculous but this takes the CAKE.

Captchas & Dwindling Species

A: Captcha word verification. What the fuck. Look at this.
It's an effective anti-spam method, but really. Is it necessary to Use optical illusions? I have
seen captchas that gave me a headache. This has to stop. Make longer strings of random
numbers, but at least provide something legible.

2: I've been hearing a lot about "new species found, endangered by climate/mankind/predators/
oxygen/high mortgage rates..." Mutations occur in nature, naturally. Snake with two heads,
cattle with extra legs, Martha Stewart. If you look in every corner of the earth you'll find some
weird stuff and species die off, deal with it. Take a picture. Whatever.

XP Crash, Browser Sampling

Last week my PC crashed hard. I was able to back everything up, so no sweat. Anyways, it gave me the chance to re-evaluate some web browsers. Here's what I found.

• Avant: Quick, streamlined, only one that utilizes custom hosts files to block adservers but crashes CONSTANTLY.
• Opera: Real quick, nice addons, but can't do scripts like the dropdown menus on mouse hover at amazon.com. Or even the secondary Inbox link on Yahoo! Mail. Also, can't get your homepage on a new tab. You're stuck with the speed dial (which wastes an extra click) unless you fanangle an *.ini file.
• IE8: It's the standard, albeit bloated and a tad slower than the rest. It's set as my default browser only for compatibility issues when an application wants to open a web page. With all the linux cockjobs targeting it, I at least feel it's equivalent to walking through a driving range.
• Orca: Haven't really tried this one too much, but I think it's written from the same code as Avant. Besides, my favorite now is...
  
• Firefox: The one I'm using now. Quick, compatible and not as bloated or ridden with memory leaks as previous builds were. Lots of useful addons to, especially adblocker and FLASHBLOCKER YAY!

Of course there's Slimbrowser, Google Chrome, Netscape, etc, etc. But Firefox is the one I'm sticking with right now.

More Hiatus I Know

I couldn't get the Snarfer to Blogger thing working, because my version of Snarfer didn't have the email settings that I could find. But I DID find the Clipmarks addon for Firefox lets me clip anything to this blog. So if I see anything nice, I'll clip dat ****.

Hiatus & Disclaimer

I just got my first third-person comment, so I'd like to repeat this: this blog is mostly the product of hard-working net journalists from Gizmodo, Kotaku, and many other websites that invest time AND money into providing us with great information. If you like what you see, I implore you to check out their sites.

And as for the hiatus, expect more to come. A very helpful comment just rode in on the wings of angels from David with a suggestion pertaining to Snarfer. (Thanks again!) So, needless to say, I'll be posting more. (The forums on Snarfer.com got shut down and I don't know why yet. Strange.)