Previously, on "The Tech In Me":
... then this guy is not only the "bike hero", he's my hero! For all Guitar Hero fans, check out this great video of how to play this game on the streets:
Source: Kotaku
You already know I'm a sucker for everything Portal-related. So, it's not news that I would post a video such as this one:
In order to save some money from MP3 purchases, you can always try to find some other means of getting those MP3s you want for free. Of course not all those techniques are legal, but what did you want? It's for free...
Lifehacker has made a nice post that gives some advise on this area. For example, you can try searching the MP3 you're looking for in the Web. If that doesn't work for you, you can always download the music you want from MySpace. How about borrowing your friends' CDs or using the web? Another possibility is to grab the audio from a video. The quality is not the best but most of the files are audible.
What are your techniques to get MP3s for free?
Yes, that's right...the title is correct: a banjo can be used as a valuable brain surgery instrument.
Eddie Adcock is one of the pillars of Bluegrass Music. Recently he realised that a new found tremor in his hand could threaten his ability to perform professionally. So, he underwent brain surgery to treat the hand tremor and to test the success of the procedure, he played his banjo throughout the entire operation.
Surgeons placed electrodes in Adcock's brain and fitted a pacemaker in his chest which delivers a small current that shuts down the region of his brain causing the tremors.
Don't believe me? Check out the video:
Source: BBC News
After hearing so many people talking about how amazing the new Bond movie's theme music is, I decided to have a look at it. And indeed, the music is quite amazing. The combination Jack White/Alicia Keys didn't seem obvious when I first heard of it, but after hearing the tune, it makes you wonder why these two haven't worked together before.
You can check it out at the official website. Or you can see the video here (but the quality at the official website is better):
By now you've probably realized that I'm a huge fan of the Super Mario Bros. console game, and especially, its theme music. If you're a fan too and always wanted to play the theme in your favourite instrument, check out the music sheet here.
I know how difficult it can be, sometimes, to find good guitar tabs to learn music from. Luckily, for all guitar fans out there, I found this great website, Songsterr, that, not only has great tabs, but it has a great on-line software that allows you to reproduce the tab by playing the exact notes at full speed or half-speed, allowing you to easily pick up the chords and playing techniques for specific tunes.
Have fun :-)
And we're back! After a few days to get used to the new idea of being a Father, I'll try now to update the blog a little bit.
But for now, let's flashback to the blog's August last year's best posts:
A few days ago I posted a nice tip on how to download musics from MySpace using Safari and wget in Mac OS X. In that tutorial, I showed how to use wget to download the music because in Safari I was unable to use the "save as..." function to actually save the MP3 file on the computer. I also explained why this tip didn't work with Firefox (because it doesn't have an Activity window such as Safari's).
But then I discovered that I can paste the "secret" MP3 URL in the Firefox Address Bar and then use the "Save Page as..." to actually save the file.
So, since Safari and Firefox can do some team work, you no longer need to install wget on your Mac to download musics from MySpace.
DISCLAIMER: even though the instructions provided in this post may be (mis)used to download copyrighted material, this blog or its author do not support any piracy activities and cannot be held responsible for what others do with the knowledge acquired here. The author disseminates this knowledge with the sole purpose of allowing users to backup musics that MySpace's publishing artists already allow users to download, which is the case in the given example.
MySpace is a great social website that has specialized in providing access to a lot of musical material from musicians around the world. Some of those musicians publish their musics in their profile and even allow downloading them (as you can see in the figure below that shows the music box for Ani DiFranco), but for doing that you have to be logged in to your MySpace account.
But what if you don't have (or don't want to create) a MySpace account? Well, that's what I'm going to show you:
Previously, on the "Tech In Me":
I've been a fan of the Super Mario Bros theme ever since I started playing the game when I was a little boy. It's one of those tunes that once you get inside of your head, it's difficult to get it out... but in a good way :-) And it seems that I'm not the only fan, since it only takes you a little search around the web to find highly-creative fans playing the game's theme song in the most oddly ways.
I know we're way past Christmas time, but this is to compensate those of you who didn't receive the Guitar Hero game for Christmas.
Hand Bell Hero is 4 key-based music game (like Guitar Hero) where you have to keep up with the bells and play Christmas tunes. Check it out and have fun!
Engadget posted on the new gadget from Sony Ericsson that is supposed to run PSP games. They did this based on a scan from the Portuguese version of the Stuff magazine. What they didn't know was that this was a part of a "predictions" article for the new year from Stuff (on the January 2008 issue). Which basically means that the gadgets presented on the article are not real. Instead these are merely wild guests from Stuff's editors based on the evolution of gadget's market. They even used the expression "probability of existence" to denote the probability of these gadgets ever seeing the light of day.
So, being a Stuff subscriber, I decided to read the article again and present here some of those interesting gadgets that Stuff thinks will come up on 2008 (the given percentage is the probability of existence):
On May 2007, Pandora made the unfortunate decision of going "offline" for non-US users. I got very upset because Pandora was my main source for discovering new music (based on my musical taste).
Fortunately, new services appeared (such as Last.fm), which offered similar mechanisms of searching/listening music. However, the engine behind Last.fm was not as good as Pandora's. The Pandora system is connected to the Music Genome Project, a project that has been trying to define the "genes" of music, thus making way to establish more interesting connections between artists and songs.
The project analyzes the similarities of musics by comparing "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony". It's clear why Pandora works much better than other services that basically connect artists by genre, instead of using the intrinsic properties of the musics.
And now Pandora is back (in Portuguese) with a "global" version that makes it accessible to almost everyone in the world.
Enjoy!
...go to Songza. There's millions of musics available, but for listening only.
You can also use it to post musics on your site such as this "hit" from Supermen Lovers:
