I was searching the internet the other day looking for MP3’s of music from older NES and SNES games (it’s all got to be royalty free by now, right?) when I came across this website. Quoted from the site:

8 Bit Weapon is Seth, ComputeHer, and MelBot. 8 Bit Weapon has performed across two continents with an arsenal of 8 bit weapons, which include a Commodore 64 and 128, a couple Nintendo Gameboy classics, Nintendo N.E.S., Intellivision synthesizer, Atari 2600, Speak n Spell & Speak n Music, some hybrid lo-fi acoustic-electric drums, and an assortment of other vintage and toy synthesizers.

Unless you’re familiar with the beeps, bloops, and bleeps of old-school videogame music, that paragraph might come across as gibberish. To someone like me, though, who owes his childhood happiness to Nintendo and Sega, I find it highly nostalgiac and incredibly awesome. If you are in the same boat, it’s probable that you’ve already stopped reading this blog post and are fully exploring the 8 Bit Weapon website.

If you aren’t someone who grew up with characters like Mario and Sonic, I recommend performing search engine queries for videos and music samples of the band’s work. Who knows, it might just be quirky enough that you’ll dig it regardless of your background.

- Joshua

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Besides a few UI annoyances and minor issues with Spaces, OS X Leopard is pretty sweet. And, even though I gripe about Spaces from time to time, I don’t think I could live without it now that it is a “use it every day” tool for me. Yes, all in all I’m quite happy with how things are functioning on our computers.

There is one issue I’ve encountered, though, that seemed to rear its ugly little head as early as Leopard update 10.5.1. Every now and then, I completely lose sound on my PowerBook G4. No, not that I just can’t hear sound through the speakers, the computer doesn’t recognize an audio output device whatsoever. Resetting the computer seems to work okay, but it happens so frequently lately, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a problem with Leopard or an issue with the sound card itself.

Some hunting on the internet shows it’s happening to others, but I can’t find any sites where Apple has acknowledged the issue and plans to release a fix in the near future. Honestly, it may be affecting so few users it might not warrant the troubleshooting effort from the fine folks in Cupertino, but it certainly is annoying for those of us who suddenly lose iTunes functionality during our favorite songs.

- Joshua

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Internet sensations typically don’t give me any reason to stand up and take note (honestly, what was the appeal of lonelygirl15?), unless they’re fairly creative or cool. There are, however, occasions when something comes along I find really impressive, and Ronald Jenkees is one such individual I can’t get enough of. Ronald is a musician who writes, produces, records, and performs all of his own music, and he has a bunch of videos on youtube of him performing various songs he’s written. The following video is one of my favorites he has posted:

Not only is the music very well made, it is entertaining to watch him play; you can tell he is having a lot of fun. Also, he seems like a very down to Earth guy (watch the entire video to hear him talk about the song) who hasn’t let internet stardom get to his head. Mad props to you, Ronald, and I hope you keep doing what you’re doing for many years to come.

- Joshua

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As mentioned in this blog post (this one as well), we are currently watching both Battlestar Galactica and The 4400. Now, these two shows are very, very good, but they are only a couple of the programs we are obsessed with. Some are better than others, but they are all worth watching. From drama to comedy and horror to sci-fi, the following is a list of shows (in no particular order) we can’t get enough of:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (finished)
Angel (finished)
Battlestar Galactica
Carnivale
The 4400
Grey’s Anatomy
Desperate Housewives
Firefly (finished)
Smallville
Lost
Ugly Betty
Stargate SG-1
Numb3rs
Supernatural

Since it would be impossible (for the two of us) to catch all of these shows when they air on network and cable television, we watch them in collected DVD formats. This is both good and bad, though, because while we don’t have to wait an entire week for new episodes to come out, we don’t have enough self control to keep ourselves from watching multiple episodes in one sitting.

Filed under television addiction dvd

Linda is finishing up her Summer classes this week, and next week her mother and father will be here to help make preparations for the wedding. We’re slowly closing in on the “only one more month to go” mark, so we’re excited to have her family here to assist in moving things forward. Have a safe trip, Mr. and Mrs. Chu, and we can’t wait to see you!

- Joshua

When your trade paperback and graphic novel collection comes close to exceeding two hundred books, it can be difficult keeping track of everything. The worst part is trying to remember which copies of certain titles you need. Thankfully, a company called Bruji has created a database program specifically for cataloging books - Bookpedia. It has built-in, iSight driven barcode scanning software; once your books are scanned in, Bookpedia references the ISBN with the Amazon catalog and dynamically pulls all the book's information into your library. The thing I like most about the software is the ability to create a wish list of titles I need, which can easily be transferred over into the main library database once I've purchased them. This, of course, means no more guessing and trying to keep track of hundreds of books.

Bruji also has 3 other titles designed for keeping track of your movie, music, or video game collection. Each can be purchased individually or as bundles, with greater discounts depending on how many you purchase. There are other programs available, but I liked Bookpedia's clean, iTunes like interface the most.

- Joshua

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One of the things that bummed us out about the Xbox 360 was a dependency on Microsoft software for using extra features available on the console - most notably, digital content streaming. In order to stream music, pictures, or video from your computer, you originally had to be running some flavor of Microsoft OS (XP or Vista) so you could use Windows Media Player version 11 (WMP11). WMP11 has a built-in ability to search out other systems on your network to stream content to, and the Xbox 360 is one the systems it recognizes as a compatible device. This is all fine and dandy for Windows users, but what about us MacOS users?

Yes, we could climb out from under our safety blankets and install Windows through one of a couple of virtualization programs available for OS X, or we could make use of Apple's Boot Camp, but we really, really don't want to. We're forced to use PCs at work and school on a regular basis, but we choose to use our Macs at home. We realize this limits us, but when company's like Nullriver are awesome enough to recognize the need for software alternatives for Mac users, we get to stay sheltered in our comfortable Apple world just a little bit longer.

Connect360 is a program which runs as a preference pane plugin and acts just as WMP11 would for streaming media from a Mac to a Xbox 360. We tested it out last night and found that it works flawlessly. Due to limitations of the Xbox 360 for only accepting certain video types, we had to convert some videos to a compatible format before they would work, but it wasn't a big deal or inconvenience. A few TV episodes and movie trailers later, we realized Connect360 is $20 very, very well spent.

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