The Evolution of Video Game Music
April 22, 2008 (mid-morning)
Great piece on the evolution of video game music over at NPR.
Maybe I don’t feel so guilty now after adding both Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. soundtracks to my iTunes library.
dfbills.com blog
Setting a Time Machine size limit
April 20, 2008 (mid-morning)
To create a Time Machine size limit in Leopard, simply issue the following command in the terminal:
defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine MaxSize 102400
Size is measured in megabytes- my example is 100GB.
Starbucks 50 million iTunes promo = 6 million downloads
April 15, 2008 (mid-morning)
Last fall, Starbucks announced a “Song of the Day” promo giving away more than 50 million free songs via iTunes download card. This event coincided with the Starbucks iPhone/iTunes “Now Playing” service.
The “Song of the Day” promo ran for more than 30 days in more than 10,000 Starbucks locations. According to data released by Starbucks today, the promo only saw 6 million songs downloaded- an 8% redemption rate.
I don’t know about you, but I know I had a few cards that I never redeemed- it will be interesting to see how well the next venture fares.
Open data from shell in any graphical application
April 15, 2008 (evening)
A sweet tip for opening data from the Mac shell environment in any graphical application from MacOSXHints.
Previous to this hint, the only way I was using “open” was to open files from the command line with their related graphical app. For instance, opening a .rtf file in TextEdit:
open mytext.rtf
Or simply piping source code to TextMate via a curl download:
curl http://dfbills.com | mate
Now, I can can load data and files into any application by adding the -f and -a flags:
curl ‘http://example.com/encodingerror.html’ | open -a ‘Hex Fiend’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.html’ | open -a ‘TextMate’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.png’ | open -a ‘Preview’ -f
curl ‘http://example.com/example.m4v’ | open -a ‘QuickTime Player’ -f
A new take on the Super Mario theme song
April 15, 2008 (terribly early in the morning)
I’ve seen dozens of videos showing people around the world playing the Super Mario theme song. But, this is the first original one I’ve seen in a long time:
Super Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles