Casual Games

I just finished my 60 Minute trial of PopCap Games Chuzzle.
If you first take a look at it you probably think that it's just another "match-three-of-the-same-color" game (like Bejeweled 2), but this one is special.
I don't really feel like describing the game, just play for yourself.
The developers definately had too much fun making the game, left click on one of those furry balls multiple times or left click them a single time (deluxe only) to see what i mean.

Pandora

I just read this post on Raph Koster's Blog where he mentions Pandora, a great music discovery service.


You feed it with your favorite songs and it generates a playlist with similar tracks.
I currently enjoy listening to tracks described as

• "features disco influences, danceable beats, excellent vocal technique, a laid back female vocal and a high-pitched voice" (Lavaa - Wherever You Are)

or

• "features disco influences, a laid back female vocal, romantic lyrics, the heavy use of chordal patterning and melodic part writing" (Milk Inc. - The Sun Always Shines On TV).

And it all started with adding "4 Strings".

VMware Player "hacked"

A few days ago VMWare released "VMWare Player" which can run virtual machines but cannot create them.
Today I saw this how-to on hackaday.
I just installed Ubuntu and it works great!

Here is my modified how-to:

• install the VMWare Player
• download the "Browser Appliance" virtual machine
• make a test run of the virtual machine to verify that it works
• download the Ubuntu CD-Image
• replace these two lines in the file "Browser-Appliance.vmx":
  

  ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
  ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

  by these:
  

  ide1:0.fileName= "ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso"
  ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"
  

• start the virtual machine and press ctrl-g to direct the
  input to the virtual machine
• press escape and boot from cd-rom
• install ubuntu
• revert the changes made above
• done (you may want to delete the iso which you don't need
  anymore)

SVG in Firefox

If you are running Windows 2000 and try to play SVG Tetris (or view some pictures), you may be wondering why the download dialog appears. This is because you are missing the file "gdiplus.dll".
Get it here from Microsoft.

Search Engines

At the moment all visitors of my blog come from the GreaseMonkey mailing list, to be more specific from this post.
To make my page more open to the public I decided to add it to some search engines.
Here are the links:

• http://www.google.com/addurl/
• http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (requires yahoo id)

Slashdot - add mirrors

I have added an image to the description of my "Slashdot - add mirrors" script at Userscripts.org. As you probably already guessed it adds links to some mirrors to the articles and comments. Check it out here.

Greasemonkey UI

This post on the Greasemonkey mailing list inspired me to make a toolbar button for Greasemonkey.
It doesn't tell you if Greasemonkey did something but it allows you to disable individual scripts and Greasemonkey by the click of a button (the monkey greys out too).

Update:

After fixing some bugs I guess I should release this modification. Here are the modified files. Make sure that you are using Greasemonkey 0.5 beta and have made backups.

Userscripts.org

Here are my scripts.

fp

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