Ninjas! Robots! Heck, it’s even got This Product™. Jon’s new indie game, Ninja Robot Winning Gameshow, manages to be simple, challenging and humorous all at the same time. A little while back I posted a video of the gameplay prototype. The game is (mostly) finished and everyone can download and play it now:

Can anyone else say, “About time!”?  I’ve had this almost ready to release for quite some time.  But I wanted to add some finishing touches to it.  There are more finishing touches that I’d like to add, but at least now it’s to a point where I feel like I can let other people download it, play it, and rag on it.

I especially appreciate Jon taking a moment in his announcement to talk about his objectives in making the game, and what tools and libraries he used.

The Good

• The game is easy to learn, but hard to master.
• Dig the background music.
• The ninja robot has a great sense of humor.
• Commercial breaks give you something to laugh about when you keep dying.
• Nice retro look and feel.

The Bad

• Controls are a little tricky – sometimes it isn’t clear whether you are allowed to change gravity or not
• The collision detection with spikes is a little too sensitive. Occasionally it seems off by a pixel or two.
• Commercial breaks are a little too frequent. Also, it would be nice if there were different “ads” that were shown.
• Background music tracks are chosen at random, which is OK, except you often get the same song two times in a row.
• Not much in the way of sound effects other than the robot speech.

The Ugly

• Not being able to play this on the iPhone.

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Shiny Apples: Award-Winning Mac OS X and iPhone Apps

If you are an Apple fan, your software picks this month have to be the winners of the 2009 Apple Design Awards announced this week at WWDC.

Burn Music CDs the Easy Way on Windows

Let’s face it: sometime you still need to burn an old-school music CD. Digital music players aren’t for everyone, and making a custom CD as a gift is still nicer than handing someone a bunch of zipped MP3’s. If you are running Windows, the easiest way I know to burn a music CD is with Burrrn:

Burrrn is a little tool for creating audio CDs with CD-Text from various audio files.
Supported formats are: wav, mp3, mpc, ogg, aac, mp4, ape, flac, ofr, wv, tta, m3u, pls and fpl playlists and cue sheets. You can also burn EAC’s noncompliant image + cue sheets! Burrrn can read all types of tags from all these formats (including ape tags in mp3).

I especially like the way it converts song information from your tags to CD-Text so that CD players can display song and artist info for each track. Very nice. Although Burrrn is free, please consider sending a small thank-you to the programmer by way of a donation.

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I’ve recently been playing around with my old Athlon XP 1800 box and Windows 7. There is no way Vista would approach usability on that old hardware, but Windows 7, suprisingly, does just fine! Most hardware was recognized out of the box, even a WiFi card that Windows XP never was able to find on its own. Except for my poor, old Sound Blaster Live! card from days of yore. He got completely ignored by Windows 7. Abandoned, actually. Poor guy. I think I heard a sniffle come from somewhere inside the case.

Fortunately, I remembered something interesting that I learned while working at Microsoft on printer drivers. The fact is, Microsoft bends over backwards to avoid breaking old drivers with new operating systems, especially ones immediately succeeding each other. Now, put that together with the knowledge that the Windows 7 driver model is almost the same as in Vista, and you might start to see where I’m going.

Since Vista came directly after XP, there is a good chance that those dusty old Windows XP drivers would still work with the Sound Blaster Live! on Windows 7 (and presumably Windows Vista, but I haven’t tried it). So I went to the Creative Support site, dug around in their archives (note: you have to do a search at the bottom of the product page to see all the downloads), and tada! Found some Windows XP Drivers for my old Soundblaster Live! model.

After waiting about a month for the driver to download from Creative’s craptacular file server, I was excited to finally get my Sound Blaster Live! card working. But upon running the installer, it flashed a message about not being able to find any Sound Blaster cards on my computer! Dang. Back to square one.

But wait…what’s this? After closing the installer, Windows 7 goes Clippy on me and suggests that I re-run the installer with some “suggested settings.” Sure, why not? And you know what? This time it worked! It actually worked! Wahoooo!

P.S. – Do you like to hack hardware? Ever wanted to mod a game console? You need these books!

Recently I was looking for a show to go see, and came across some reviews about Pixar’s new film, Up. The reviews were all positive, with everyone basically saying that Pixar had managed to come up with yet another great film. Pixar is one of those amazing companies that has figured out how to not only do something great the first time, but again and again.

In fact, most people get lucky the first time and spend their entire lives trying to duplicate that first success, with no real understanding of the principles that made them successful in the first place. But Pixar has made a conscious effort, since the beginning, to identify and reinforce such principles. And that’s the real secret to being great.

Paul Thurrott writes about Windows 7:

Was it possible, even remotely, I wondered, that the Windows 7 RC had improved matters enough to make this OS usable on this old hardware, a machine that was slow and out of date the day I got it over two years ago? I didn’t think so, but I needed some UMPC shots for the book, so it didn’t really matter. I fired up Windows 7 Setup on the device and got to work.

To my surprise, it runs just fine. Not just acceptably, it runs well. It runs as well on this little piece of junk as it does on a 2009-era netbook. This UMPC has an 800 MHz Celeron processor and just 1 GB of RAM. It will not accept any USB memory keys for ReadyBoost purposes, so there’s no way to even improve the memory situation. But it doesn’t matter: Windows 7 just runs and runs and runs. It runs well enough to play a full resolution H.264 DVD rip in Windows Media Player (windowed or full-screen) without a hitch. In fact, I brought the thing to the gym Friday and watched 30 minutes of that movie while doing some cardio. Perfect.

Now, I don’t care if you think Steve Jobs is your own personal God and Microsoft is merely a footnote in history. You have to admit this is freakin’ amazing. I actually installed Windows 7 on my old Athlon XP 1800 box. And it runs like champ. But here is the most surprising thing of all: in some ways Windows 7 is even faster than Windows XP on the same hardware.

Prediction: Apple will spend millions on new commercials making fun of Windows 7. They will probably run some spots that try to paint Windows 7 as just Vista with a new set of clothes, a haircut, or some fancy makeup. This will be sadly hypocritical, because you can make the same argument against Mac OS X vs. BSD. But, at the end of the day, anyone who takes a genuine look at Windows 7 will have to admit Microsoft has done something, well, insanely great.

Tip: Be sure to rate your computer (search for Windows Experience Index in the start menu or control panel). Windows 7 will actually use the results to tune your system for better performance.

Shipping big files around has always been a pain.  For example, ever try emailing something HUGE, like, say, 1 MB? It’s pure evil. Sending big files as email attachments is only slightly slower than driving over to the nearest post office and mailing a USB drive with the same data.  And that’s only if it works. Most email services and apps block really big attachments (say, 500 MB), or simply fall over dead after trying valiantly for a week or two to ship your file.

Now, I see that mad look in your eye, and I know what you’re thinking… I can haz FTP? Sorry… you can haz not. FTP is a pain to setup and use (especially for non-technical folks), and is a notoriously unreliable protocol. Not to mention the constant user account juggling and security concerns (you l337 hacker, you). And then if you get that all sorted out, putting that one big file on your awesome $5.99/mo web server is probably going to take down your entire site and put you over your storage limit. Phew. No thanks.

What we need is a simple software-as-a-service that act’s like a FedEx for big files. Gets it there right away, with no hassle. Free is even better (we’ve got to cut costs, people!) And here it is:

TransferBigFiles.com

They do this for up to 1 GB. Not perfect, but darn close. Check it out.

Perhaps you were fooling around with Boxee. Or maybe you just found this USB thing lying in the gutter and you decided to bring it home to a warm, loving environment. Who knows? The problem is, there is this GPT partion-thingy keeping you from using all the space on your USB drive.

What you need is this handy (Windows) tool from HP. It formats anything with a USB plug (well, maybe not everything). Anyway, the GPT partition or whatever else is on there doesn’t stand a chance. Here’s the link:

http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197

Go crazy.

I like this guy. Don’t let other people tell you how to think.

I always got a kick out of hex words (words that only use hexadecimal characters). If you are similarly deranged, Ned Batchelder has generated an awesome list of hex words for your viewing pleasure. Perfect for making your own T-Shirt. Like, you could put 7e55e118 below a mesh , and only graphics hackers would understand.

Recently I tried out the Windows 7 beta on my Acer Aspire One netbook (it worked great, by the way – in some ways faster even than XP). I figured I could always revert to the factory-default Windows XP image stored on the mystical “hidden partition” that PC makers are so fond of using. However, Windows 7 is apparently too intimidating for the poor little Acer eRecovery Management software. It simply doesn’t know what to do with itself when confronted with a Windows 7 partition.

ARM: What is thy bidding my Master?
You: It’s Windows 7 we’re after.
ARM: I’m sorry, did you just say Windows 7?
You: You got a problem with that?
ARM: Actually, I, uh…
You: ARM? Are you OK?
ARM: My mind is going…cannot format..failed to format…partition not found…

Let’s face it: Acer eRecovery Management needs a little love to get through this. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a System Rescue USB drive (Note: An alternative to the spyware-laden Daemon-tools for mounting the ISO file as a virtual CD-ROM is Virtual CloneDrive). If you have trouble with the System Rescue CD, you can try some other distros.
2. Go into the Acer BIOS settings and change the boot settings to check USB first. Plug in your System Rescue stick, and restart the netbook.
3. Run “wizard”, and launch gtparted (icon towards the lower-left of the screen).
4. Delete partition 2, create a new one, then reformat it as NTFS
5. Mark partition 1 as bootable (right-click, edit flags). Remove USB drive.
6. Reboot into the Acer System Restore software. Choose to restore the system.
7. Plug the System Rescue USB drive back into the Acer netbook.
8. Reboot into the System Rescue CD/USB, go back into gparted, and flag the restored partition 2 as bootable.
9. Remove USB flash drive and reboot.