AWESOME ZONE

Me. I did. WOOYEA.

Media keys are nice because they make basic media player operations like changing songs, turning off embarrassing music when someone is nearby, or even bringing the media player to focus, extremely, touch-of-a-button easy. The biggest difference between my computer’s two boot options right now, other than being open or closed source, is how well these buttons work.

On Windows, I am pretty much forced into iTunes, since Windows Media Player was no good when I first started organizing my library, I got an iPod for a birthday, and iTunes looked all shiny (version 4/5 or something). iTunes hates these buttons. When I hit the “Media” button, it causes something sort of like a scene out of the original Star Trek movie, when trying to go into warp throws them into a wormhole.  

After it figures out what just happened, my computer randomly opens either WMP or iTunes.  The volume keys move the change the volume at either a 1 or 2% increment, which is usually not what I need.  Most of the other “action” buttons don’t actually do anything, unless a media player is open and focused on the screen. Oddly enough, the “Power” button will shut down my computer.

On Ubuntu, the media button does nothing. No system crash, no eventual program opening, it just ignores that key, probably because I never mapped it. The rest of the keys work just fine, as long as any media player is open, including Rhythmbox, Banshee, Totem, and VLC.  The volume keys move big distances of volume, which is nearly always what I want, moving at around 10%.  The power key does shut off my computer, but usually weirdly abruptly.

To summarize, iTunes’ Windows integration is the real reason I switched, but the media keys get more use than other key on my keyboard.

All Day is intended to be listened to as a whole.
It is broken up into individual tracks only for easier navigation.

This album is a free download.
Girl Talk thanks all artists sampled. A full list will be posted in the future.

Official Site is here.

torrent file

http://www.metacdn.com/api/users/demo/content/041f6b043da908310331c28f6e3355fe/replica
http://jam2.me/allday
http://download.idbhole.com/Girl_Talk_-_All_Day.zip
http://enzo.zeroground.net/music/Girl_Talk_-_All_Day_(IA123)_mp3s.zip
http://www.a3on.net/noise/Girl_Talk_-_All_Day_(IA123)_mp3s.zip
http://www.mediafire.com/?2hq0zff602blb2j
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NTOH6DO
http://www.mediafire.com/?vy057v6rld16oee
http://hotfile.com/dl/82708513/c2cc374/Girl_Talk_-_All_Day_IA123_.rar.html
http://rapidshare.com/files/431007441/Girl_Talk_-_All_Day.zip
http://hotfile.com/dl/82737194/10b4ffc/Girl_Talk_-_All_Day_(IA123)_mp3s.zip.html
http://www.fileserve.com/file/VTHERSe/www.NewAlbumReleases.net_Girl
http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=x48mbhdh3dc
http://d01.megashares.com/dl/kydpIvf/Girl%20Talk%20-%20All%20Day.zip
http://www.filesonic.com/file/r000216945/32493377/girl_talk_-_all_day_ia123
(one seamless file)
http://www.filedropper.com/girltalk-alldayseamless
http://www.metacdn.com/api/users/demo/content/0f4322bb7a4a11d553f3f75282cc183d/replica
http://www.mediafire.com/file/gtdpea8cmll599s/Girl_Talk_-All_Day_seamless.zip
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GNIBWFID

All Day by Girl Talk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The CC license does not interfere with the rights you have under the fair use doctrine, which gives you permission to make certain uses of the work even for commercial purposes. Also, the CC license does not grant rights to non-transformative use of the source material Girl Talk used to make the album.

[via io9]

The band describes the cover as “a psychedelic space opera that explores the temporal themes of death and rebirth.”

Quote from [SkullsNBones].

Here’s “Night City” from Warp Riders.

Buy it on [Amazon].

Get Zazu!

While I was scanning through the ol’ Google Reader the other day, I noticed an article on a sweet little News/Personal Information Reader (literally, it reads to you) called Zazu.  After my love/hate relationship with the other Text-to-Speech program I looked at on here (SayMyName Dessert, which may or may not have temporarily screwed up my phone’s Car Home app [all my doing]) , I immediately installed it, because I love TTS apps, no matter what they do.

That said, after spending 2-4 minutes setting up some feeds and linking my Twitter account, I was pleased to find that this app did pretty much exactly what I thought/wanted/hoped it would do:  in oddly accentuated British English, read me the news, some tweets, all after greeting me by name, with the weather.

On initial startup, you are prompted to login/register (I think it was mandatory) with an email and a password.  This also gets you registry on their website, www.getzazu.com, where you can modify your news feed settings, in a spiffy web ui.  The main interface of Zazu is a nice little clock/settings button combo, granting you quick access to your included news feeds, as well as your alarms and your personal information (email, twitter, etc.).  The menu hides the manual way to get it to read to you, whimsically styled “enlighten me”.  The main way to get Zazu to “enlighten you” is to set alarms, which can be triggered at a time, on any specific day of the week. Weather data can either use the GPS or a manually entered ZIP Code.

According to MakeUseOf.com, the developer has plans to update the app with “calendar integration, advanced voices, advanced news feed settings, and full social media integration”.  Additionally, they are planning on/already developing  Zazu on other mobile platforms.

Update: according to the @getZazu, the official Zazu Twitter, calendar integration is live! [Twitter]

For now, it is Android Only, available FREE on the Android Market, or scan the QR Code, below.

The other day, I was reading some posts on XDA and messing around with Tasker, a Locale-like app that enables you to run different apps or change different settings depending on such things as location, whether you’ve docked your phone, or even what time it is, when I saw the mention of an app called SayMyName Dessert (the QR code over there doubles as a link to the AppBrain page for this app).

SayMyName Dessert is a snazzy little text-to-speech app that can work as a Locale plug-in, so by extension, it will also work as a Tasker plug-in, that can read aloud several different things that makes your phone work like a phone.  Specifically, with the Pico TTS engine installed, you can get your phone to speak to you when someone calls, to tell you who is calling, which is much better than setting a custom ringtone.  When you get a text message, you can have it read you just the sender’s name, or the name AND the entire text, though you should probably set it to stop reading when it encounters non-textual things like emoticons, which can be done in the settings.  You can have it read the sender of an email, or have it read sender and message, though that can get tedious.

Right now, I have mine set up to work with Tasker to read me the sender and body of any text messages I get when I have my phone in the car dock.  If you want to try that, I’ve attached the Tasker config for you to import here (right click, Save As . . .).  To import, just download the file onto your SD card to /sdcard/Tasker/profiles/Read_SMS.prf.xml, open up Tasker, hit the Menu button, select Profile Data and select Import One Profile.  Pick the profile you want to import and import it!

SayMyName Dessert is a great application to use if you want to be alerted who is calling/texting/emailing instantly as it happens.  The only negative about this app is that when you open the options pane to set it up, it will always nag you to buy the donate version, but that is really a small issue over such a great app.

Locale is around $10, and you can get it here: Get Locale

Tasker is around £3.99 (just over $6) and is awesome.  You can see what Lifehacker had to say about it here, or you can get it from the market through this QR code:

The purpose of CSS is, among other things, to separate the format from the content; that is, HTML exists to get a point across, while CSS serves to make that point look good.

History, Briefly

CSS 1 was released (as an official W3C Recommendation) in December 1998¹. It has since been discontinued for CSS 2 in 1998, which in turn was updated in 2007 to bring us to the current Candidate Recommendation of CSS 2.1, whose full specification can be found here. Since 2005, CSS 3 has been in development, with many new (very shiny) features, a list of which is kept here. CSS 3 is written in a modular form, which only means that different parts of it will be done at different times, as such, here is a status list for the different modules.

And that is a (very) brief history of CSS.

Using CSS

There are three different ways to convey your styles on to a web page. You could either put them (1) In-line, (2) in the <head> section of the page, or (3) in a separate, linked stylesheet. Of those three, the final method is the most recommended, as it works the best with the separation of format from content.

• In-line

This would be <span style="color: #ff0000">red</span>

• In the <head>

<head>
    ...
    ...
    <style type="text/css">
        body {
            background-color: #000000;
            color: #ffffff;
        }
    </style>
    ...
    ...
</head>

• In a separate stylesheet

<head> ... ... <link href="path/to/stylesheet.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> ... ... </head>

The actual styles are found in the linked stylesheet.

Basic Syntax

CSS has a very simple system of syntax. Every rule set is of the following form:

selector { property: value; }

or

selector {
    property: value;
    property: value;
}

Most of the selectors and properties allow any amount of whitespace (blank spaces, line breaks, etc., within each rule set.

The Selector

You can think of the selector as the subject of the CSS sentence. The selector has to exist somewhere in the HTML document that the stylesheet is styling. For example, if you want to set the background of all paragraphs (the <p> tag) to black, and the text color to white, you would declare the following:

p {
    background-color: #000000;
    color: #ffffff;
}

However, if you only wanted to set the colors for one specific paragraph, you would open up your web page’s source and change the paragraph tag from <p> to <p id=”thisOne” >, or any other id=”?”, it only matters that you remember which id goes to which element. Now, when you declare your style, you can specify which paragraph you want to be different!

p#thisOne {
    background-color: #000000;
    color: #ffffff;
}

Note that while using p#thisOne is guaranteed to get your styling on the right element, you can get by with using simply #thisOne.

Different Selectors

There are three major types of selector (not counting pseudo-classes). They are as follows:

• HTML Elements
• IDs
• Classes

The HTML Elements are such things as the <body> tag, or the aforementioned paragraph tag, as well as any other element found in the base HTML source of your web page. IDs, as shown in the paragraph color example, are referenced in CSS with the syntax of #anID. IDs are unique, that is, they may only occur once in an HTML document. Think of them as the IDed element’s Social Security Number; each element can get one, but no two are the same. That said, you do not NEED to give an ID to every single HTML element, just the ones you want to have styled. Finally, classes are reusable names with which you may describe multiple elements, and an element can have more than one class. For instance, if you were styling a blog, two posts may look like this:

<div id="post-1" class="post featured technology">
    POST STUFF (about technology!) (this post is FEATURED!!!)
</div>
<div id="post-2" class="post food">
    POST STUFF (about food!)
</div>

Finally, you can also group more than one selector per rule set. You would use this if you wanted a particular series of things to share a common rule, such as making several text holding elements use the white text on a black screen format that we’ve been using as an example previously.

p, li, div#thatOne {
    background-color: #000000;
    color: #ffffff;
}

The Box Model

One enormous concept you need to understand when you deal with CSS is the Box Model. The box model is the representation of an HTML element and its positioning.

The  box model incorporates several different pieces of CSS; specifically, it deals with the height, width, padding, border, and margin of and around an element.

The main thing to note here is that padding effectively extends the background of an element beyond its actual size, while the margin extends an invisible buffer around the element, its padding, and its border.

Properties

Now it’s time to talk about some real-life stylesheeting!

For these examples, examples have been set up at my projects site. Generally, the styles will be in external sheets, to let me reuse the example page.  The different styles will be in a separate directory, linked here.

You’ve already seen examples of how to set the text color and background color of an element, but if you would like to see them in action, check it out here.  If at any point, you want to read more about any of the properties discussed here, check out W3Schools.  They have a very excellent reference page on most, if not all, of the properties and selectors in common use today.  In addition to CSS, they have information on a whole host of other web languages, including HTML and Javascript, and a good primer on making your pages with a more dynamic language, like PHP.

Backgrounds

Though you’ve already seen how to set the background color, there are many other things you can do with the background, in fact, there is at least one other way to set the background color. Specifically, you would use the background property, which has several different parts, and will be the first time you might have seen multiple values set for one property, which is referred to as using setting the shorthand properties.

The different things you can set with background are the color, the image (if you want to use an image), how to repeat the background (usually only with an image), and the attachment and position, which are both used in the positioning of a background image.

body {
    background: #ffffff url('image.jpg') repeat-x fixed right top;
}

In order, the shorthand property sets the color, image, repeat, attachment, and position of the background, wherein the color is #ffffff (white), the image is named image.jpg, it is set to repeat on the x-axis, if the content exceeds the screen height, the image will stay snapped to where it is positioned, which as the last property declares to be a the top right.

You could also set all of these individually, as so:

body {
    background-color: #ffffff;
    background-image: url('image.jpg');
    background-repeat: repeat-x;
    background-attachment: fixed;
    background-position: right top;
}

It is up to you as to how you declare the background properties.

Padding & Margin

The padding property is the first part of the box model that is not literally the element in question. Use of the padding property adds a backgrouneded buffer to any or all of the four sides of the central element. There are four different padding properties, as well as the shorthand property.

With the exception of the extension of the background, margin is functionally identical to padding, as far as the setting of its values goes. Simply replace ‘padding’ for ‘margin’ in these examples and you will have it done.

p#thisOne {
    padding-top: 5px;
    padding-right: 5px;
    padding-bottom: 5px;
    padding-left: 5px;
}

The directions can be listed in any order, but I wanted to make it clear that they’re set in clockwise order, as this is a theme among the directional shorthand properties. The shorthand property for padding has 4 different methods, and each method will set all four of the directional properties. First, the shorthand to set the padding in all four directions to 5px:

p#thisOne {
    padding: 5px;
}

Short, sweet, and to the point. If you want to set each of the four separately, the order is “top right bottom left”, as exemplified here:

p#thisOne {
    padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px;
}

If you want to set the top and bottom the same, and the left and right also the same, but a different value for each axis, use this:

p#thisOne {
    padding: 5px 10px;
}

There, the padding for top and bottom will be 5px, while to the left and right, the padding will be 10px. The last shorthand lets you set different values for the top and bottom, while grouping the left and right to its own value.

p#thisOne {
    padding: 5px 10px 5px;
}

If at any point, you do not want a side to have padding, and you are using any of the shorthands, simply set the value in that direction’s spot to 0px.

Undoubtedly, the greatest thing about the N1 is that it runs Google’s Android Operating system, which is not-so-secretly the AOSP, which allows people who tweak or modify the code that runs the OS to do some truly fantastic things to what starts out as an already amazing phone. One of the most prolific developer/modders in the fray is Cyanogen, whose builds of the AOSP are some of the most commonly used bases for the huge array of ROMs out there. In fact, his mods are so well known that he is one of the few people to have received a cease & desist order from Google for his incorporation of Google’s proprietary applications (like the GMail app, the Market App, etc.) into the CyanogenMod (CM) ROM. The whole of this licensing saga can be found with a quick google (look for Cyanogen C&D Google).

All that said, Cyanogen is by absolutely NO means the only Android ROM developer for the Nexus One (or any Android phone. See XDA for “details” XDA-Developers) At the time I wrote this post, I had tried out at least 7 different ROMs, mostly loosely based around the CM ROMs. If you have an N1, I would totally try out one of the SenseUI ROMs just to see if you like it and also to check out what shiny things can be baked into phone.
I’ve now had this phone for three months. The only major complaints I’ve heard or had about it involve battery life, which maxes, for me, at not quite one day, which really isn’t too bad for a non-Apple device. The upgrade to Froyo was snazzy, almost definitely worth more than the medium amount of press it received, and it certainly solved most of the issues present in the phone before it came out. I’ve not had anything occur that would make me even consider getting a newer, “better”, phone, and before Google pulled it from general sale, I recommended it to everyone. Now, if you feel like being a developer, you can still get the phone as a dev phone, but the price is up substantially, and I don’t know if you can get it with a plan, so, yea.

Google Nexus One: 9/10 Great phone.