Trapped series: Trapped 1, Trapped 2, Trapped 3, Trapped 4, Trapped 5. A series of Flash puzzle games. Very fun. I actually found Trapped 5 first (a while ago, actually -- I've been holding these links for a while), and then played them in reverse order. You might want to do this, too, since Trapped 1/2/3 are ridiculously easy, while Trapped 4/5 are much more time-consuming and larger. If you play them in reverse order, you appreciate the precursors that much more, even though they're simple.

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ClickDragType is another flash game that I just found today via digg (click on the pic to start the game). You have to figure out how to operate stuff; the whole point of the game is to just try clicking and dragging stuff in the puzzles to figure out how they work. Very creative game, and also makes you explore on your own rather than simply following rules set at the start. I finished all 10 puzzles in about an hour, although I probably lost a few minutes because of a bug in the 8th puzzle. (If you get there, I would recommend doing them in a logical order rather than a random order -- you'll know what that means.)

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On the subject of flash games... Panda Pang: OMG this is so addictive. I think it's probably the funny image of a panda shooting bouncing amoebas that makes me come back and play more. There are 12 levels, so you can win this game.

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More on flash games -- specifically N. I am seriously addicted. A day will not pass by on my computer that that game hasn't been opened. I've been slowly but surely going through the main levels (I've beaten columns 00 through 40 and 70, as well as most of the 50 column), but there are also a few user levels that I've passed that have been fun (and hard). Here are some cool replays, if you're interested. (Copy the replay text that starts with the dollar sign, paste it into the replay box in the "User Levels" section of N, and press "Watch Replay".)



and, of particular pride, I managed to complete the only built-in user level that is of type "vhard" (that means "very hard" for the uninitiated). Actually, it didn't seem too hard to me; the only thing was getting the very last jump to be perfect. Without further ado...

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A bit old, but still relevant: how to tell the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Bahahaha. (Funny, though, I previously railed on him in an AppleXnet rant over this post.)

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On a different note, since I use my Mac at home primarily for storing all my music, I recently wanted to transfer some songs on my iPod to my iMac G4 at work. (Since all the songs at home are automatically transferred to my iPod, this would be the "easiest" way of getting all my recently added music onto my old iMac.) Man, I had a difficult time. And man do I hate crippleware.

I was under the impression that since this was a popular thing to want to do, there had to be at least one or two decent free apps to do this. Apparently, that was asking too much. It seems as if the creators of all the decent software for this purpose have massively crippled the features.

These were my requirements: first, the preservation of all metadata, not only which was ID3 tags but also stuff stored in the iTunes library file (or iPod equivalent) like song rating and play count. Another was an "easy" synchronization -- that is, I could set up the initial settings, but after that, the software should automatically detect which songs I'm missing and add them to my local iTunes library without having me interfere.

The first piece of software that I went to was iPod.iTunes, because I seemed to remember using that before and that it was decent. iPod.iTunes claimed to satisfy all my requirements above (more on this later), so that was good. Despite the crappily designed interface, I went ahead and performed a "iTunes: Songs & Playlist" synchronization. This took a while, but after 15 or so minutes it completed the process. The only caveat was that because it was unregistered, it only transferred some of the music not on my iPod -- about 1/3 of it. (iPod.iTunes claims to transfer "about half" in unregistered mode, which seems to imply that rather than simply finding all missing tracks and then only transferring half, it only transfers songs that match some criteria, explaining why it's only "about half" and not "exactly half" as one might expect.)

I knew this limitation up front, and I was seriously ready to simply go through the process multiple times to transfer over a progressively smaller amount of songs until I could transfer the few remaining over manually. However, no amount of fiddling or preference manipulation would get iPod.iTunes to transfer any more files than the initial "sync". So iPod.iTunes went into the trash.

I then tried out iPod Browser and iPod Freedom. iPod Browser simply lists songs by their filename on the iPod which basically ridiculously expects you to figure out which song "ADEV.m4p" is. So yeah, that doesn't work. iPod Freedom also lists songs by their filename. Both of these programs also have just as crappy looking interfaces as iPod.iTunes (what's with all the oversized buttons?), which basically made me quit them one second after launching them. (Only with subsequent courage did I try to figure out whether they really worked.)

PodSalvage was the next thing I downloaded. But on first launch, it asks you to press the "Start" button to install the files necessary for the program. Sorry, but you're not touching my damn filesystem with a ten foot pole. An application like this does not require extra resources besides the application package itself.

Finally, I came upon PodWorks. This seemed promising, as it has a decent interface, and transferring over single tracks at a time worked beautifully, with all the metadata kept intact. (While looking at the results of single track transfers, I noticed that all the tracks previously transferred by iPod.iTunes did not in fact have preserved metadata besides the ID3 tags, so that made iPod.iTunes fail my requirements. I had to delete all the tracks it transferred because of that.) Unfortunately, you can't transfer multiple tracks at a time with PodWorks unregistered. And there seemed to be a 250 song transfer limit anyway.

No worries. I used AppleScript's GUI scripting to make a script that selects a track, presses the transfer button, waits a few seconds (for it to finish transferring and the progress sheet to go away), presses the down arrow, and repeats. In this way, the script will go through and transfer each track one at a time through PodWorks with all metadata intact. Also, since you can limit PodWorks to only showing those tracks which aren't in your local music library, it was easy to transfer over only those tracks that I needed.

And it turns out that PodWorks doesn't really have a 250 song transfer limit, because I managed to transfer over 400 songs in this one session using the script.

$8 is reasonable for a well-designed app like PodWorks (but not for any of the others), but I'd still really appreciate it if programs like this weren't crippled, so I could fully test out the app before buying it. I do admit that was the first time (and maybe last time) I'll ever need to do something like this, so $8 may not even be worth it for me, but it was still kind of a ridiculous ordeal. With any of my apps, the only thing that's different about the unregistered version is that you occasionally get a pop-up reminding you of the unregistered status. But other than that, my programs are fully functional. I prefer good will + full-featured trial + nagging to get customers to buy my product rather than creating a crippled unregistered version. But I guess that's just me.

But if you do need an app like this, I would recommend PodWorks over any other app. Just so you know. Heh.

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And finally, I'd like to point out The Dvorak Zine. It's a really cool PDF/printed booklet that extolls the virtues of the Dvorak keyboard layout. The benefits of this keyboard layout are quite good, and even if you don't get a typing speed increase, you definitely do get a comfort level increase. I found out about this "zine" through my officemate Gwyn, who also uses the Dvorak keyboard layout (as I only found out tonight). Gwyn actually has a cameo on page 23. :) It's a cool booklet.