While I was surfing for something totally unrelated to it, I found a nice guide in Flash that explains it all, has music samples and maps of major genres showing its derivatives. This is the Ishkur’s Guide To Electronic Music. It even has an introduction tutorial explaining many of the basics.

It may not be perfect, but the sole fact that it “illustrates” you is enough for me. If you want to know even more about an specific sub-genre, Wikipedia is your friend.

While I was looking for a coat I remembered that people living in the northern hemisphere of the world were in summer, which led me to the conclusion that if you do a trip to this hemisphere and buy stuff right on time, then when you bring it back home you should be ready for the coming winter season and also saved a ton of cash. The same logic could be applied vice-versa.

At least here in Chile when it comes to sales of these kind of stuff, they are done by the end of July until there’s nothing left.

Of course it isn’t worth it if you come just for that, but it might be an interesting thing to do if you happen to be here on time.

After some days of usage, I decided to install a nLited version of Windows XP. By removing drivers, some languages support and many other things the final installation media wasn’t over 200 MB.

The OS alone isn’t exactly useful, so I had to install programs, but they had to be lightweight and serve the purpose well at the same time. Today we are infested with bloatware, but being a software junkie myself I think I made some good choices when installing stuff on the tiny machine, which I want to share with you:

Web Browser - Opera

I use Opera Browser since 1998, and it keeps managing to surprise me with every release. This program simply has a lot of functionality for the amount of resources it takes. Heck, it’s even faster than Firefox 3. It’s not only a web browser, but a mail client, feed reader, BitTorrent downloader and IRC chat client. Opera also has unique things such as the Speed Dial, total indexing of bookmarks and history (so you can find pages based on its content, not only the URL), notes, widgets, synchronization through Opera Link, voice recognition, etc.

Media Player - The KMPlayer

While many use Videolan as their favorite player, I think KMPlayer deserves more attention. KMPlayer supports many video and audio formats right away, since it includes all the needed codecs. It has lots of postprocessing options for video and audio (with more possibilities through Winamp Plugins and Directshow Filters), supports playlists, subtitles, video containers such as MKV or OGM, watching DVDs, etc. It also has 3 different presets of CPU usage. By selecting the lightest setting you should be able to play some HD movies on the Eee with no problems.

Photo Management - Xnview

Xnview is similar to Picasa, but much more powerful and less resource intensive. You can browse your pictures through its configurable browser, and also crop, correct red-eye, adjust, retouch and convert them. It opens a ton of formats and allows you to save in many as well. It also has a lot of filters, even supporting Photoshop plugins. My installation only takes up 3 MB, and it works very fast. Be sure to check this one out.

Instant Messaging - Pidgin/Miranda

Pidgin and Miranda IM clients are not resource intensive like the official ones (that is, for us users of proprietary services like MSN), since they are just focused on text, emoticons and file transfers, rather than annoying and unnecesary things such as nudges, games, full screen animations, etc.

Both serve really well the purpose and are very economical screen real estate-wise, which is a bless for the tiny 7″ screen of the original Eee. Miranda is the lightest one, taking up little more than 1.5 MB. Pidgin supports plugins and has more options, but it needs more space and also requires the GTK Runtime to be installed.

Others I’m too lazy to write about

From PDF reading without Adobe’s bloatware to a nice program launcher to speed up your tasks, here are the rest of the programs I’ve installed on my Eee.

Notepad Replacement: Notepad++

Compressor: 7-Zip

PDF Reading: FoxIt Reader

Drive and Registry Cleaning: Ccleaner

Dock: Rocketdock

Program Launcher: Launchy

Calculator: Microsoft PowerCalculator

Finally, after installing all these wonders and tweaking XP a little bit more, everything I had on disk didn’t take up more than 1 GB. Now I have plenty of room to store more documents and some music without needing an extra SD card sucking up extra battery time.

Do you notice any change here? Of course not if this is your first visit, but this design you’re seeing is one of my latest creations. I took the same theme I designed before and modified it further to look just as you’re watching now (you may gonna think it’s ‘fugly’ if you are watching it from Internet Explorer 6, because it doesn’t support PNG transparencies).

Another thing I did was to fix some internal stuff with the blog. There were some database errors that actually prevented me from posting stuff here. After realizing that, I always lose the motivation to write and I was like that for months until now. Now this thing has been fixed and it’s running the latest version of Wordpress.

Finally, I made this website a little bit less blog-centered, since I won’t be always here to write stuff on it. One of the consequences of that is having sections in the sidebar, such as the portfolio section (which is still under construction) and some featured posts. This part is not ready, I want to put content above the blog entries on the homepage to show featured projects (but that will be when I actually have stuff to show).

Let’s see if this modifications and experiments I did will be here to stay.
Oh, as for the new design, feedback is welcome and greatly appreciated.

It has a pleasing color scheme, nice gradients and a familiar look if you’ve been working with the Wordpress Default Theme, since it’s based on it. It’s also Ad-ready, because the middle column has been reserved for a skyscraper banner, but you can get rid of it if you wish and put more content, or go the other way and put more ads.

• Download the latest version here!

Did you like this theme? Then please buy me a cup of joe:

While I am neither a designer nor a theme expert, I’ve made some decent works like with my blog and some other Web projects I have, so I finally decided to release this theme.

This theme is based on a three columns modified version of Kubrick by Liew Cheon Fong, and just like the original one, it is licensed under the GPL 2.0 License.

Changelog:

July 30, 2008:

• Removed the fake ad placeholder.
• Added support for Gravatars.
• Fixed some texts for consistency.
• New screenshot showing exactly how the theme looks.
• Now it shows the post tags in the “postmeta” class.

July 25, 2008:

• Corrected link items on sidebar widgets. Now they should show up as intended.
• Extra validation compliance against XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
• Added a screenshot image for the Wordpress Theme Preview panel.

June 7, 2008:

• Widgets support added by Ipung. Linked the site temporarily.

March 8, 2008:

• Initial release

After returning from vacation things had to get back to normal. Recently I’ve been preparing my stuff for this school year, which is going to be my last one in HS since I’m now in Senior year. I guess it will be a tough year for sure; little free time, university entrance exams preparation and other time consuming stuff.

I don’t even know if I will have enough time to write any thoughtful article during the course of the year, but I’ll try to. This isn’t an excuse or anything, but I opened this blog with many different goals in mind (sharing things, writing a how-to, promoting my projects, networking and earning some money through ads if possible).

I left some little website projects unfinished, but I’ll try to put them online before my schedule gets too tight. As for school… classes start tomorrow.

Well, I spent this entire sunday playing old videogames, the ones I used to play when I was 4 -10 years old, back then when I had my trusty IBM 486SX PC.

If you want to play DOS games on a modern computer, you’ll need a DOS Emulator like Dosbox, since most of your devices won’t be compatible with the old technologies used back then. Soundblaster anyone?

Among everything I played there were many great games, but I’d like to put here some of favorites:

• Super Stardust ‘96

This is my favorite Asteroids clone ever. It has great visuals, fast paced gameplay, 3D tunnel sequences between worlds and nice techno soundtrack.

You can pick up many different powerups and weapons in the game, by destroying enemies and giant space rocks. Some levels feature unique enemies, and let’s not forget about the bosses.

There’s also a sequel for this game called Super Stardust HD for Playstation 3. I tried it a while ago, and it was as addicting as this one.

• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

I love graphical adventures, and this is the first one I have ever played in my life (as you can see I have it in Spanish, since at that time I couldn’t read English).

It has a fantastic plot, set in 1939 a little before World War II, in which Nazis want the power of the Orichalcum, a legendary metal from Atlantis which is more powerful than Uranium, and of course you have to stop them.

You play as Indiana, the game features great puzzles, action and a lot of traveling… what else can you ask for? At some point in the game you’ll have to choose one of three paths; Wits, Fists or Team. The Wits path has less fighting but harder puzzles, the Fists path is more action-oriented with lighter puzzles and more fighting, and finally in the Team Path you’ll go with Sophia which is involved in the puzzles and gameplay as well.

• Stunts

For a game released back in 1990, this is astonishing. I’m not only talking about the graphics, but the game as a whole because it’s very polished. It features 11 branded cars to play with, many tracks and computer opponents.

The sound isn’t impressive, but in the visuals side it’s quite good… you can even switch camera angles and save your replays.

Still not convinced? Well, the game also has a track builder which skyrockets its replayability value; you can create your own with as many obstacles you want, including bridges, tunnels, sloped curves, loops and much more.

• (Bonus Track) Cyril Cyberpunk’s second level

OK,  it’s a great game and everything… but how can something like this appear on a level!?.

Of course there were many other great games I played, like Commander Keen, Major Striker, Jazz Jackrabbit, Carmen Sandiego, Duke Nukem, Doom, Heretic, etc… but… you know… it would take much more time writing and pasting screenshots.

Back in November of last year I did that test just for the sake of doing it and while I could see my results online in December, I couldn’t get the certificate until today.

I got 890 points out of 990. Breaking it down into parts, in the Listening Comprehension section I got 430 points and 460 points in the Reading section.

What does that mean? ETS which is the organization behind this test (also the TOEFL and others) host a can-do table which serves as an interpretation of the scores.

This time we had the opportunity to take the test for free since the Chilean Economic Development Agency was paying for it. This is because they want to create a registry of English speakers, in order to attract foreign capital by clearly stating the amount and quality of our human resources. Our data is now also part of a Job Board.

As for me, I’m pretty happy about this… I always wanted to take a test like that, it was for free and I got a good score.

The website features a fake video infomercial (which I embedded a Youtube copy here) selling products to make websites and advertisements both print and online really stand out, and one of them is a cream to make the company’s logo bigger. Seriously, watch the video… if you are a designer you may remember something that all your clients say to you, simply because they have no idea about design.

Here’s a little review of my favorite ones:

Videojug: This is the first one I came across. It’s a UK based website with a large collection of quality videos, most of them professionally made by themselves. In case of more personal subjects like dating or lifestyles, many of the videos are acted by people in an often funny way while the explanations are narrated (they are also available in text).

When it comes to more specific things, sometimes they interview experts in the subject. There is content in many categories, and users can also upload their own as well.

Viewdo: This is one of the first, if not the first one that started with this new concept. At first it was like Videojug, with professionally produced content, but then they allowed users to upload their own. It has plenty of user-created videos, and a good variety of well categorized content.

5min: Got five minutes? 5min the Life Videopedia is a great offer too. It features a unique player called the “Smart Player” which allows you to do extra stuff like zooming in or putting the film in slow motion.

Some examples:

• How to be the Perfect Boyfriend on Videojug
• How to Tie a Tie (Double Windsor) on Viewdo
• How Slot Machines Work on 5min