Rock your box with Rockbox

Seeing as how I haven’t switched OSes or gone on a customization frenzy this week, I’ll talk about a little something I found a few months ago. Rockbox is its name. MP3 players are its business. Awesomeness is its nature.

Windows XP revamp, part 2: convenience (a.k.a. UI improvements)

Now you have a nice, easy-on-the-eyes Windows XP desktop. If you don’t, then you either missed the first part of the guide or I just suck at writing guides. So anyways you have a pretty XP setup, but it’s still rather annoying and inconvenient sometimes. Here are some cool programs I found that give Windows XP a little usability boost.

5 addicting open source games

There are lots of games in the world of open source, which means lots of cheap fun. Well, sort of. Many of these games aren’t complete enough to be playable, others have been abandoned, and some just aren’t very fun. But there are many good open source games, and out of these a few are just amazing. So amazing, in fact, that you just might get addicted.
I’m pretty new to open source games, but here are 5 of those rare, addiction-inducing open source games that I’ve found, in no particular order. All of these games are available for Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. Fun for everyone!

Wakoopa for Linux has arrived!

I just found this today, and I am overjoyed. Read about it here. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m sure it will be good, and even better as time goes on and they polish it up.

edit: I tried it, and it’s awesome. No problems at all so far, and it works just like the Windows tracker except for the lack of web tracking for now.

deck out your Windows XP, Linux style

I like Windows XP, mostly because I don’t have money to buy Vista. XP works alright, but after using Linux (Mint and Ubuntu) there are just a few really useful features that I miss. XP also looks pretty bad compared to newer operating systems. So here are some nice improvements I’ve found. These are best for people who use Linux as well as Windows, but most of these are useful even if you don’t use Linux.

Wakoopa: Facebook for geeks

Have you ever felt that, although Facebook is a great social networking site, it just doesn’t let you express your real inner geek self, trapped by the mainstream tastes and expectations of society? Have you ever longed for a peaceful haven where technological self-expression abounds in plenty and abundance? A whole different world you can beam yourself into and enjoy every imaginable form of technology and awesomeness ever imagined by mankind at the press of a button? Er… we’re gonna have to wait for that last one, but in the meantime you can enjoy Wakoopa, yet another social networking site. But this isn’t just any old run-of-the mill networking site. According to Wikipedia, the ultimate source of mostly-truth, Wakoopa is “a social networking site that monitors the software applications its members use.” In other words… GEEK POWER!!!

foobar2000: a new kind of music player

Well it’s actually been around since 2001 (that’s how old the license is, anyways), but this is the first time I’ve tried foobar2000. I’m in a fresh Windows XP setup until Ubuntu 9.04 comes out. Of course, I can’t go 10 whole days without crankin’ up some tunes, so I downloaded MediaMonkey, my standard music player. After I got error messages upon trying to import my music library, I decided to try something new for a change. I picked foobar2000, since I’d heard about it but never tried it.