I spent an hour or two playing with Scratch a programming environment for kids. It’s infuriatingly difficult to re-use code (there are no functions for instance), no arrays, no network connectivity, and no external files.

But isn’t this awesome? (use the arrow keys to drive once it has focus, the green flag may start it)

Here’s something I wanted to see exist. Rather than yet another Guitar Hero clone, this is a guitar emulator… sort of.

Start it up with your USB Guitar Hero controller plugged in (as the only Joystick), and there you go: from guitar hero to guitar poser.

• Strumming causes a note (obviously)
• Pressing a single key gets you regular notes, A, B, D, E and G. Pressing several keys at a time gets you some chords, chosen pretty much at random from the ones available at the freesound project
• The whammy bar controls how quickly notes fade out once you’ve unstrum
• The volume is controlled but how vertical the neck is

Check out those wicked graphics! Seriously though, try it out.

The samples are huge so the ZIP is 27megs: GuitarPoser.zip.

I’m using a Pinnacle Remote Kit (for MCE Certified for Vista USB 2.0 Interface) that was $30 off newegg, and it worked out of the box for Windows Media Center but I want to use other programs. All of this is being done on Windows Vista Ultimate.

Winamp

Winamp takes the cake for compatibility with this remote.

1. Press Ctrl+P to bring up preferences
2. From Global Hotkeys, enable default multimedia key support

Now winamp will respond to keys whenever it’s running unless another program has focus and wants the clicks for itself (like if you’re running Media Center).

Windows Media Player

I tested WMP first, and I could’ve sworn it wasn’t working, but after configuring winamp, WMP now responds to next, previous, play, pause, stop, volume, mute, back and OK seems to go to the previous file.

Media Player Classic

MPC, everyone’s favourite little open source player isn’t so friendly:

1. Press “O” to bring up options
2. Go to Player\Keys
3. Double click on the “key” entry, so for “Next Playlist Item” click on the string VK_NEXT, it turns into a drop down and you can change it to some of the media keys. The one’s I’m sure of are: VK_MEDIA_NEXT_TRACK, VK_MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE, VK_MEDIA_PREV_TRACK, VK_MEDIA_STOP but I haven’t gotten play/pause to work correctly.

(I should probably repeat that nothing on this site reflects the thoughts of my employer in any way.)

One of the features I’ve wanted in MP3 players for the past few years was the ability to wirelessly sync what they’re playing.

Here’s the fairly common scenario:

Yuppie couples & groups of friends replace their MP3 players often and usually at the same time with similiar models, and they’ll have a lot of overlap in the songs they have. Now they want to go for a run together.

So I’d like my Zune to allow me to try to negotiate a shared playlist with the closest zune (P1)

I’d go off signal strength at the time that we started to figure out who to sync with automatically, but if you want to give me a list ok — especially if there’s no clear signal winner. But I think that putting them beside each other is more intuitive. (P3)

Syncing the play/pause/ffwd buttons would be great, but I don’t know if there are timing issues that make this hard. I would even be ok if we had to both press play simultaneously to start. (P2)

Sync with more than two Zunes. This would be a great selling point of Zunes, imagine being the only person in your running group who can’t listen in — dude join the social already. (P3… and I realize it conflicts with the other P3)

My current solution:

I got myself a $5 Belkin FM transmitter off Woot ($12 on Amazon), and plugged it in. Reception past 2 metres is pretty bad. It’s funny, my mom was excited about the FM receiver on the Zune, I thought she was silly — who needs radio?

Pros:
-Syncs automagically
-works with many people at once (sort of, the range hinders it)
-works with non-zunes (only one device needs a FM reciever)
-don’t need the same playlist

Cons:
-bad recepetion over any real distance (a shared playlist would work even over great distances, though play/pause/ffwd wouldn’t)
-extra cost/hardware/weight, another set of batteries to worry about
-receiver doesn’t get the song information
-so much less elegant
-no control over who’s listening (I don’t really care)

I just bought a new (ok, refurbished) Gateway laptop from Tiger Direct, I had forgotten how infuriating getting a new laptop is:

• Different manufacturers use different (and random) key layouts, I don’t use the Fn key (and I can’t re-map it!) why did it displace my precious Ctrl key?
• Widescreen laptops dont have wide keyboards, why is that? Did they feel I just had too much space and the reason I don’t use my desktop is that the key board is just too intimidating?
• I don’t want to sign up for AOL, that’s not going to happen.
• There’s a lot of annoying time limited software installed that doesn’t work — my machine actually locked up before I could install anything.

Most of the problem is that somebody paid to install software on my machine that I wouldn’t have anyway (I don’t even normally use Adobe’s PDF reader, Foxit’s reader is so much faster and nicer).