tunequest

The first in a multi-part series dealing with speeding up the play rate of podcasts so you can listen to them faster and fit more subscriptions into your schedule. Part One: The problem at hand and a simple computer-based solution. UPDATE: Toward the end of this article, I point to some scripting techniques to automate the acceleration of podcasts with QuickTime. Well, Mac users, it's your lucky ...

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In addition to their world-sized beats, The Chemical Brothers are generally known for their world class videos. I stumbled across this video to Star Guitar from the duo's 2002 release Come With Us while perusing the ol' Google Video/YouTube library this afternoon and was quickly fascinated. It was directed by noted film dude Michel Gondry, who's done some impressive work, including intriguing videos for Bjork, Beck, Radiohead ...

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Ah, it's been a while since we actually talked about music here at tunequest, so let's pick up where we left off: Susumu Yokota. I recently posted about my discovery of his music via an Amazon recommendation for his 2001 exploration of ambient minimalism, Grinning Cat (perhaps a reference to Alice in Wonderland?). Having piqued my interest to the extreme, I started researching the man and ...

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Text-based games for the iPod, known generally as iStories, are nothing new. Using the basic HTML support found on device's Notes feature, some people have been putting together text-based adventures for a couple years now. Heck, even I sketched out the beginning of a story a while back, but never completed the project. In its most basic form, the idea is to load a series of inter-connected ...

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UPDATE March 26: After nearly a two month stint of being offline at the iTunes Store, the Star Trek TOS is back. The complete first season is available in its original broadcast form. Additionally, newly remastered episodes from the first season are available in their own section. At this time, iTunes is still the only source for them in their uncut form. Remastered First Season Episodes on ...

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Note: The offer from iTunes has expired. If you've been searching for a reason to try out the iTunes' much-promoted movie service, here's one that might just persuade you. Free film: Good Morning Babyoffer expired. Description from the store: A confused woman struggles between two loves-a love for her so-called future husband and a love for a new found home. Falling off her envisioned map of life, she tries to ...

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During the Macworld expo keynote a week ago, Steve Jobs made the off-hand comment that Paramount Pictures had joined Disney in selling films through the iTunes Store. Of course, that deal means that all of the Star Trek motion pictures (except the Search for Spock) are now available for digital download, enabling portable viewing on a iPod or streaming to a new Apple TV. Like all movie ...

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The other day I discovered that Acrobat 7 Pro has built-in OCR (optical character recognition). So I decided to run some scanned pages of text through to see how well it works. Well, it actually does work, and with surprising accuracy, though the resulting document was nearly double the file size of the original. It's really cool though, because Acrobat layers the OCR'd text invisibly over ...

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The bribe is that, if you subscribe to the tunequest feed, I'll use that medium to point you toward free music downloads that are worthy of your attention. I had been using WordPress' "Optional Excerpt" to point to the links whenever I wrote a post. But that was proving cumbersome. It unnecessarily tied the posting of links to my own erratic posting schedule and it was requiring ...

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