JDHarper.com

Brett Turner's Banjo Music

2009-10-14T05:08:25+00:00

Looking for great banjo music? You could do a lot worse than Brett Turner's posts on Metafilter Music. They range from sad to playful, from western ballads to just plain fun songs.

I really like So Does Everybody Else, Only Not So Much, an adaption of an Ogden Nash poem that's "an apology from an aging man who spends his time boring people with the same stories."

O all ye exorcizers come and exorcize now, and ye clergymen draw nigh and clerge,
For I wish to be purged of an urge.
It is an irksome urge, of nettles and glue,
And it is turning all my friends into acquaintances, and all my acquaintances into people who look the other way when I heave into view.

There's also several songs in French, and several instrumental pieces. You can get it all here, downloadable as MP3's.

Why I'm uninstalling Left 4 Dead

2009-10-09T05:02:41+00:00

Left 4 Dead is a game about surviving the zombie apocalypse. You and three other people are immune to the virus that is converting humanity into undead monsters; the rest of the city is not so fortunate. You have to run, using a variety of weapons and fighting a variety of special monsters, from your starting point to an escape vehicle. It can be a lot of fun.

Can be. With the right people it's fun most of the time. But sometimes, even having the most fun people in the world isn't enough to save it.

Tonight, I played with pretty much my favorite group of internet gamers. But it was still frustrating. I lay the blame for this almost entirely on the game: I would pounce on people's backs as Hunter and just bounce off of them. My teammates would vomit on three of our opponents as Boomer, and would only get credit for one of them. A full clip of autoshotgun ammo wouldn't take out the Hunter I was shooting at as survivor.

To be fair, the other team was really good, and I felt like I was dragging our team down a bit. I got taken down literally three steps outside of the initial spawn. I did almost no damage as the tank. Etc, etc.

The point is that, between the game's technical deficiencies and my own lack of skill, the game frustrates me at least one game in four, even with my favorite teammates/opponents. So I say: Goodbye and thanks for all the pills! I'll see my friends in chat and in TF2.

Can I get a 3X game?

2009-10-05T04:05:08+00:00

JD came into the room, blew a great cloud of dust off of the blog's admin panel, coughed briefly, and began to type a new entry without bothering to apologize for neglecting the blog for four months. "That's what RSS readers are for, to let people keep in touch with websites that are infrequently updated," he reasoned. "Besides, no one wants to hear a long-winded apology. Best to get to the actual content."

I have loved 4X games (games in which you control an entire society, starting from a small village/planet, eXploring the universe, eXpanding your empire, eXploiting the resources, and eXterminating your enemies) since I first played Master of Orion back in the mid 1990's. I like starting from scratch, gradually increasing in power, building a mighty empire.

What I don't especially care for is that last X. I like building my empire, but I don't really care for conquering other empires (or, far more frequently, getting conquered).

Tonight I was playing Civilization 4, happily building the Portuguese empire. I had expanded out to a small island off the coast of the main continent, I had hanging gardens and spices and all the comforts of a great empire. What I didn't have was a strong enough military to keep it--Celtic invaders broke off our trade agreements and took over everything but my small island in an embarrassingly swift conquest.

Maybe I've been spoiled by Euro-style board games like Agricola and Puerto Rico, but I like having a field that I know that people can't mess with directly, where you're competing on how well you use the resources available to you to build your territory, rather than conquering other people's territory.

I want there to still be a goal and competition--SimCity bores me to tears--but I want it to be indirect. I want the video game equivalent of a Eurogame. Any ideas where I can find one?

Ubiquity

2009-07-09T21:50:04+00:00

Ubiquity adds easy to use commands to Firefox. It's dead simple to use: activate it with a keyboard shortcut (I use Ctrl-Space), then type in a command. The commands autocomplete, so you don't even have to remember or type in the whole command. Some good ones:

weather <location> gives you the local weather
tinyurl <URL> sends the URL to tinyurl and enters in the shortened URL at the current cursor location. (Great for Twitter!)
twitter <message> broadcasts a message on twitter
tag <list of comma-separated tags> saves the current tab as a bookmark and assigns it the list of tags
email <text> to <email address> starts a new email in Gmail with a link to the current web page
escape HTML entities replaces all instances of greater than signs with > and all less than signs with < in the selected text--very useful for HTML-enabled forms where you want to discuss HTML tags
translate <text> <from language> <to language> replaces the selected text in a website with a translation of that text into a new language.
add to google calendar <event> adds an event to google calendar, e.g. "add to google calendar dinner with parents Friday at 5pm"
list opens a list of all the commands Ubiquity accepts

Very spiffy.

My iPhone App is Done!

2009-07-03T18:53:20+00:00

So, I've been gone for a while. I've been spending most of my time learning how to program in Objective-C and writing a new iPhone app. And now, it's finally ready and available for download!

The FoodPad Calorie Tracker is designed to make it as easy as possible to keep track of what you eat. It remembers previously entered foods in an autocomplete list for later meals, and it helps you discover how many calories are in your favorite homemade foods with the Recipe Calculator.

You can download FoodPad from the iTunes App Store now or find out more about it.