Hands-On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife | Wired.com: “As Link duked it out with a giant hairy spider on the TV screen, we could see all sorts of secondary info on the controller screen: the dungeon map, Link’s health bar, the items he was carrying. These icons no longer cluttered up the TV screen and got in the way of the high-definition visuals. The cool part was this: With one tap of an icon on the touchscreen, the images flipped. Suddenly, seamlessly, the game was running on the touchscreen and the map, etc., was on the television.”

Aahhh. So awesome.

Notification Center: “You get all kinds of notifications on your iOS device: new email, texts, friend requests, and more. With Notification Center, you can keep track of them all in one convenient location. Just swipe down from the top of any screen to enter Notification Center. Choose which notifications you want to see. Even see a stock ticker and the current weather. New notifications appear briefly at the top of your screen, without interrupting what you’re doing. And the Lock screen displays notifications so you can act on them with just a swipe. Notification Center is the best way to stay on top of your life’s breaking news.”

Ahhhhh. Awesomesauce.

iTunes Match:”Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.”

Knockout.

Apple and Nintendo should just marry each other. They would have kids as cute as baby pandas, but who hit baseballs like Albert Pujols, and dominate basketball like LeBron James.

I’ve collected a handful of things that have proven very useful lately, so I figured I’d throw them up here so I can find them again in a year when I’m trying to dig myself out of another hole.

This isn’t really much of a blog post, as much as it’s just a collection of stuff that is useful to me. Feel free to stop here.

Skitch

Skitch is a super handy screenshot/quick image editing tool. It sits in your menu bar until you need it, and then you just quickly grab a screenshot, throw in some arrows or text or whatever you need, and then it shoots it off to an FTP site or wherever you want. It’s super handy.

See, handy!

Ruby/Rails

One of the things I’ve been trying to spend more time doing is building little web sites. I’m a big fan of Ruby on Rails, but I hadn’t upgraded to Rails 3, since building Rails on the Mac has always proven to be a big pain in the ass. After a whole bunch of Googling and piecing together different sets of instructions, I think I’ve got the steps down. They are, roughly:

• Build a local version of readline and dump it in something like /opt/local or /usr/local
• curl the latest version of ruby, untar it, enter the directory
• run autoconf
• run ./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread –prefix=/opt/local –with-readline-dir=/opt/local CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
• make, sudo make install
• Boom, you’ve got ruby in /opt/local

Next, you want to install rubygems and then rails:

• curl the latest version of rubygems, untar, enter
• sudo ruby setup.rb
• sudo gem install rails

Now you’ve got ruby, rails, and your gems all setup in /opt/local (or wherever).

csshX

Cluster SSH is something I’d never seen before until one of my co-workers was using it the other day. We have a lot of servers where you need to do something on a bunch of boxes at once (or tail the logs on a bunch of boxes at once). Normally, I end up with 10 tabs in Terminal and flipping back and forth between them.

csshX is a nifty, Mac-native cluster ssh client. You open up a bunch of hosts, and then you can send the same command to them all, and it nicely tiles your windows so you can see them all. It’s so simple, and so brilliant.

ddrescue

Finally, as I’ve been building up a media server to feed my AppleTV, I decided to go back to the many CDs I burned in school and grab some old music. It was like opening a time capsule–little video clips, email, school work, music–reminding me of who I was 10 years ago.

Sadly, my memory works better than the memory of an optical disk. There were a handful of CDs that I burned that weren’t working very well (or, well, at all).

That sucked.

Thankfully, there’s a little tool called ddrescue. I downloaded and built it. It’s been running for the last week trying to scrape every last valuable bit off of those CDs (and has saved some of the amazing papers I wrote in college. Amazing.).

The big takeaway? Don’t use ddrescue. If you’re relying on CDs as backups, burn copies of CDs. Spend 100 bucks and buy a big ass hard disk ad back things up there. Back things up the cloud (Amazon, Mozy, whatever).

Basically, avoid having to use ddrescue.

Like changing the theme on my blog (thanks http://www.blogohblog.com/).
Updating plugins.
Writing.
Other stuff.

So, if anything is broken, let me know.

And the little light bulb went off in my head. I got it. It all made perfect sense.

Elite Beat Agents is the most fun game I’ve played in, I don’t know, forever. Basically, it’s Guitar Hero for the Nintendo DS. The game sets up these little scenarios, like say, two “socialites” getting stranded on a deserted island. Then the “Material Girl” by Madonna starts playing, and you tap along to the beat, hitting these little circles in order, occasionally dragging a circle back and forth over a path. If you tap along in time, you win. If you don’t, you lose.

You hear someone describe it, you think it sounds ridiculous. You see someone play it, you get a little intrigued. You play it, you’re hooked.

It’s one of those games where you get frustrated because you can’t get by a song (let’s say, “Canned Heat” by Jamiroquai, since that’s the one that kicks my arse), but you keep trying, since you get a little further each time. On your 5th try, you finally pick up the beat and you breeze through.

Everything about the game is silly. The song selection (“Sk8er Boi”, “YMCA”, “Material Girl”, “You’re the Inspiration”). The scenarios are silly, except one about a girl who’s dad DIED and his ghost brings her a teddy bear, which is sooooo out of place in the game that it’s awesome.

I can’t do it justice. This game is astounding. A Technorati search turned up 4000+ mentions of the game.

You won’t understand it until you try it, but to get an idea, check out this YouTube video of the “September” level.

• If someone cuts you off while driving, rather than flipping them off or shooting them with a gun (the two most common forms of comebacks), you can simply say “I bet their car smells like fish.”
• If someone disses your mom, as in “Your mom is a poophead”, you can simply say, “oh yeah, well, your mom smells like fish.”
• Should someone bump into you while shopping for Christmas gifts in the very crowded shopping mall, and then that person shoots you the “ohhhhh, if we weren’t in a mall I would so crush your head with a Casio keyboard” look, you can simply tell them “hey, stop staring at me, your eye stare smells like fish.”
• If the Dead Sea Spa people try to harrass you into testing their products in the mall, you can simply say “Sorry, your Dead Sea Spa smells like fish.” (This one, I wish I had thought of a few weeks ago).

I can’t think of a single thing that you can’t use “smells like fish” in response to. I encourage you to start using it in your daily life.

If you do start using it, I encourage you to link to this post using the words “smells like fish” … maybe I can get the top spot on Google!

P.S. Stop reading this, your reading smells like fish.