Hung Truong: The Blog!

Pandora Internet Radio – Find Music You Like!

So I guess this has been around for a while, and I tried it a long time ago and forgot about it. Pandora is this online radio thing. You give it an artist or a song that you like, and Pandora creates a radio station that plays music it thinks you'll like. For instance, I made a “Toasters” radio station, and it mostly plays ska. The idea is that you'll find new music you'll like and buy tons.

It seems like their algorithm is pretty complicated:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it's about what each individual song sounds like.

It's actually done a pretty good job of finding music I like. The Aquabats station plays a lot of music I already own and like. The other songs are okay too.

After playing with it for a few days, I have a few complaints. First, they repeat themselves way too much. I've heard The Toaster's “Can I Get Another” like, four times already! Next, they only let you skip so many songs every hour. You can get around this by making more than one station and switching them (which will play a new song!).

Other than the weak variety of songs, Pandora seems to work pretty well. It's at least nice to have free music that you'll probably like streaming automatically.

Mogu People Pillows – WTF!?

So I saw this thread on fatwallet about “Mogu People.” Apparently they're these squishy pillows in the form of people. Here's the hippy company's description:

Mogu People are reminders of what is best in all of us. Each one represents a positive human ideal or emotion. By their presence, Mogu People remind us to use our positive attributes to overcome challenges, reach our goals and follow our dreams. Keep them around to motivate you throughout the day or share them with others to empower their day.

Friendship, love, encouragement, motivation, sympathy, apologies, birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, holidays…

I guess they were popular a few years ago, but I never heard of them. They seem to be really cheap now. Anyway, one of them really creeps me out. The Success one:

Seriously, it looks like an alien! I can imagine waking up, seeing this next to me, and flipping out (and killing people)!

Cobalt Flux – GET!

Well, it's not quite gotten, but I won and paid for a Cobalt Flux on eBay, and it shipped today. Hopefully it'll work and stuff. I'd been thinking of getting one for a while, since my DDR skills had advanced a bit (and lost some weight) since this:

Right now I'm using a normal pad, but upgrading to the kick ass metal pad should help me get better scores. Like the Power Glove! It cost a pretty penny ($280 shipped), but it also came with two games that I already have. So I can auction those off to bring the price down. Usually they go for $300 new plus like $50 for shipping. Plus you have to wait two weeks!

In all, I'm calculating that I saved about $100 (after I sell the extra games). These DDR Pads are supposed to be pretty sturdy, so hopefully that means I don't get a dud. I guess I'll have a full review up once I play on the pads!

What Not to Do With Your PS2

Back when my anime blog was in its infancy, I was writing video game related posts, too. Today I was cleaning up my previous entries, and came across one about the warning pictures from the PS2 manual. I figured it would be more at home here, so without further ado, I present “What Not to Do With Your PS2”:

Do not unplug the Playstation at any time. It will become aware of your treachery, flip out, and kill people.

How To Stop RSS Scrapers From Stealing Your Content. Plus Revenge!

I noticed a while back in my Technorati blog backlinks thing that a certain blog was reposting all of the articles from my anime blog. It was an RSS Scraper that ran on some software called “Autoblogger Pro.” Basically, the site scraped posts from a number of anime blogs and reposted the content with adsense ads. While I didn't mind the link back, it still bugged me that the person who set this up was simply profiting from other people's work. I figured I'd do something about it.

The first thing I noticed was that all comments on the blog were turned off. This makes sense, since every comment would have probably been “stop stealing my content, you jackass!” There wasn't any contact info or even an “about” page. I decided that contacting the owner of the website wouldn't have helped anyway. It was time to take matters into my own hands.