Tech Smartly

I’ve been collecting more and more music nowadays, after realizing how much awesome game music there is at the time. There is a whole new world out there in which I didn’t know existed, the world of game music. Nowadays, if I’m ever in the mood for some new music, I don’t go see the top 100 songs. I don’t ask my friends what they like. I’m not really that interested in that anymore, except for a few exceptional bands. Now, I ask my pal Google to search for game music. I can sometimes get great results from certain searches, and I get to listen to awesome music. Sometimes I get nothing. But after much googling, I have several games from which awesome music is derived from. Here is a list of my favorite game music. Oh, and pardon my lack of music knowledge. I barely know anything about different genres, so anything that has a strong beat, a lot of synthesizers, and often little change in melody, is what I would refer to techno music.

• F-Zero GX

This game has a pretty nice soundtrack, consisting of techno music, and it’s nice to listen to in the background. My personal favorites are ZEN and F-ZERO GX/AX Arrange Version “Big Blue”.

ZEN

F-ZERO GX/AX Arrange Version “Big Blue”

• Jet Set Radio Future

One of my personal favorites, this game has a really sweet soundtrack. It’s hard to explain sounds tracks when all I can really say is that it sounds like techno, but this is different from f-Zero GX. It also has talking, and is different in style. Well, I think you’ll understand what I mean when you hear The Concept of Love and Fly Like a Butterfly.

The Concept of Love

Fly Like a Butterfly

• Sword of the New World

This is an MMORPG with a great soundtrack, consisting of techno, some heavy metal tracks, European violins, with some new age as well as some funky music. With half a gig of music, with half of it up to 5 minutes long, and 4 tracks that are 10 minutes of techno, this is a great soundtrack if you’re into any of those things. Sometimes the songs even contains a mix of two. sword of the new world Is one of my favorites, and the large amounts of songs means that I’ll almost never get bored of it. I couldn’t pick only two songs that best represent this soundtrack. Therefore, here are my favorite songs: Sol de la Centro, Espada Nigerio, Rosa Rosado, and Old Speckled Reel.

Sol de la Centro

Espada Nigerio

Rosa Rosado

Old Speckled Reel

• Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven
  

A stealth game based on feudal japan, this has some excellent music in the style of that time. If you like that type of music, I’m sure there are several songs that will tickle your ears in Tenchu’s soundtrack. My personal faves are Sadame (which means fate in English), and Echigoya’s Estate.

Sadame

Echigoya’s Estate

Now, you may be wondering where you can find the complete soundtrack of all these songs. I was wondering myself, until I found a site called Kingdom Hearts Insider, or simply khinsider. Khinsider has a large collection of songs, from many different games. It does not have every song, but name 3 games, and at least one will be on the list. That is, unless you choose incredibly rare and almost unknown games. If you’re looking for game soundtracks, you can get them free at http://downloads.khinsider.com.

During spare time, when I’m bored and trying to put off writing my next blog post, I often stumble. Sometimes I get a few gems like this insulting source code, or several other many things. One of these such gems, is a Linux distribution chooser. One of the things that I often hear people talk about when they’re trying out Linux is what distro to choose. This is actually quite a big problem for many new Linux users. Some go to Ubuntu, a good OS for Linux newbies. After all, it is considered one of the most user friendly Linux distributions and the most widely used. However, for those who choose to be a little different, or don’t like Ubuntu, there are hundreds of different distros to choose from. Perhaps you would prefer Mandriva? Or maybe OpenSuse? If you’re up for a little challenge, try Gentoo. Or try all the Ubuntu flavors like Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Gobuntu, Ubuntu studio, Fluxbuntu, UbuntuME, Mythbuntu…Ok, you know what I mean. There are just so many different distros to choose from, and it can be really hard for someone with little technical skills, or even with quite a bit of technical skills to choose the “right” distribution. Here comes Polishlinux.org with it’s Linux Distribution Chooser.

The distribution chooser requires only several simple questions. It simple and easy. Due to the simplicity however, it does not say exactly why a distribution better, or what it has over other distributions. It shows several distros that fit best the criteria, with links explaining each on in depth. However, it can be a bit hard to compare them like that. Here comes in another tool to compare them. From the same website, you can easily compare two distros, comparing them in different categories and each distro is given a rank in each category.

With these two tools, I hope it will be easier for other people to choose a distro, especially those new to Linux. If the quiz is too hard for you, there is also another one which is easier to answer, and gives help if you don’t know what it means. Made by zegenie Studies, you can find it here.

If this has helped you jump the ship and start using Linux, then good luck to you. You won’t need it though, it should be pretty easy since you will have found a newbie friendly distro.

Let me start by introducing myself, seeing as this is my first time posting. My name is Jonathan Robertson, and I’m an IT specialist and Linux user. I am an old friend of Joe, which you of course all know. I will be writing a few articles on Linux for this blog, starting with my kLife series. I’m sorry if some articles come at a delay, I’ll try my best to keep writing whenever possible, but due to recent events, I know that I will be busy for a while.

Some stuff about me: I’m a Linux user! I have successfully deleted Windows from my machine, mainly because I don’t have the time for games these days so I don’t have anything to loose :-P. I use the openSuSE Linux distro, and am an active activist for Linux and Open Source. I truly believe in the potential of open source and Linux in particular, and the potential it has (with time, not overnight of course… but give it 10 or so years…) to challenge Microsoft Windows in the OS marketplace. To show Linux’s readiness today, I’m writing these articles that will cover the apps that we would use for the main uses we have for our computers. Namely: Music playing, photo management, picture editing, movie editing, movie playing, web designing, instant messaging, email and groupware and of course simple web browsing and basic office uses. The programs I plan to review for each of these (suggestions for changes are welcome of course)

Music player- Amarok
Photo manager- DigiKam
Picture editor- Krita
Movie editor - KDENLIVE
Movie player - Kaffiene
Web design - Quanta Plus
Instant messaging- Kopete
Email and groupware - Kontact
(Web browser - Firefox)
(Productivity suite - OpenOffice.org)

I will of course talk about the shortcomings of each, but I think I will prove that for anyone which only needs to do the basic tasks listed above, Linux is a viable option.

I’ve been looking for a new host, since I am not happy with network solutions. There are so many other companies that give so much more for a cheaper price. I’ve been searching for new hosts to choose from, and it’s not easy. It seems like every host has at least one horror story, so it’s not easy what everywhere you search someone says that the host is terrible. Well, I’ve chosen AN hosting, for their cheap price and many other features, and hopefully now the website will be much faster. Supposedly, the changes will be in effect in 2 days. If you were ever frustrated with my site being slow, hopefully this will happen never more! Once everything is sorted out, everything will be at 100%.