iPad Soft Restart

I have a music app (looking at you, Synology DS audio) that tends to freeze up on occasion. Well, actually, it doesn't freeze, but rather seems to get stuck between songs sometimes. Anyways, this prompted me to hunt down, without much hope, how to "force close" an app, to use a more Android-centric term.

To my surprise, turns out you can...

1. Hold down the Wake/Sleep button to get the red shut-down slider.
2. But instead of sliding that sucker, hold the Home button for a few seconds.

This takes you back to the home screen and seems to shut down all apps, which took care of my problem.

Billboard Top Debuts

In my never-ending quest to find sources for "good music" — whatever that may mean — I hacked together a Yahoo Pipe from the Billboard 200 that spits back a rough list of the top debuts. Billboard provides an API service, but I didn't want to sign up for a key and read thru documentation. They provide a public feed of the top 200, which I believe is updated daily, which is fine, but I don't want to sift through 200 items in my Reader every day to find the changes. And to make this a bit more tricky, the only real info provided in the feed is album rank, but you can get the feed pre-sorted by weeks-on-chart.

So the pipe truncates to the first X number of albums with the lowest number of weeks on the chart, and then it filters to only those in the top X ranks. Those two variables are sent to the pipe as a query string, so I may need to tweak those. Respectively, 40 and 15 seem to do a good job right now.

Color at the End of this Tunnel

fireworks, anyone?

I started this game several years ago. It got interrupted by several things, such as work, moving, getting licensed, finishing another game started previously, moving again, new job, moving again ... You get the picture.

So it's down to the music. I could still refine the UI experience a hundred more times, but I think I just need to get this project done while the time (and winter) is here. And nothing but the music stands in my way. Too bad my piano's 4,000 miles away. Where are you, Live? Actually, I've already started to to take samples and clips from inudge and assemble them in Live with some midi instruments and effects. So far, so good.

A 2012 release appears likely. Heh.

Photography Poster

Infographics

Skills

Just got this in my inbox:

Am I playing The Sims? Some sort of RPG? When did real life become a character sheet stat builder?