I couldn’t find the new drums, but Activision was cool enough to allow the old drums to be compatible with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Here’s my performance on the old rockband drums of “Are you gonna go my way” on expert level.
I’ve strong beliefs that this is the first user made video of someone playing Guitar Hero Drums (with the rockband drums) outside the official promotional videos you can find all over the web.

This was a lot of fun to play, I didn’t do a 100% score, but close, so to all trolls, this is not a video to show how good I can play, but to demo the backwards compatibility, and that you can actually learn to keep the basic beat of this song with a game like this.

I put the original audio of the song on top and it syncs perfectly.

Played on Xbox 360.

By Gubatron

I usually don’t keep lighttpd access logs turned on to avoid writing for every read, but there are times when you need to monitor what’s going on, and you’d like to have a high signal-to-noise ratio so it might be convenient to ignore all requests to .gif, .png, .jpg, .css, .ico and other urls on your webserver.

To only log certain files, or to NOT log certain files, you resolve this the same way as you do every other thing in lighttpd… by matching lighttpd variables to regular expressions and applying the settings where they match.

# www -> the main website
$HTTP["host"] =~ "^www.yoursite.com$" {
  server.document-root = "/var/www/www.yoursite.com"
  server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/www.yoursite.com/error.log"

  #Only log non-css and images
  $HTTP["url"] !~ "(\.css|\.jpg|\.gif|\.png|\.ico)$" {
    accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/www.yoursite.com/access.log"
  }
}

So in this example, we only log, where the URL doesn’t end with any of the “.css”, “.jpg”, “.gif”, “.png” or “.ico” extensions. We filter those out.

Hope this works for you.

I just got a new Apple Wireless Keyboad.

My laptop currently sits atop a Griffin Elevator, this keeps it cool and also helps keep my neck at a healthy angle, something I need given how many hours I spend on the computer.

The problem with the Elevator is that after a while, your arms get tired and you end up resting your arms over your elbows, causing you elbow dryness and sometimes pain.

To rest my elbows and have an ergonomic posture, I needed a keyboard that was small enough to fit on my tight desk.

The other reason I got it was that the MacBook keyboard is extremely worn out.

Getting used to the new keyboard
The function keyboard layout is a bit different from the one on the MacBook. It took me a couple hours getting used to the spacing between the keys, but now I’m fully used to it. The feeling of the keys going down is very addictive.

Since the keyboard is wireless, I’m planning on getting another one to put it in front of the TV. Once Boxee integrates Joost and Hulu perfectly into the system, getting an Apple TV or a cheap custom built computer as a media center will make a lot of sense.

I’ve been hooking up the laptop via HDMI to the TV, and it sucks every time an episode ends in Hulu, or when there are commercial breaks on the ABC.com HD player because you have to get up and click on continue, or select the next episode to watch (unless you have setup playlists previously).

A wireless mouse and keyboard solve that problem.

Useful for Internet TV
Another plus, it can work like a remote control, for your HDMI-TV/Laptop setup.

I can proudly say we’ve been Cable-TV free for over 10 months now (saving probably around $200), I “survive” on Netflix DVDs & Streaming (can’t wait for the Xbox Live upgrade), Joost and Hulu.

Given my past history of doing things 2-3 years before regular people, I can see a big future for the Internet TV/Video companies that survive this “crisis” (bullshit crisis really, go to Venezuela and see what a real crisis is), eventually the whole thing will be packed on little boxes and CableTV companies will be in trouble if they don’t jump on the I-watch-what-I-want-whenever-I-want-via-internet boat.

Monday, October 13 9:25AM

NEW YORK (Gubatron) — This morning Joost has launched what seems a stealth test of their Flash video player delivering 5 days ahead of scheduled, according to the announcement made by the company the last September 18th when they released a new browser based version of their platform.

There is no press release in relationship to this on their website yet, but the new Flash player is readily available on the web site for Windows, Mac and Linux. It looks and feels exactly the same, and best of all, now all Linux users can enjoy the vast content on our favorite distro (content which I think suits us perfectly as a geek audience)

Also there are no embedding options available as of now. Hopefully it’s just a matter of time, they have plenty of viral content.

Joost could be in more devices = More Viewers
I expect this player will broaden the possibilities for Joost as an ubiquitous platform. Now the possibilities for integration are endless, I’m already starting to think Mobile (iPhone, Android), Wii, PS3, all you need is a flash player on your platform, and anyone out there (if the company doesn’t do it first) with enough spare time on their hands will be able to put together a Joost player.

Now imagine all that free tv spectrum to be released in February 2008 to be used for free internet access, I can see enormous worldwide TV audiences on mobile devices for marketers to start drewling.
This is great not only for Joost but for all the video companies that have enough vision (and funding) to realize these opportunities today. Start gathering your Android teams now.

Other improvements
I also noticed the search result page has a new filtering set of links, that can help you down narrow search results. This is a great improvement, since their search results would yield several hundreds of videos and there used to be no other way but to page through all of them. Now when you perform a search, you’ll see Filters (each with a count of how many videos are available) by Venue, Genre, Sub-Genre, Series, and Runtime.

No more p2p?
Now the question remains, will they ditch their P2P plugin, their old P2P client? If they do, this only means one thing:

100% Flash Player = No more P2P

They had said that P2P users would get content in higher quality than those with the “Joost Standard” Flash version, as you can see on the screen shots, the quality is pretty high for the flash version, my guess is somewhere down the line, they’ll probably decide to get rid of P2P altogether and foot the bill just like Hulu is doing now (which has a growing catalog of HD content). Hopefully bandwidth is getting cheaper, In my personal experience I consider the whole Bandwidth business is way overpriced, because Data centers and Networks can always find themselves big corporate customers and resellers that will pay anything, we can only hope this will change as the technology advances.

Screen shots
Click on the screen shots to see bigger.

Joost 100% Flash Player running on Ubuntu 8.04

Joost Full Screen on Linux Ubuntu 8.04

Joost Flash player on Mac OSX Leopard

Joost

Joost is a system for distributing recorded TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer TV technology (and now Flash), created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa).

During the summer of 2008, a couple of Venezuelan Parachute Base Jumpers (Carlos and Pedro) got together with Propela Productions to make a short film about an extreme dream of the jumpers, Jump from the Base of one of the Twin Towers of Parque Central in Caracas, Venezuela.

They format published in YouTube was divided in 2 parts, this is part 2. You can see Part One here.

Very nicely planned, produced, executed and edited (to my taste).

Let’s keep an eye on these guys, anybody knows if they have a site? I just got this from Nosgoth

Best damn funny/controversial show I’ve seen. Seinfeld on steroids for what’s left of the decade.

From wikipedia:

The series deals with a variety of controversial topics, including abortion, gun control, physical disabilities, racism, sexism, religion, the Israeli/Palestinian situation, terrorism, transsexuality, slavery, incest, sexual harassment in education, the homeless, statutory rape, drug addiction, pedophilia, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, child abuse, mental illness, gay rights, bulimia, prostitution, nazism, necrophilia and cannibalism.

Stream provided by Hulu.