Saturday, February 28, 2009
Sega and Mufins

Braeden received a Marvel Heroes pinball machine from Santa for Christmas. It's not full size, but it's pretty nice. And I'd say it stands about four feet tall and is maybe 20 inches wide so for his purposes it is perfect and he loves it.

The pinball machine of course got me thinking about how awesome it would be to have a mini arcade in our house. Short of winning the powerball and buying a bigger house I really don't foresee this ever happening.

BUT

The Sega Taikan Game Collection from Organic looks back at Sega's custom sit down coin-ops which rocked and veered from side to side to simulate the onscreen action. Four games are lovingly recreated in miniature PVC form as follows:

- Space Harrier
- Super Hang-On
- Outrun
- Thunderblade

I know, I know, it's not even remotely the same, but maybe with a little imagination I could turn my office desk into a pipe dream.

*~*~*

On Friday, Mufin launched its music player, which analyzes the songs in your music collection based on their audio content, rather than on human analysis or genre.

Mufin stands for music finder, and it's your personal music discovery engine for helping you find, listen to, and discover music online! Mufin has millions of tracks and counting ready for you to explore!

The mufin player doesn't just sort your music by artists or track names like you are used to, but also by sound similarity. It's not just useful when you're building a playlist, but also to keep track of which music tracks go together in your library musically.

Once Mufin has analyzed your tunes, it can recommend similar-sounding songs from your collection. It also catalogs songs in its online database and can recommend music from its own sources, if it doesn't find anything similar on your hard drive.

*~*~*

Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com's new Kindle does for books.

Soon you'll be able to read magazines and newspapers on an e-reader.

The news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey's O, and Cosmopolitan.

Of course what would be better is if one e-reader could do it all. No one is going to want to carry around more than one gadget for reading when we already have a bunch of other gadgets in our pockets and bags.

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  • Written by: Christy"
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