I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts recently and particularly enjoying the Solar Clipper series. My main problem has been that the iPod Touch defaults to playing the newest podcast first, so that I always have to skip backwards to get to the next episode. I found a neat little solution for this that I thought I should share. It only really works for completed podcasts, or podcast novels though.
I downloaded all of the podcasts to iTunes, then selected the podcast and selected “Get Info” from the right-click menu. I then changed the content type form Podcast to Audiobook. This moves the completed podcast into the audiobook section and gives you correct ordering – sweet!
I heard about Peggle (buy Peggle on iTunes) several times before I actually tried it. Being Scottish I can be a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to paying for apps. There a re a good number of high quality apps available for free and the price (£2.99/$5) seemed quite high to me and ignored it. I had even read about the Peggle pricing experiment, found it interesting but not the game itself.
Then I was in an electronics store waiting (quite a while) for something to be brought out to me and they had Peggle running on a PC. I played it without really knowing what it was and became addicted. So i ponied up the money and bought it.
The aim is to knock out all of the orange pegs on the different boards. There are a majority of blue pegs which help your ball to have something to bounce off and the occasional purple score multiplying peg.
The most interesting pegs are the green ones, which offer new “special powers” depending on which level you are on and which of the 10 Peggle masters you are studying under. Among the powers are:
Super Guide – showing you where your ball will go after its first bounce
Space Blast – lights up all nearby pegs
Fireball – blasts its way through pegs instead of bouncing off them.
There is a collector barrel moving from left to right on the bottom of the screen then you are able to re-use the ball (useful when you’re running out)
I’ve played it for hours since I downloaded it and am re-playing it. It’s a great “quick” game, to play in spare minutes, but you could also play for prolonged periods and it’s well recommended.
It does behave very well when I’m listening to my own music, keeping the sound effects but dropping the music (although the “Handel’s Messiah” music when you finish the level is fabulous)
“Day of the Tentacle” is one of my favourite games of all time. I played it through as a teenager and I loved the 3 streams of play.
The basic concept is that you play as 3 friends, all separated by 100 years (Laverne in 2176, BerNARD in 1976 and Hoagie in 1776) and you have to co-operate to make sure that you can all get back to 1976 and defeat the evil Purple Tentacle (as opposed to the good natured Green Tentacle)
For example you Bernard has to retrieve a “help wanted” sign from the present, send it to Hoagie in the past so that he can get a job and deliver a battery to Laverne in the future.
It’s very complicated but wonderfully humourous. you play havoc with time (adding amendments to the US constitution so that everyone has a vacuum cleaner in the basement, just so that you’ll be able to use one in the future) and it can be a bit frustrating trying to work things out but the game is so cleverly written that it’s a joy to play.
I’ve been playing it again recently thanks to my jailbroken iPod. ScummVM is available via Cydia and it has been great playing through this and “Flight of the Amazon Queen” (now available for free!) Next up is “The Secret of Monkey Island!”
In a tower defence game you face waves of enemies, slowly increasing in difficulty while you build up your defences against each wave. There are usually waves with different characteristics (i.e. some can fly so are immune to ground based weapons) and weapons to match lots of characteristics. The idea is to build up a mixture of defences to defeat al enemies.
The premise here is that you are defending the Mars base from invading alien hordes.
One of the things which hits you immediately about Sentinel is the high quality visuals and sound effects. Of all of the games in this genre which I’ve played this is by far the best produced. It’s also one of the most addictive. There are 4 separate layouts to defend, in either assault (90 waves of attack) or endurance (unlimited waves.)
Since the release of Sentinel 2 (review coming soon), Sentinel has been reduced to 99c – well worth the money.
My only bugbear with the game is that it stops whatever you’re listening to when it starts but you can get around that using the double-click trick.
Okay, so I’m probably the last person to find this (and it’s probably in the manual which I’ve never bothered to read) but I’ve discovered that a doubleclick on the iPod’s circular button brings up a little control panel for the music settings, allowing you to resume listening, skip forwards and backward and adjust the volume. I find it particularly useless when battling with apps which won’t let you listen to what you’d like to listen to.
Having finally submitted to the march of the iPod (after loving my iriver and i-audio x5) I’ve had to come to terms with iTunes.
I’m no iTunes fan – never have been – but it’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be. It’s picky and clunky in parts (and i won’t get started on my obsession with album art) but I’m learning to live with it, if not love it.
My main problem is that I keep my iTunes library on an external drive, my laptop not having enough space. This usually works okay but sometimes iTunes forgets where the library is, re-sets the location to my local disk, and I lose the ability to play all of my tunes. Every time I try to play something I get the error
I scouted around on the internet for a script or something to re-associate the files until I found a very simple solution – tell iTunes where the library is. In the settings for Itunes you can specify where the music is located and, once I do that, it finds all of my tracks again. Some things are so simple I have to be told what to do.
Eye tricks is one of those free apps which I downloaded ages ago and haven’t used much since.
There’s nothing wrong with it but it’s just not that exciting.
It consists of 30 different optical illusions, some animated, some not. The standard is pretty high’ and there are some classics in there, like the “is it a vase or is it 2 faces in profile.
It’s interesting but now that I’ve reviewed it I’ll be deleting it. There’s no real replay value.
One of the first really good free puzzle games I found for the iPod was flood-it (free iTunes download). It’s a simple concept. Your aim is to make all of the board one colour by changing the colour of one segment. For example if the first square is green, and the one next to it is red then you make the first square red and the blocks become a whole. On your next colour change any squares of that colour directly next to your block are added to the whole and it grows and grows.
I may not have explained it very well but it works very well, It’s also a good one handed “thumb” game. the only section of the screen you use is the six coloured circles at the bottom, and there’s no real speed. you can play it while walking around, or sitting on the bus and not worry about jostles and other issues.
The game is ad supported but there is a premium version available for the iPod for 79p (buy from iTunes), which I bought having spent so much time playing the free version. The pay-for version allows you to undo a move, upload online scores, retry a board, etc. Of all of these features I only really find the undo useful and it’s a pity that it doesn’t import the play history form the free version.
If you’re looking for a simple but deep strategy game to while away a couple of minutes (or even a couple of hours, then this comes highly recommend.
A few weeks ago I bought an unofficial AV cable for my iPod Touch (2g) on Ebay. I used the cable several times and it worked out just fine.
Now I find that – since the update to os3.0 (WHICH I PAID FOR – don’t get me started) – the cable doesn’t work any more. The video cuts out after a few seconds (the audio continues) but a warning pops up on my iPod saying that it’s not supported.
Very annoying. I’ve found severalmentions of this online but nobody seems to be making a fuss.
I suppose there are 2 options
This was broken accidentally, in which case there might be a fix in the upcoming 3.1 release
This was broken accidentally, in which case it’s another step on Apple’s campaign to shut out third party accessory manufacturers, as seen with the recent iPod Nano headphone debacle
As a reluctant iPod convert I’m trying to love the big Apple, but incidents like this make it much harder. I’ve considered buying an “official cable” but at over 4 times the price I feel that i’m being forced to buy something I don’t need.
And I’ll be clear that I blame Apple for this, not the guys who sold it to me on ebay.
I love my gadgets but I always want that extra bit of freedom with them. I unlocked my Wii so that I could play games not supplied by Nintendo and I’ve had a hankering to do the same for my iPod touch. I don’t like having restrictions on what i can install on something which I own so I took the opportunity of my )S3.0 upgrade to execute the Jailbreak.
It was relatively painless. I used the software supplied by the DEV team and it was straightforward. The part that took me the longest was finding the downloaded formware which i’d bought from Apple. Once that was located it was plain sialing, apart from the complicated set of keypresses to reset the iPod (there’s a walkthrough in the software).
So what can i do now that I couldn’t before? Not a whole lot, as of yet. I have a new “app store” called Cydia and I have a nice bookshelf background to my home screen. Few of the applications I’ve found so far are that exciting apart from MxTube, a YouTube video downloader which is coming in handy.
I’ll be investigating the possibilities and will keep you all (I’m talking to you Google-bot, my one and only reader) up to date.
I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts recently and particularly enjoying the Solar Clipper series. My main problem has been that the iPod Touch defaults to playing the newest podcast first, so that I always have to skip backwards to get to the next episode. I found a neat little solution for this that I thought I should share. It only really works for completed podcasts, or podcast novels though.
