New iTouch apps, PSP firmware and creating a tar.gz archive
Hi again,
I’ve been fishing around for new iTouch apps and have found some excellent new ones out there. Check out Simplify Media, its brilliant allows you to connect to your iTunes library as long as you have a Wifi connection. Just install the app on your Mac or PC, create an account and download the Simplify Media app from the iTouch Installer and log in there too. Takes a little while to get the libraries the first time but after that its very fast. The songs then buffer as if you were streaming them, I’m very impressed with the speed of it – a must have for any iTouch/iPhone owner.
Another site that has lots of recommendations but isn’t quite working for me yet is Seeqpod which is basically a search engine that searches for music in Safari and apparently can stream the audio over the net. The audio doesn’t start for me yet, not sure why. There does seem to be a HUGE amount of music there though.
iPhysics is very very cool ‘game’, you can draw lines, objects and then the physics engine takes over and the new objects bounce around under gravity and as you would expect under Newtonian phyiscs. The really impressive thing is that it is dynamic, you can create objects on the fly and they’ll interact with one another and bounce around the place, fun. The game part involves moving a ball across a level to a small red box, there’s tons of user-created levels so its quite fun from what I’ve played of it. Here’s a video of something similar I found a few weeks ago, thought it was only a college experiment though 
Similar to the SimplifyMedia is the telekinesis project. It looks really cool and I’ve not had a chance to test this yet but will give it a goo this evening and see how it works.
Also ScummVM is available for the iTouch now which means that……….yes Monkey Island my all-time favourite game can be played on it. Also can play all the ScummVM developed games, Sam & Max, Indy series and all the other classic adventure games. Hurray!
MobileCast is an other app that can be installed via the Installer. It allows you to fetch podcasts from RSS feeds without having to sync up with iTunes, this wil be handy when I’m travelling and can just pick up random Wifi hotspots.
I’ve recently upgraded the firmware on my PSP to version 3.90 M33-3, mainly because I want to play Pro Evo 2008. Check out Dark Alex’s site with all the releases there, I upgraded from version 3.51. Always pretty nervous when doing it but he hasn’t let me down yet.
Finally here’s how to quickly create a tar gz archive. Here it is
tar -pczf nameOfArchive.tar.gz /directoryToZip
