Filed under: Fun

If you're looking or an easy way to increase your touch-typing speed, head over to Klava. Klava's a free, online touch-typing tester that delivers a never-ending stream of words in patterns that help you focus on the most troublesome letter combinations, increasing your overall typing speed.

The tool offers a few different word sets including standard and advanced English, and even a few programming languages for the software developers out there that would like to increase their speed.

As someone who taught himself to touch-type using an ancient piece of freeware on my Windows 3.1 computer, I can vouch for the effectiveness of this type of tool. Dedicate twenty minutes per day, and your typing speed will increase in no time.

[via Lifehacker]

In what must surely be a sign that schools and universities are under-funded, a network security dude at the University of Georgia has just been arrested for shaking down multiple file-downloading students.

Two weeks ago he approached a female student and said he could make the "situation go away in exchange for money" -- he was promising to keep the data private, rather than forward it to the university administrators. In this case, the student didn't have any money and went straight to a university official to report the nefarious network nerd. He was promptly arrested by the police -- job done! (If anyone's wondering, this is the best way to get out of blackmail situations... don't give in to their demands! Don't deal with terrorists! Never eat yellow snow!)

There's no hint of how much money the guy was trying to extract from the girl, nor any hint of whether he tried to obtain other forms of 'payment' instead. But still... maybe it's not the RIAA or MPAA that you should be most worried about, students!

[via CNET]

What key do you prefer to hear music played in? Most people aren't aware of a preference in this regard, but you might be surprised to learn that there are some clear key-related patterns to your listening habits.

HacKey uses your Last.fm account to determine your favorite music based on a unique listing of your top 50 tracks by play count (both overall and for the last six months) and your last 50 "loved" tracks. It then queries the Echo Nest API to get the keys for each song, and presents it to you as a pie chart, along with the percentage split between songs that are in a major and minor key. Once the pie chart has completed populating, you can mouse over a given key to see song titles that are in that key.

Is HacKey particularly useful? Not really, but if you're enough of music junkie to be scrobbling your listening habits to Last.fm, you'll probably find HacKey at least as entertaining as I did. And if you happen to like rock music as I do, I'll bet your favorite key is A Major like mine was.

A computer's keyboard and mouse have never been very good as an interface to play a virtual piano, but The Virtual Keyboard takes an interesting approach that makes the resulting music much more appealing.

While you can individually click on any key on the piano's keyboard to hear the resulting tone, where it shines is in its ability to play predetermined chords just by pressing a number key on your computer's keyboard.

Each number from 1 to 7 represents a chord from the scale of the key you're playing in. You can choose what key to play in, and even shift the chord voicing lower or higher to better approximate the sound you want to hear.

What's great about this approach is that the numbers represent a valuable musical concept: musicians often use numbers to represent chords relative to one another, regardless of the key they're playing in. So, for example, Louie Louie could be represented by "1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4" -- try it, and you'll see what I mean. It doesn't matter what key you're in, that pattern still sounds like Louie Louie when played with the right rhythm.

While The Virtual Keyboard seems like a toy or time waster, I can see it being of real value to songwriters who don't play piano, but need to figure out some chords for a song they're writing. It is limited by the fact that you can't play chords that don't naturally fall into the key the virtual piano is set to, but I'll take that simplification for the ease of use it offers in return.

Have you ever wished you could see what you look like with only one eye? Yeah, me neither. But, if you DO want to, there's a web-toy called Monoclopse that will let you do exactly that.

The site offers up a grid of other users' pictures that they created using Monoclopse, and you can click the camera icon to create your own. Rather than using your webcam to take a photo, Monoclopse asks you to upload a photo you already have. It then has you mark the centers of your eyes, and finally offers a fine-tuning scroll bar to get it just right.

Of course, if you have a Mac you can achieve a similar result with one of the effects in Photo Booth, but Monoclopse makes the process more simple, and more accurate.

It's silly, but fun.

Thanks to Thomas for the tip.

Whether we like it or not, our world runs on numbers. Some people more than others embrace numbers and data. Nick Felton, for one embraces numbers.

Like a major corporation, Nick has been publishing an annual report on data from his life since 2005, and this year's report is now available. The data used for Nick's report was accumulated by distributing cards with an online survey URL to each person with whom he had a meaningful encounter.

The report is gorgeous, with elaborate data visualizations, charts, and graphs all over the place. It's a marvel just to peek at.

But it does leave me feeling a bit strange. Can a life and all of the complex interactions involved with it really be boiled down to some pretty graphs? Should it be?

Is this something you could see yourself wanting to do? How would you feel being asked to fill out a survey for a project like this?

If you love space shooters with tons of customization and upgrades, Enigmata is for you. You start out with one of three ship types and you can build out from there -- upgrading your shields, weaponry, and even the ship itself. As you unlock more achievements, new sections of the store open up, further fueling the addictive upgrade madness.

As for gameplay itself, it's not that challenging if you repeat an easy level several times to collect gold and buff up your ship. However, learning to use special skills like bombs and shield recharging can also be important -- especially when facing some of the tougher end-of-level bosses.

Sometimes enemies drop X icons, which damage your ship, temporarily downgrade your firepower, or even steal your gold. These are avoidable, but they're the most annoying thing in the game. Fortunately, you can buy items that protect you from them as well.

Enigmata can seriously kill a few hours if you find yourself getting obsessed with having the best ship and unlocking all of the black market upgrades. Make sure you don't have any urgent appointments for the rest of the day before you start playing, because you might be there a while.

And god forbid you unlock the Legendary shop ... it contains a very expensive item that transports you to a level where the only enemies are bosses.

If you like retro-style gaming, you're going to love Don't Look Back, which is a modern platformer in a retro style by Terry Cavanagh.

The game manages to create fantastic ambiance with the use of only about 4 colors, and very simple music. The graphics are old-school, which is to say extremely pixelated. The control scheme is also very simple; you can move left and right and jump, and if you're lucky enough to get a gun, shoot it. You can only aim right and left, so you'd better hope the bad guys come to eye level at the right time.

The game opens with your character at a grave site, and he goes on a long adventure. I haven't completed the game yet, so I'm not sure where he's going, but it's the getting there that's the fun part anyway.

VisualBoyAdvance is an open-source emulator for Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. If you want to relive the glory days of handheld gaming on your computer, it's pretty much your go-to app. But what if you'd rather play handheld games on, well, a handheld device? Palm Pre and Pixi owners can do just that, thanks to a port of VisualBoyAdvance for WebOS.

A very enticing video of Mario Kart running on a Pre [check it out after the jump!] makes me wish that something this cool - and dubiously legal - could ever slip through Apple's app store and onto my iPhone. (I can neither confirm nor deny that I once jailbroke an iPod Touch to play Final Fantasy for the NES.)

Apparently original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games run smoothly on a Pre, but you might get a little lag when playing Game Boy Advance ROMS. Still: Tetris! Super Mario Land! Kirby! I'm certainly not saying that Download Squad condones piracy, but it's very impressive that someone was able to get this running on WebOS.

[via PreCentral]

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of putting together jigsaw puzzles; it's just not an activity I would ever choose. On the other hand, when there's a partially completed puzzle sitting on a table, I can't walk by it without sitting down and starting to look for pieces to match up together.

I suspect this Time Waster is only going to appeal to the real die-hard jigsaw puzzle fans out there. Among the various games at Shockwave.com are a set of 10 jigsaw puzzles that you can put together online. Playing involves moving pieces around and rotating them until you get a match, at which point you hear a satisfying click. Of course, there's none of the tactile feedback of feeling the pieces in your hands, the smell of the cardboard, and the frustration of finishing a 1,000 piece puzzle and discovering that one piece has gone missing.

Hmm, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

The very oddly named VVVVVV (pronounced "the letter V six times) is a new retro game from Terry Cavanagh that is very reminiscent of the Commodore 64 days of gaming.

In fact, when the game loads, you see the classic blue loading screen with rainbow flickering borders, just like the good old days. The game also features 30 minutes of original chip music.

VVVVVV focuses on a single game mechanic, which is the player's ability to reverse his gravity. There is no jumping, no keys, no locks, no fighting; it's simply a platform game where the goal is to progress without impediment.

The demo for VVVVVV is available to be played at Kongregate, which amounts to the first two levels of the game. The full game, which can be purchased for Mac or PC, has many more levels, plus a mini game. You can also download the demo for Mac or PC.

There are plenty of apps for my iPod Touch that I'd like to be able to run on my desktop. You know what's tops on the list? A fart app!

No, not really. In fact, I can't imagine anyone bothering to create something like that -- but as we've seen with just about every other app store or extension repository, if an app is extensible, someone's going to code a fart add-on for it.

Google Chrome users can now get in on the fun(?) with Farty! Install the extension, wait five minutes, and your computer will let one rip. Oh, the hilarity!

Wait a minute...Actually, since it doesn't install a toolbar button this could be just thing to drive your Chrome-surfing co-workers insane. Sadly, it does cause a pop-up window to appear, but it's still a decent one-time gag.

But you didn't hear that from me...Download Squad would never encourage that kind of tomfoolery, except maybe around April Fools' Day...

Puppet Wars is a simple game of one-on-one battles between deadly puppet-like robots. Your puppet is armed with two upgradeable swords and a body that you can upgrade for increased HP. You attack by holding a left or right arrow to spin and using the mouse to maneuver toward your opponent. The 9 enemy robots (plus three bosses) are progressively strong and provide progressively more gold.

Puppet control is a little slow and clunky, but the game isn't fantastically challenging on easy or normal difficulty, as long as you're buying the best weapons and chassis you can afford after each round. On hard, the final boss (the aptly-named Butcher) is a pain to defeat. Puppet Wars is good for a half-hour or so of fun, but the small number of levels and upgrades means it loses replay value quickly. If you're in a bad mood, though, that half-hour spent with blade-wielding puppets might be just the prescription you need.