Max Engel - the 8BitKid
living bit by bit

If you just upgraded to Safari 3.1, you may have noticed that the Yahoo! Media Player is crashing the browser. This is due to a change in the latest version of Safari, and is being addressed and should be fixed ASAP (EDIT: this problem was fixed and pushed to the stable build as Wednesday afternoon, 3/19).

In the meantime, if you try to deactivate the current plugin (v0.3), you may encounter a problem. This is a non-fatal error, and your admin panel should return to normal through just hitting the “back” button on your browser. However, I have found and corrected the bug, so please download and install the new version.

- Download the Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress Plugin v0.4 with bug fix

Every week I venture up to the corporate mothership in NorCal, and so I spend a fair bit of time in rental cars. I’ve worked it out with Avis so that I get a Prius whenever there is one available, but occasionally they throw me a curveball. This was one of those weeks. When I got to the rental car lot at the San Jose Airport, I found this white Mitsubishi Eclipse convertible waiting for me. Luckily, it was a gorgeous day; definitely top-down weather.

Growing up, my dad always had convertibles (which he has now augmented with a motorcycle), and so I have a visceral love for drop-tops. Once I got the top down and hit the road, I was able to put the car through its paces on the 101. The seating position is a little low for my taste, but it did feel cozy. The steering was a bit loose, although the handling in general felt nimble. I don’t have the peppiest engine in the model they gave me, but it still had a pleasant acceleration curve that gets more zest in the higher gears. In general, I definitely enjoyed darting about the roads while en route to Sunnyvale.

Well, this week certainly started off on the right foot, and I’m looking forward to spending spring with some more fun rentals.

If you haven’t noticed, there is a music player integrated into this site. It creates those small play buttons next to each mp3 links (such as for this incredibly amazing song), and also creates the player in the bottom-left corner of the screen. If you want to see a richer demo, play with my music posts category. This player is a free piece of software available courtesy of Yahoo!. While they have already done an excellent job of making the player easy to integrate into a site, I decided to test my coding chops and make a plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform (the one that this site uses) to make it even easier to install and manage.

I recently had some free time to work on the plugin, and it now is up to version 0.3. I have completely rewritten the plugin, and added some functionality. There is now an “options” pane that will allow you to turn on the “beta” build of the player, so to speak, so you can test the new features coming down the pipe.

Also, I must disclose that while I am a Yahoo! employee, I work on this in my free time since I love the utility, am a big music fan, and needed a cool coding project. Please play around with this latest version and pass along any feedback.

Download: Yahoo! Media Player Wordpress plugin v0.3

Those of you who know me understand that I am severely lacking in kitchen talent. This has lead me to have an encyclopedic knowledge of microwave dinners, hot pocket types, and more recently, selective photographic memory for all restaurants in West LA. However, my fine friends from college do not share in my ineptitude. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have enjoyed many an excellent meal as an undergraduate. I personally witnessed one of Claire’s battles with buttermilk biscuits when she brought them to help us recover (along with Kevin’s lentil soup) from a rather zany New Year’s Eve as we spent the first day of 2008 playing the most excellent game, “Power Grid”.

So please lend your eyeballs to the work of Kevin, Brandon, and Claire, as they help guide you through the world of sustainable food, buying locally, and act as your general tour guides through the culinary kingdom. Their new blog, the Food Junta, is here!

I thought it would be great to have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV so I could have “Front Row” on the big screen. Well, this turned out to be a more complex (and more expensive) project then I had originally imagined.

After getting the Mini, the first thing I did was snag the right cables and accessories. This included a DVI <–> HDMI cable, the Apple wireless keyboard, and the Apple Mighty Mouse. With these gizmo’s, I was ready to enjoy some couch-browsing. This is when the first problem arose. I realized I was out of HDMI ports. This problem was compounded by the fact that my receiver doesn’t handle HDMI switching and was out of digital inputs. After a great deal of searching, I found a company called “Octava” that makes this wonderful product. The fantastic thing about their HDMI switcher is that it switches digital-optical signals as well. I ordered one immediately.

After the switch I arrived I got everything hooked up and was ready to rock. Actually, I wasn’t. You see, the DVI-to-HDMI setup was causing severe overscan issues (where the pixels extend out of the visible area of the screen). In order to correct the overscan, I had to spend way too many hours tweaking with SwitchResX. I finally found a custom set of settings that corrected most of the overscan. Alright, so now I was ready to sit back and enjoy some quality Front Row time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Besides 8bitkid, I also have a site with many friends called: “Hall of Beers”. It is a site that covers beer news, reviews, and adventures in booze (as our tag line states). I have just finished a large round of upgrades, so go check it out, add it your RSS, and take our sage-like advice.

While I was in NYC over the holidays, one night was spent at the bar “Rififi” in the East Village. When Common People by Pulp came on I had to hit the dance floor with my friends, since it holds a special place in my heart as one of my favorite rock anthems. Apparently this guy felt the same way:

Later, during the brief interlude during which I actually was motivated to break out that rare “Engel shake”, this song came on. I had forgotton about this ditty until last night, when it popped back in my head, and I dug it up online by doing a lyrics search. I have decided to take this rambling post as an opportunity to test out the new, most excellent Yahoo! Media Player (DISCLOSURE: I work for Yahoo!, but I think this is rad independent of my paycheck). It is a great piece of webware, and my apologies to Lucas and Ian for sullying their player with this cheesy song (it seemed a lot better at 3am…).

Well, I left New York City yesterday. I closed out the trip with an excellent day filled with lentil soup, the board game “Power Grid”, and a stop by “Pomme Frites”. It was great getting to catch up with family and friends, and thanks to everyone who rocked along with me in the city.

Here is a smattering of pictures from my visit.

Greetings readers! On a personal note, I am going to be in NYC for the next week. I will be in Williamsburg for the next several days, and then staying midtown. If anyone is going to be around, definitely drop me a line. I am planning at least one visit to one of my favorite watering holes, “Barcade”, which combines my love of vintage arcades with my fondness of microbrews. I am coming in from Vermont, and about to board the train in Albany, so I’ve gotta dash in a sec…

Also, you may have noticed that the site has gone through a major overhaul in recent days. I have been spending my vacation migrating everything over to Wordpress so I can update it more frequently since I am no longer tied to software on my home Mac. I promise to update more regularly now :-) Please keep checking back, as I am still working out some new features, such as my photo galleries, better mobile integration, and more.

Happy Holidays!