I, like many others, am a huge fan of Quicksilver, an awesome app launcher for the Mac that can do a lot more than just launch apps.

I recently just discovered a site that brings the ease and speed of Quicksilver to web search, so far it seems pretty cool. The question is if it will actually prove useful utility after the novelty wears off. I certainly like how quick it is, in fact because it searches as I type it actually feels quicker than Google.

Check it out: http://keyboardr.com/

Whos.amung.us is a neat service that allows you to monitor the users on your site in real time. Simply embed a small widget in your page and then a counter is placed there for everyone to see.

I wish you could pay a few bucks a month to make the huge counter disappear and make the data private.

Cool new trick I just learned:

In iTunes if you want to show only songs with 3 stars or higher simply type *** into the search bar, **** for 4-star or better, you get the point. This can be paired with other things in the search box like “Vampire Weekend ***” which will then show all Vampire Weekend songs with three or more stars. Saves a lot of fuss creating smart playlists just for stars.

The only thing now keeping the search box from becoming perfect in my opinion would be a OR function. It really pisses me off that I can’t type in “Vampire Weekend || MGMT” to show songs from only those two bands. Who the hell uses |’s in their song titles anyways? Even better would be a way to add filters, like the new search in OS X 10.5 Leopard. Maybe one day…

Now that I’ve started complaining about iTunes I might as well mention my biggest gripe, no good way to queue songs! Winamp did this amazingly well. Say Im listening to music and wanted to listen to a particular song next. All I had to do was select that song and push ‘Q’ (or something like that). That song would then have a little ‘1′ next to it indicating that it was next up. I could continue adding songs like that to my heart content. Winamp also had a nice little quick search like Quicksilver, which allowed me to type the name of a song and push some key to queue it, which made the process even faster. iTunes does have queueing in the party shuffle, but it really sucks. It only works if I am listening to the party shuffle playlist, and if not, I have to take the time to pick my current playlist in party shuffle and then re-play the song I am currently listening to so that I can queue the next song… big pain in the ass. Also there is no quick way to search my library although I have a feeling there might be a way to do this in Quicksilver (I dont quite like the built in iTunes plugin).

If any of you know a way around these issues please let me know.

Not kidding… check this out. I spent way too long staring at her/it. Its amazingly realistic, in fact Andrew thought it was a video chat when he saw it from across the room. I think its actually 3D rendered to some degree to achieve the head rotation. It scales really well even with the browser window at full screen, I can only notice a bit of deterioration in her hair textures.

My only problem with it is the goofy smile she has every once in a while, no human smiles like that.

[UPDATE] So it seems like a Japanese company is responsible for this, their website is http://www.motionportrait.com/ but I cant read any of it.

I just found out about a new game called Echochrome, and I am REALLY excited. Basically its a puzzle game that makes Escher like sketches a reality. See for yourself:

It should be out soon for PSP and Playstation. I cant wait!