I played a lot of games this year.  Perhaps more than in any previous year since leaving high school.  Since I usually don’t buy games when they first come out, the winner will not necessarily be a game that came out this year.  I went to my raptr page and took a look at all the games I played this year.  Following is a list of the games and a little about what I thought of them.  At the end will be my pick for 2010.

Here’s your calendar for January 2011.  It’s a goose getting dry on top of a shelf of ice on a lake that was partially frozen over.  Click on the image you want then right-click to set it as your background or save it to your computer and then set it that way.

For Square Monitors:

[caption id=“attachment_4012” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Jan 2011 background for square monitors”] [/caption]

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m going to be posting the code on my GPL code page.  Here it is for you to see and for Google to index.  Just fill in the appropriate variables with the secret keys you get from each site’s API.

See it online here and sign up to get your own. They send you your most interesting photos from a year ago.

After writing my Boxee review based on my experience over the weekend, I tried to use it again Tuesday and Wednesday. There two shows that I watch Tues-Friday: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’m not sure what API or screen scraping Boxee uses for these sites, but it needs to be improved. When I went to look for Monday’s episode on Tuesday, it wasn’t there. And Colbert didn’t appear to have any shows since mid-November. That tipped me off to check their websites and see that they did, indeed, have new episodes. Very disappointing. I don’t want to pay $200 for a device that works worse than a web browser on the shows that are important to me.

My wife enjoys watching TV a lot more than I do. I prefer interactive or creative pursuits like programming, photography, or video games. If, tomorrow, all the TV studios said we could no longer use the Internet to freely watch their programs (with ads, of course), I wouldn’t buy cable. Once I’d broken that shackle, it was gone forever. Even when I had Comcast and my MythTV, the hard drive was filling up with the shows I liked (Myth Busters, Dirty Jobs, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report) faster than I could watch them. But Danielle enjoys TV and I enjoy making my wife happy. So, when I read about the Boxee Box, I thought it might be something she’d enjoy.

See it on their site to setup your own.  Mostly consists of photos from my 365 project.  The last two are from a trip to Hawaii.

After this blog post it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was quite annoyed at the United Artists AFI edition of the movie, “ Fiddler on the Roof”.  I was watching it for the third time a couple weeks ago and, as is our habit, I turned on subtitles.  Neither Danielle and I are deaf, but we often turn on subtitles to make sure we can understand everyone in the movie.  Sometimes they have accents that are hard to decipher and sometimes they’re blocked out by ambient noise in the movie or in the real world.

Here’s the desktop background for December.  I know it’s Western-centric - perhaps next year will be more neutral.  To use as your background just left-click on the appropriate image for your monitor size.  Then right-click on the image and your browser will probably have an option called “set as desktop background”.  If it doesn’t, you can save it to your computer and manually set it.

for square monitors:

[caption id=“attachment_3923” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Dec 2010 Background for Square Monitors -1024x768”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3993” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Amarok”] [/caption]

So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music.  So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed.  I started getting even more played music showing up than before!  I was baffled!  Then I realized it was my piss-poor understanding of statistics at fault.  Telling it that there should be an 80% of the music selected having never been played is equivalent to saying there should be a 20% change that the music selected should have been played before.  What the heck is going on?  So, if you look at my collection - when I moved to KDE 4, it lost the previous stats.  So all of my music was unplayed.  Let’s say I have 10,000 songs.  So when I tell it to randomly play music (with no bias), there’s, at first a 0/10,000 chance of a played song coming up.  After that, there’s a 1/10,000 chance of a previously played song showing up.  After a day, there’s a 26/10,000 chance of a played song coming up.  So because of randomness I could end up with previously played songs.  Stats only tell us what will happen in the long run.  In 10 flips of a coin you could get 10 heads.  But in infinite flips you should get half of them heads and half tails.  26/10,000 = 0.26% chance of a previously played song coming up.  So, when I set the bias so that theres a 20% of the songs that come up will have been played, I’m greatly increasing my changes of hearing a song again vs just leaving it on random!  At least for now.  Once I’d listened to most of my collection, it should flip.  There will be so many previously played songs that those will be random enough to satisfy me.  Right now not enough of them have been played relative to my collection’s size so the same ones keep coming up.