oddball
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Oddball is a drum machine controller you toss around to make beats
Making beats with various drum machines and sequencers can be a fairly sterile affair. Typically, you hit some buttons on a rectangular box or click grid squares in a software interface, looping the pattern again and again until you've created a beat you're happy with. A new Kickstarter project, however, changes the game completely with Oddball, the beat-making ball that you can bounce, hit and toss to create beats kinesthetically.
WoW: About that pineapple wallpaper in Gadgetzan
You really have to love your favorite MMOG to do something this kooky! In our oddball post of the day, PallyDog wants to decorate a room when she moves into her new home with some wallpaper she saw in the goblin huts that populate Gadgetzan. She even went as far as telling her mother about the wallpaper, who called it "very early American," and cracked up that her daughter, got the idea from World of Warcraft. PallyDog hasn't finished the quest to find one almost exactly like the one pictured above, but we all wish her the best of luck on her epic wallpaper journey. Where is Quest Helper when you really need it? If you want read some real WoW news, please check out all of WoW Insider's coverage on the upcoming 2.4.3 patch. If you have any goblin design tips or would like to share your own WoW house design creations drop us a note in the comment thread.
Four things you might not have expected to find on Apple TV
Apple TV is proving to be a hacker's delight, a kind of subMini with a complete (if variant) OS X operating system, wireless networking, and many other useful features. It also has a lot of legacy associated with it. Here are a few things you can find on Apple TV that you might not have expected: Internet Explorer favorites. Dating back to 2003, you can find a list of Apple-related sites in /Users/frontrow/Library/Preferences/Explorer Perl. Apple TV ships with a full 5.8.6 Perl installation for your scripting pleasure. Screen capture. You'll find the utility screencapture in /usr/sbin. It works perfectly, allowing you to snap pictures from your Apple TV and store them in the frontrow account. e.g. /usr/sbin/screencapture -tjpeg ~/applelogo.jpg Sounds. All your standard sounds (Basso, Frog, Pop, Sosumi, etc) are located in /System/Library/Sounds. If you so hack your system, you can play them in VLC or QuickTime Player and they sound exactly the way you expect. However you have to bring over a copy of System Preferences if you want to assign them to your non-existent Apple TV alerts.
