My good friend and fellow Mac User Group buddy Dave Warker developed a new iTunes controller called hotTunes. It’s just a small application which has almost no interface, but controls iTunes via key commands. While others have pointed out that there are other options out there, I happen to prefer this one above the others. For instance, I’ve used SizzlingKeys for a long time, but it takes a little while to respond if the computer is busy processing something else. I’ve also tried Synergy, but I don’t really need yet another menu bar item. However, hotTunes just sits in your Dock and waits for a key command to pause, play, rate, or show information. I helped design the hotTunes icon, too, so part of me likes seeing my own work in my Dock. Regardless, hotTunes is a great little key command based iTunes controller, and I highly recommend it.

Microsoft has posted over a dozen high resolution videos of Xbox 360 games on their site, many of which look very impressive, despite the fact that none of the hardware or software is finalized yet. Unfortunately, the videos are in Windows Media 9 format, so you’ll need Windows Media Player or the Flip4Mac WMV Plugin to play them. If there’s demand for it, I’ll convert them to a Mac-friendly format, however I don’t have the bandwidth required to host H.264 versions of them. If anyone has enough of bandwidth to serve up several 100MB+ videos, please contact me. As far as the gaming goes on the Xbox 360, it should be interesting to see how things work out as developers learn how to take advantage of the power available in the new console.

I just noticed that searches were broken if you attempted to search while browsing a category. A thread on the WordPress forums quickly resolved the problem. I had to replace < ?php echo $PHP_SELF; ?> with /index.php inside the searchform.php file to direct searches to index.php, which can handle them.

This is a neat hack — it shows how to modify an Xbox controller’s second memory card slot to provide a standard USB port, which can in turn be used to charge an iPod Shuffle while playing the Xbox is on. See the rest of the photos. The Xbox seems to recognize some USB mass storage devices and will ask to format them to the Xbox’s filesystem, and it would not be a good idea to do that if it asks when the iPod is connected. However, you can format USB flash drives and use them to stash game saves. Personally, I keep the 007 Agent Under Fire hack and various homebrew BIOS files on a 32MB flash drive for quick modding.