A little while ago, I added the ability to include stuff from the Hype Machine on any website. Several of you noticed and did just that.
Thank you!
Here’s who put one of these up so far (in no particular order):
Silence is a Rhythm too
CubikMusik
aka::Raff
Brooklyn Ski Club
Music for Ants
My Ex Best Friend
Boy and His Blog
Trees Lounge
Kibbe Rocks the City
Shannon Palmer’s arty arty blog
The Ledgers of Life
I think that’s it – I am happy you all found it useful!
If you would like to get a badge too, have a look here
You can now add a list of the latest tracks from the Hype Machine to your blog or website!
Pick what kind of tracks you want to show up in your badge, copy and paste the code into your template and you are done. The track links lead directly to blog posts that mention the songs.
Right now, you can include the most recent, popular tracks, as well as ones that appear on the Now Playing page of the Hype Machine.
Here is what the “popular tracks” badge looks like:
Try it out!
In early 2005, I was experimenting with networking and computer games to find a way for people on the Internet to play “private” (also known as local or LAN) games, even though they were physically in different places. I called this LanAnywhere. The original site is no longer up, but here is the front page and the FAQ page.
There are many good and bad reasons to do this, but usually people want to play this way to bypass the official matchmaking services, try out game hacks or to quickly play head-to-head. Official online gaming usually happens via GameSpy, which frequently has its own unpleasant set of problems that go unfixed for months.
My attempt to take a stab at this involved using VPN (Virtual Private Network) functionality built into Windows 2000 and XP to connect players via a central VPN server in such a way as to fool the games into thinking they are on the same local network, therefore enabling the local (LAN) game modes.
This sort of worked. After more testing it turned out that the speed was seriously limited because the connections went through a central server and many games failed to work because of the slightly non-standard way they send and receive information. There were a few people who did manage to play some games, but in the end it just didn’t work well enough. So that was it.
Around the same time I also ran into an incredible project called Hamachi. Hamachi is a much better approach to the problem as it connects the participants directly into a special private network over an encrypted channel. It is also for many more things than just games, but for games it has been working very well. Alex Pankratov, who seems to be largely responsible for it, has done an amazing job in putting it together, technically and even aesthetically (such pretty UI!).
My hat is off to Alex and the Hamachi team for doing something that I spent many nights trying to get working, and doing it well. Check it out!
Comments Off on My hat is off to Hamachi • Posted by
Anthony on
January 3, 2006
It’s now easy to tell your friends about a song you really enjoyed on the Hype Machine.
Just click on the song name on any of the Hype Machine pages and you will end up at a page for that individual song! The page has a listen button, a link to the blog post, and a link to a place where you can pick up the record.
Try it out!
I’ve put together a list of 52 songs that the Hype Machine visitors have found exciting during most of this year.
For each month that the Hype Machine was up, I’ve selected seven songs out of 50 most popular tracks during that time. The site was only up for a couple of days in April, so there are only three for that month.
I’ve tried to include different artists, covers and quirky songs, so hopefully many of you will hear something new. This list is not a traditional “Top Albums” or “Top Tracks” list because I tried to highlight tracks that were popular during a given month while avoiding some of the tracks that any mp3 blog reader must have already heard.
All tracks, new (released in 2005) and old qualified for this list as long as many people listened or read about them. I was surprised to see so many covers on this list, but most of them are very impressive.
Some other excellent lists are up at (in no specific order) My Old Kentucky Blog, Gorilla vs Bear, work for it, Popsheep, Take Your Medicine, Grey Will Fade, and Information Leafblower. If I missed a good list, feel free to add it in the comments.
So give some of the 52 songs of 2005 a listen, tell the bloggers who mentioned the songs if you really enjoyed something and pick up a record or two. And if you have something on your mind, you are welcome to drop me a line or comment.