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Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Top Stories from the last 24 hours
Why You Should Be Using an App Launcher (and How to Make It Do Anything You Want)
November 27th, 2012Top StoryWhy You Should Be Using an App Launcher (and How to Make It Do Anything You Want)By Whitson Gordon
App Launchers Do More Than Launch AppsNearly every time we write about launcher apps, many people ask why they should use one over Windows Search. Even though app launchers have been around for awhile, few people realize that they can do a lot more than just launch apps. With one, you can open documents, search the web, make calculations, add items to your calendar or to-do list, run custom commands, and lots more—without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. It's way faster than using the mouse, and once you've given it a shot, you'll never be able to go back to doing things the old way again. In this guide, we'll give you a taste of how to use our favorite application launcher, Launchy, to do all of these things with just a few keystrokes. Launchy works on all platforms, but this guide focuses on Windows users—if you're a Mac user, we recommend checking out our beginner's guide to Quicksilver instead (though this post may give you some ideas of how to use Quicksilver effectively). If you're a Windows user and don't like Launchy, check out our recommended alternatives—you should be able to do just about anything we talk about with those launchers as well. The Basics: Opening Programs, Documents, and FoldersWhile Launchy can do a lot of advanced stuff, it's a good idea to get acquainted with the basics first. Let's start with the simple stuff: launching apps, opening folders, and the other things you probably use Windows Search for. How to Launch an App
It's that simple, and the whole process takes place in just a second or two. Tweaking Launchy's SettingsYou can tweak a lot of settings to customize how this basic behavior works, too. Bring up the main Launchy window with Alt+Space, then click on the settings icon to see some of your options. You can hide it when it loses focus, put it on top of other windows, tweak the hotkey you use to bring it up, and more.
Other Things You Can LaunchAgain, launching apps is the most basic way you can use this. Here are a few examples of other things you might do:
Really, you can do almost anything you want with this. If you ever find you have a set of apps, documents, folders, or other items that are tedious to access, add them into Launchy as a catalog and you'll be able to fire them up in less than a second, without ever removing your hands from the keyboard. Perform More Advanced Tasks with PluginsOkay, so app launchers can launch programs. That's cool, but not mind-blowing. Here's where things get interesting: you can install multiple plugins for specific tasks unrelated to app launching. Launchy comes with a number of plugins, but you can also download others from Launchy's web site and its plugin forum. Some plugins just add certain options to your Launchy index, while others require you to type the name of the plugin, press Tab, then type in your query. Here are a few examples of cool plugins:
Create Your Own Tasks to Do Nearly AnythingIf you're willing to do a bit more work, you can use Launchy to perform just about any task. Here are a few examples of what I've added: Use Weby to Integrate Launchy with Any Webapp
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=from+my+home+address+to+%s Replace You can use this same trick to add an event to your calendar, send an email, update Twitter, add a new note to Evernote, and lots more. See our guide to clever URL commands for more ideas. Use Shortcuts to Integrate Launchy with Other Programs
You can also follow this same process for searching your Windows system with Everything, creating Outlook tasks, notes, contacts, and appointments, and even changing Windows power plans. If you have an app you want to integrate, just see if it has any command line switches and you're on your way to some pretty sweet stuff. Use Batch Files to Do Anything You Can CodeIf you have some scripting skills, you can do nearly anything your heart desires with a few well-placed batch files. Just add your
You can do any of these with Launchy by adding their scripts to a cataloged directory. In the end, the world is your oyster. Anything you can dream up, you can probably figure out a way to get it done with a few keystrokes using an app launcher. If all you want to do is launch apps, then you're probably fine sticking with boring ol' Windows Search or Spotlight. You'd be missing out on a lot of time-saving shortcuts, though, so if you haven't used Launchy before—or never took advantage of everything it could do—we highly recommend giving it a shot. You'll be surprised how much easier it'll make your life.  |
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Hold Your Applause, The GOP Is Not Dead Yet
November 27th, 2012Top StoryHold Your Applause, The GOP Is Not Dead YetBy Mobutu Sese Seko
If this sounds familiar, it should. It's what everyone on the left and in the mushy middle of the Beltway thinkspeak press said in 2008. It's still kind of dumb. If you consume a steady diet of Politico, the Huffington Post, Slate, Think Progress, DailyKos, Wonkette, Media Matters, etc., you could be forgiven for thinking that the Republican Party is essentially a dead beast, speared through the skull and nearly vivisected, flailing its broken carcass against the earth via residual brain-stem shock and somehow also managing to devour itself. It's a fascinating narrative to push. Internecine party struggle and a broken ideological system contains far more innate drama than describing the 2012 election as a miscalculation or a temporary fuckup. That's just situational setback, but a party rotten at the core and at war with itself is real heady ontological shit. You can write a dozen pages in the New Yorker or Harper's about it. You can meet your Atlantic blog quota for two weeks with meat like that. I like Salon and many of the writers there, so let me make an example of them, if only because sending them a bunch of hits is no bummer. The following 33 stories ran on that site since election day:
At best, many of these are just gloating, but many more are premature. Quite a few verge on the hubristic, and some are just absurd. Quite a lot seem like they were churned out by the DJ3000: "Those clowns in [Washington] did it again. What a bunch of clowns." Everyone who swings at prognosticators after the results are in bats 1.000. But the low-hanging fruit is worse than simply exulting in a win, which is every partisan's right, up to a point. There's the emphatic belief in fundamental chaos and doom for conservatism: the GOP will lose in 2016; Karl Rove is being fed to hyenas; Bill Kristol somehow matters; Elizabeth Warren might have killed the Tea Party; the GOP's demographics are dead; the GOP's nasty politics won't work anymore; and Fox News will kill Fox News' own philosophy and beggar its fans. Then there's the "Obama Is a Jedi!" thing, which is so goddamn embarrassing that it makes anyone who likes Star Wars and leftist politics want to wear a sticker that says, "YES! I've had sex! And NO! I am NOT like that guy." There's a time for champagne, though, and that's election night. After that, reality sticks its head in the tent, and there's no bigger or more relevant buzzkill than 2008. In that election, Democrats won both houses of congress, including a senate supermajority, and the presidency. Not only did they defeat a "war hero" and a hot lady, they did so with a goofy older guy who looks like he goes to sleep with a UV light in his mouth to lighten his CRELM TOOTHPASTE gleam—and also a black dude. It seemed as if there couldn't be a bigger repudiation of the Republican Party and its ethos. Democrats were in charge of everything but the judiciary, riding the high of electing the hitherto racially unelectable. Two years later, the Democrats had lost the house and significant gubernatorial races, introducing the country to men like Scott Walker or the preposterous mantis-creature Rick Scott—the biggest Medicare fraudster in history, who ran on a platform of government somehow hindering wealth creation, despite all the things he billed it for. The inevitability of Obama's new leftist ascendancy was crushed by the election of someone like Allen West, basically a whackjob authoritarian-sexting Iraqi torturer whose voice programming got stuck for two years on a "HitlerHitlerHitlerHitler" loop. This is why all the 2012 gloating sounds so presumptuous and like a deeply arrogant temptation of fate: the Democrats suck at closing the deal in non-presidential-election years. While minority-voting demographics trend Democratic, there's no accounting for the illogical behavior of an electorate, which can vote against its own interests or not vote at all. The Democrats have spent nearly half a century trying to get the white working class to vote for it and against plutocracy, to no avail. Then, in 2010, the revolutionary wave of 2008 voters stayed at home, and Democrats got hammered. Human emotions aren't inevitable, and apparently attendance is less so. Thanks to the 2010 census year, the GOP won the chance to redraw districts, which seems like a pointless political detail, until you remember that Democrats are likely to win the popular vote of 2012 house elections by over 1,000,000 votes, yet remain decisively in the minority in that chamber. Details like house elections matter, because you can beat your breast and say that Obama's Electoral College win was a "decisive mandate," but a far more decisive mandate is being in control of the house of congress that actually passes budgets. The people might express their will via referenda on the president or his challenger, but all the aspirational programs in the world mean diddly-shit if you can't fund them. Karl Rove, Dick Morris, Bill Kristol, Rush Limbaugh, pollsters and pundits fighting each other—this is all sideshow. In the aftermath of 2008, internment-camp apologist and cheerleader-with-rabies Michelle Malkin went on the warpath against RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and declared apostate anyone who criticized Sarah Palin. Jon Huntsman thought the pendulum had swung so decisively Obama's way that he became an ambassador in the administration. Pundits thought the Republican Party might be replaced or torn asunder. Even now, amid all the supposed calamitous entropy of this election, the GOP has gotten firmly on "message control." The representatives conceding that they will ignore Grover Norquist's pledge never to raise taxes are all senators—people who don't craft budgets. Meanwhile, DC thinkspeak organs have begun to praise the courage of house Republicans who are willing to raise revenues by closing tax loopholes, so long as "entitlements" like Social Security (to which people are entitled because they fucking paid for them) are trimmed. It's a bold initiative that recognizes the changed realities of the post-2012-election Washington. It's also what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan campaigned on, and what Obama ostensibly defeated. The GOP is in such disarray that it's already being hailed for its reasonable compromise in declaring that it will accept what it supported and campaigned on, all along. If the GOP weren't dead, dysfunctional and full of idiots killing each other, just imagine what it could accomplish. Image by Jim Cooke.  |
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![China Thinks <em>The Onion</em>'s Sexiest Man Alive is a Real Thing and that Kim Jong-Un Won It [UPDATE]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vSBgOjJgWiaE9K1UerZtxBGaX6hezpdO3qb_Sj1TlY73ymFs9cIWOC2gmRzShog7yNlGEBCOHZu41sqETwX8gMPv-GDJa_oi0NoOSkxe_2HXYfA-ADASXbhiUF4d1N=s0-d "China Thinks <em>The Onion</em>'s Sexiest Man Alive is a Real Thing and that Kim Jong-Un Won It [UPDATE]")
The Vita Is A Great System-Too Bad Sony Screwed It Up
November 27th, 2012Top StoryThe Vita Is A Great System—Too Bad Sony Screwed It UpBy Jason Schreier
Perhaps Call of Duty: Declassified, which currently has a whopping 32% on Metacritic? Or Uncharted: Golden Abyss, a game that our Kirk Hamilton called "a cut-rate version of the Uncharted games that most people have already played"? How about Resistance: Burning Skies, which Kotaku boss Stephen Totilo called "a mediocre new first-person shooter that has no excuses for underachieving"? If you've seen a commercial for the Vita, you've probably heard Sony's big tagline. "Get console-quality gaming with the PlayStation Vita." Not a bad selling point, and maybe the Vita does offer console-quality gaming. But it sure as hell doesn't offer console-quality games. Sony's high-powered portable has been around for almost a year now, and the best gun in its arsenal is Persona 4 Golden, a 2012 remake of a 2008 PlayStation 2 game—an excellent PlayStation 2 game, but a PlayStation 2 game nonetheless. The Vita's other top games, while good, are hardly the system-sellers that Sony desperately needs. They're not nearly as varied or deep as the experiences you can get on your Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. And the Vita's marquee fall game, PlayStation All-Stars, is also available on PS3. When I ask friends and colleagues what they've played on Vita recently, the answer is typically either A. "Oh, I don't have a Vita." or B. "Oh, you know: PSP games, old PlayStation classics that I missed." Nine months in, and the Vita is a PSP, PS1, and PS2 machine. Does that really justify the $250 price point? Sony's portable system has become something of a running punchline in the gaming industry, mostly because Sony has done such a great job of screwing it up. Which is a shame. I really like this machine. It might not be the most ergonomic device in the world—try to hold up the Vita for an extended period of time and your thumbs will start to hate you—but it's sleek, pretty, and powerful. The UI is great, the online features are handled well, and I love being able to play PS1 and PSP games on the go. As a fan of niche Japanese games and RPGs, I had high hopes that the Vita would take after the PSP's success as a platform for experimental, quirky video games. Sony's portable system has become something of a running punchline in the gaming industry, mostly because Sony has done such a great job of screwing it up. But it hasn't. Nobody is buying Sony's new system, not even in Japan, where Nintendo's 3DS recently outsold it 47 to 1. Because of that, developers seem to be shying away. The Vita is floundering, and it's all Sony's fault. The biggest problem is that the Vita has become something of a landfill for bad games, the place to dump off rushed, poorly-made takes on AAA franchises like Uncharted and Call of Duty. This year, Sony has unwittingly cultivated the reputation that a portable system is for shoddy spinoffs—a reputation that it will have to spend the next few years trying to wash off. Even the portable versions of Assassin's Creed and LittleBigPlanet—considered by critics to be solid games—aren't different or special or great enough to make the Vita worth owning for a great deal of gamers. None are better than their console equivalents. None make the Vita feel better than second-class. But that's not the only problem. Sony has also become a victim of its own greed. Last week, Amazon ran a Vita deal that some thought would be hard to pass up: you could get the portable system, Assassin's Creed: Liberation, and a free trial for Sony's fantastic PlayStation Plus service all for $180. Also, a 4 GB memory card. Yep, that's four gigabytes. Or 4,000 megabytes. Persona 4 Golden, in case you were wondering, is 3,137 megabytes. If you intend to seriously download games or other media to your Vita—and you should, because this is a platform built for digital content—you'll need much more space than that. The biggest memory card available for the PlayStation Vita right now is 32 GB. It will cost you $100. That's right. One hundred dollars. When I went to GameStop to buy my Vita a few weeks ago and heard how much the largest memory card would cost me, all I could do was laugh. A hundred bucks for 32 gigabytes? I think I just spent something like $80 on a terabyte hard drive, and now Sony wants me to pay $100 for a card that can hold maybe 7,000 songs? The Vita's memory cards, by the way, are proprietary, which means you're stuck with what Sony gives you. You can't swap in a standard SD card, even if it would be significantly cheaper. That's the gargantuan hidden cost behind the Vita, the purchase that turns that $180 deal into a $280 investment. It's also one of the major reasons that Sony's hot console has received such a chilly reception. It's obscene price gouging, and it will be particularly punishing for early adopters in a year or two, when bigger memory cards are available for even cheaper. Perhaps this wouldn't be as irritating if we could just pretend the Vita doesn't exist. But it does, and it's full of potential: there are a ton of interesting-looking smaller games on the horizon, games like Dragon Fantasy and Tearaway and Soul Sacrifice. Yet other than those few games, the future is bleak for Sony's console. There are few games that could have the type of widespread appeal that will make people feel like they have to have it. The Vita's 2013 lineup is terrifyingly barren, and even if it gets more interesting, I can't help but worry that the Vita's tepid reception has kept game developers away. Why make games for a system that not even 3 million people own when you could develop for the ubiquitous iPhone, or PC, or even the 3DS? I don't make it a habit of caring about how much money Sony makes, and unless you are a Sony employee or shareholder, you probably don't either. But as a gamer, as a fan of the Vita and someone who hopes to keep using it to play interesting, creative games like Dokuro and Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, I really wish Sony hadn't screwed the Vita up.  |
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![The Wii Mini Looks Glorious, Lacks Internet and GameCube Games [Update: Canada Exclusive]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sAw6qjni5XAQKYtqYEjmD0lpC-UZuPLgK84f26KScHftiEsSo0x-vsfDf51wB1Z7m-LJ0Tg8DyaMrZJ1vhXAC9Ww1o-dW0K2AwwdLsIG2w0_o2hiwF_aVYHUnIyc-8=s0-d "The Wii Mini Looks Glorious, Lacks Internet and GameCube Games [Update: Canada Exclusive]")
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