Game Music 4 All releases its first free internet compilation. It is called Here Comes a New Challenger. It is a compilation of chiptune, nerdcore, and VG musicians collaborating together as a tribute to video games. Get more info and download the album for free.

Here are the details about the meryl’s notes blog’s 8th birthday celebration. Yes, that ugly logo up on the blog’s home page is the blog’s original logo.

You’ll get the following amount of entries based on the following guidelines:

• 25 entries: Be a guest blogger.
• 25 entries: Create a video mentioning meryl.net and post it on Youtube (send us the URL. Add 5 more if we can see the meryl.net mention for those of us who can’t hear.
• 10 entries: Contribute a prize.
• 10 entries: Twitter a post and become a follower of my Twitter at http://twitter.com/merylkevans
• 10 entries: Make a blog post about the birthday celebration, the prizes, and link to this page
• 10 entries: Subscribe and activate to our RSS feed by email.
  • Subscribe to both meryl’s notes blog and games
  • Subscribe only to meryl’s notes blog
  • Subscribe only to games
  • Subscribe to Bionic Ear Blog
  • Subscribe to meryl’s notes, the newsletter (not the same thing as the above)
• 10 entries: Link to any meryl.net blog entry.
• 5 entries: Twitter about meryl’s notes and link to this page (Need to comment a link to your twitter so we can verify it)

Sound good? Go!

We’d appreciate it if you track your entries — this way we ensure we don’t miss any. Email them to merylk [at] gmail dot com with subject “Happy 8th Birthday.” Deadline will be on the date of the last guest blogger entry (sometime after June 1). Keep checking here for the deadline.

We’ll use Random.org to draw the entries.

I rarely check out videos because chances are high that it won’t have captions or subtitles. But I bit on this Lenovo-produced video comparing its ThinkPad X300 to the MacBook Air [link: Dave Winer]. It presents a powerful visual message without using words.

But not one to let commercials sway me without research, I wondered how many attachments MacBook Air owners realllllly use. Lenovo smartly added attachments of products it has in its ultraportable Thinkpad X300 to the Mac Air to make people think thinner isn’t always better — you sacrifice some things.

Just looking at the two computers, the Mac Air still wows with its thinness. I found a twitterfriend who owns a Mac Air FabGal — check out our twitversation:

FabGal: Sorry, but mah MacBook Air could kick that ThinkPad’s ass. And also? It’s shiny! And silver! And my preshus. (drool)

Me: Mac Air does still look wowie wow wow. What do you add on to it regularly?

FabGal: I haven’t added anything to it so far. Everything transfered from iBook wirelessly. Am thinking of a superdrive, though.

So there you have it. One owner who doesn’t even have anything on her Mac Air. So seriously, how many Mac Air owners buy attachments and use them regularly? One attachment might not be so bad.

Nonetheless, the message comes through powerfully and will likely sway Windows users not to make the switch to a Mac … not just yet.

I finally got around to trying out my digital camcorder that I lucked out and found a great deal on it. I recorded my daughter’s team’s volleyball game last night and experimented. First, I would start/stop between plays to keep it short, but it has a slight delay when starting and stopping, so I stopped that.

In volleyball, the referee stands atop the net on a small platform. That platform gets in the way when watching the game. You miss out when players move into specific spots. I tried filming while directly behind the ref, standing on the gym floor where I could see the whole game in front of me, and sitting on the side where our players played.

The camcorder came with CyberLink PowerDirector Express and CyberLink PowerProducer. I started with Express hoping it would be a quick job — pull the videos together and burn to a CD. Instead it was time-consuming and frustrating. In Director, I added the title and text at the start of each game. Unfortunately, the text appeared over the video rather than on a blank screen. It didn’t have any features to add text that didn’t overlap the video.

OK, fine. Not a big deal. Moving on. I put the videos together in order and produced an MPG file. When I was ready to publish it, PowerProducer opened. There, I could create chapters and a menu like you see on videos. Once done, I burned it as a VCD. It created four folders and nothing that was obvious for clicking on to watch the video. I could play it, but an average user wouldn’t know what to do when confronted with folders with no executable.

The VCD didn’t work on our DVD players. Paul said he has created VCDs before and they worked on DVD players. But that wasn’t important it would be viewed on the computer rather than a DVD player. So I tried making a VCD using Nero instead. Same result. Another wasted CD. In the end, we burned the MPG to the CD using the regular burning option. The MPG landed on the CD and it plays fine on a PC.

I’m no media expert as I’ve never had a need to edit videos and burn them till now. There has to be an easier way to produce the CD and have it load the menu or run the movie as soon as the CD is inserted into the PC. I’d like to figure out a simple process for creating DVDs for DVD players and for computers that may not have a DVD drive. Anyone? Anyone?