Archive for the 'Internet' Category

Why bother downloading music?

Published on August 5, 2009 in Internet and Music. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Who still bothers with risking a law suit from the RIAA by downloading music these days when there’s so much on offer which is just streamed directly to your PC?

Grooveshark – http://www.grooveshark.com/

grooveshark

Type in the name of a song there on the homepage and you’re away. Not so sure on the “autoplay” feature which occasionally queues up some really random stuff but aside from that it’s a brilliant site for listening to the odd track here and there or creating playlists and letting them go.

Grooveshark offer great integration to Facebook with their Sharesong app and Wordpress with their plugin. They also offer a URL shortening service specifically for music over at tinysong.com (e.g. tinysong.com/37GX)

Last.fm - http://last.fm/

It’s the closest we can get to Pandora in the UK these days. Streaming custom radio stations tailored to your exact music tastes is something only the web can offer. You ask for an artist and it’ll use it’s vast collection of data to create a custom playlist full of artists similar based on what other users of the site listen to.

Unlike Spotify, Last.fm have opened their API allowing developers to make their own third party apps which can access content, Mobbler being a prime example. Many an evening I’ve plugged my speakers into my phone and let Last.fm be the DJ..

The Hype Machine – http://hypem.com/

Scouring the so-called blogosphere for tracks posted on music blogs, the Hype Machine is a great place to find countless remixes of your favourite artists. You can create watchlists containing recently posted material from only the artists you’re interested in or you can dive straight in and see what’s being talked about the most across the Internet.

The site will continue to play tracks even if you carry on navigating around the site. However it will only play music as it comes in the order of search results, there doesn’t seem to be a proper way of creating custom playlists.

HypeM is integrated nicely with Twitter and Last.fm allowing you to tweet your recently “loved” tracks and scrobble the tracks you’re listening to your Last.fm profile.

Spotify – http://www.spotify.com/

This ad-supported service with it’s own stand alone client is expanding it’s huge music library with thousands of tracks added each week. Some artists have taken to pre-releasing albums to premium subscribers and their mobile client offering the ability to download entire playlists to your device *almost* makes it worth the £10/month fee.. but that’s still a rip off if you ask me.

I went to a party a little while ago, the host had paid for the much more reasonable £0.99 one-off “day pass” 24hour subscription to Spotify and left it open on his laptop the whole night so that anyone could jump on and queue up a tune. It was the world’s best jukebox, no listening to the same crappy party mix CDs on repeat, no dead air when switching CDs..

Spotify also supports scrobbling tracks to Last.fm from a setting in the preferences.

The YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/

I hate to even mention this one but there’s definitely a lot of music uploaded there, usually with a static image or slideshow of the artist where the video should be. I just find something really wrong with using a video site to listen to music, the quality is usually terrible but it’s probably by miles the most popular in this list.. Music videos on YouTube recently took a massive hit when the record companies objected to their material being uploaded resulting in over 100,000 videos being removed from the site.

Moof – http://moof.com/

Music, online, on-demand, for free… is a spin off of YouTube giving the user an iTunes-like web interface to search and playlist videos from YouTube. It’s not a bad idea but I’ve already mentioned my reservations about getting music from the YouTube.

In conclusion, perhaps there is still a place for listening to an albums worth of mp3s but I don’t find myself doing it that much any more.. And remember these are a just a choice few, new sites are innovating all the time – keep your eyes open for the next big thing.

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A Favicon

Published on July 27, 2009 in Blog and Internet. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Just to prove I’m still alive mainly, I made a little favicon for my site because I was sick of seeing it in my bookmarks toolbar with the boring default Firefox icon!

And here it is:

A ctrl+f5 clear cache refresh should get it for you if you can’t see it already..

Do you know a “Google Surfer”?

Published on May 12, 2009 in Internet, Life and Rants. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .
Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Have you ever seen someone who, instead of putting a web address into their browser address bar as you’d expect, chooses to put the address into Google and do a search on it, then click the first link?? People who do this bizarre series of actions to view a website I now call “Google Surfers”.

A chap phoned me at work the other day to ask where all his websites had gone… I didn’t really get what he meant so I got his screen up and asked him to show me and he proceeded to type “www.” into the Google search box which, with Google Suggest being turned on immediately starting suggesting results such as www.facebook.com www.bbc.co.uk etc. and the chap said he’d never even been on Facebook before! It turned out what he was after was his auto-complete history because that’s how he browses the net.

And it’s wrong in so many ways. Why not press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which would accomplish the same as clicking Search then clicking the first result? Why not actually type a web address into the address bar in the first place!? Why not bookmark frequently visited pages so you don’t even have to type anything in at all?!? What if the first result on the URL searched for isn’t the site they’re after by some random occurrence on Google which could happen? The mind boggles.

What’s gone wrong in the way people are taught to use the Internet which makes them think that’s the way everyone does it?

Advertising on Social Networks

Published on November 21, 2008 in Internet. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Now I hate online advertising as much as the next man, but…

I find myself clicking on Facebook adverts, the targeted ones they have down the right hand side on some pages. I mean, they really are targeted quite accurately. How about this one which I saw the other day??

That’s just an example of a few I’ve seen and this particular one couldn’t be targeted better. Facebook knows I run Linux because it’s probably listed on my profile from when I first set it up.. My eye was immediately drawn by the Tux icon. I keep seeing more and more adverts which are of interest or are relevant to me on the side of Facebook, which proves that “social advertising”, or whatever they want to dub it, is the way forward. To get me, someone who actively blocks adverts online, clicking is an achievement in itself. I’d say the money the company spent there was well worth it despite me not buying anything from them.

Having spent some time studying marketing at university, it’s quite clear to me that Facebook and the like have an edge over other advertising mediums because they can deliver adverts to those who are most likely to click them.. In fact I’d much rather see adverts which might be relevant to me, even if I don’t click them, than this random flashing distracting nonsense which you see on most websites.

Instant Messaging?

Published on November 4, 2008 in Internet. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

Been meaning to write something about this for a while now.. and it’s based on the following observation: I don’t log into MSN Messenger much any more. When I do, I don’t use it that much.. Pidgin will sit there idling, with my “away” or “busy” status showing… Back in the day, it used to be something I would log into as soon as I logged onto my laptop, see who was online and probably start a conversation or two. Years ago, in what I would describe as the MSN glory days when I was still using Windows, I had Messenger Plus! installed to totally customise my MSN experience and I would at times have upwards of 30 contacts online on an evening and be talking to several of them at once. Not so much these days.

Is this typical IM conversation a familiar scenario to you?

“Hi.
Hey.
How are you?
Fine thanks, you?
Yup, fine.”
……

And what’s the point of even bothering with that??

Is instant messaging itself dying?? A lot of people now prefer to write a message on my Facebook wall or send me a message (which is essentially an email) via the same website. It doesn’t have to be instant any more.. It’s fine to post a Facebook message and wait for a reply. If people do want an instant or near-instant response they know to SMS me. The fad of being able to instantly communicate with other people via the Internet seems to me at least to be well and truly over.

Has instant messaging died out completely then? No, definitely not. I wonder if it’s just the demographic similar to me, those who have embraced Facebook and now use it for most of their online communication. I still idle in a fair few IRC channels, mainly ones related to open source projects I have an interest in and on the whole the channels I’m in now are used regularly…

So IM is not dead but it would be interesting to see what MSN traffic has been like since Facebook has really taken off.

Website highlights iPhone inadequacies

Published on October 20, 2008 in Internet, Nokia and Rants. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , .
Image representing IPhone as depicted in Crunc...

iPhone not so great after all?

http://pleasefixtheiphone.com/

Found this website just now.. It’s a list of the iPhone users’ top gripes with their beloved device. As I quickly scanned down the list, I saw many things which my Nokia can do quite happily, yet which frustrate iPhone users on a daily basis.

#1 Copy and paste. The N95 can do copy/paste, no problem. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it can do it.

#2 Tilt to view emails in landscape. Once again, the N95 screen will go landscape in any application, even Email. An old firmware upgrade to the N95 8gb has enabled screen auto-rotation.

#3 Ability to view Flash content. That has again been added in a firmware upgrade of the N95 8gb’s firmware.

#4 Unwanted application icons can’t be hidden. I can just bury icons of applications I don’t use in a folder on the menu so they’re not in the way all the time.

#5 Can’t use the iPhone 3G Internet connection to browse on a Macbook. But the N95 lets me access the Internet on my Asus.

I could go on and on… Guess the iPhone isn’t so great after all.

R.I.P. LUGRadio

Published on October 12, 2008 in Blog, Internet and Ubuntu. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I know, how out of date is this post… LUGRadio finished ages ago, much to the dismay of fans. I have obviously neglected the blog as of late and meant to post something about this ages ago. But as a homage to the most brilliant of podcasts, I give you:

Jono Bacon drinking an Ubuntu beer...!

Specsavers Website Innovation

Published on August 18, 2008 in Internet and Life. 8 Comments Tags: , , , .

I was told, in my weekly meeting with my line manager, about a new feature on the Specsavers website. Thought I’d share…

It allows you to try on frames virtually, from the comfort of your own home which is a great idea. A customer at work today even said, that it being her first pair of glasses, she felt embarrassed trying on frames in the store with other people around so she’d try them online and come back in.

You can actually order and pay for the glasses on the website too, then you come into the store to complete the order and arrange for collection. So this is Specsavers taking on the online-only retailers of glasses.

First: upload a photo of yourself (or use the stock images). Here’s a really bad one of me I just took on my phone. Still in my uniform look…

Second: select the centres of your pupils in the photo.

Finally: try frames on by clicking the “Try” button. You can adjust where the frame is on the picture till it looks right. You can also add the frames to a list to compare them.

Here’s one of me wearing the £125 Osiris 605 frame. You can switch between different colours, but this frame only comes in black. My actual frames are way cooler than these, but they’re not on the website and we don’t have any in stock at the moment either, so there…

And you even get a copy to print out with all the frame details on it to bring into store so we can make them up for you. Shove that D&A! ;)

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A Handy Wordpress Plugin

Published on August 18, 2008 in Internet and Life. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Some fellow has made a pretty nifty Flickr plugin for Wordpress. Install it up & authenticate it. Simple stuff. Low and behold, you get a little Flickr icon when you’re writing a post, adding a photo from your Flickr collection is a few clicks away. Brilliant.

In other news & using the aforementioned plugin, check out my chilli plant – now featuring a couple of *red* chillies! Mmm, they look so tasty. Can’t wait for harvest time..

Chilli Plant 17th August 2008

Some useful things to bookmark

Published on August 11, 2008 in Firefox and Internet. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Figured it was about time I sorted my Firefox bookmarks and that is a *huge* task. I’ve deleted loads that don’t work anymore and attempted to sort out the remaining horde of mostly what I’d call “things which might come in handy one day“… Whilst doing so I found some old gems which I think everyone should have in their bookmarks.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ – much easier than asking someone on IM if they can connect to a site that’s down for you. Useful for when the Internet decides to be annoying.

http://www.tempemail.biz/ – it’s a must-have if you need to register for a site you’ll never visit again.

http://www.bugmenot.com/ – or you could see if there’s already a shared login on bugmenot.

http://www.doineedajacket.com/ – better than a weather forecast, it’s all you need to know when you’re about to head into the outside world.

http://www.picturesofwalls.com/ – random thing I found ages ago, some photos of funny graffiti out and about.

…I got distracted from bookmark-tidying by doing this post, so my bookmarks are still a mess. *sigh*

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