nathan.chantrell.net

I’ve been raving about streaming music service Spotify to anyone who will listen for a while now…

Financed through very infrequent and unintrusive ads or a rather expensive £10/month subscription, Spotify is the latest attempt to save the music industry from piracy, and it’s making a big impact.

The application is available for Windows or Max OS X and also runs flawlessly under Wine on Linux (which seems to have resulted in no ads at the moment) and mobile versions are in the works.

As well as browsing for artists, albums and tracks Spotify also has a radio feature where you can select music by genre and time and it also allows you to share songs and playlists with friends easily.

It’s a brilliant way to explore new music and the range available is staggering with a few notable exceptions being The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin (get with it guys!).

If you love music you’ve got to try Spotify.

Photo credit: AlexLawrence

After much umming and ahhing I finally decided to get an iPhone 3G 16GB and wow, what a fantastic bit of kit. Feels so good in the hand (you’d have to try it to understand) and the OS is the slickest mobile OS I’ve seen by a good margin. Definitely the best thing I have bought in a long while!

If I had a complaint, and obviously I was aware of this beforehand, it is that it needs iTunes for syncing etc… I don’t have any macs here, I’m a long term Linux guy as you know but I do have a couple of XP boxes around so that’s not the problem, it’s just that iTunes always seems so laggy and unresponsive on windows. Might be getting a Mac Mini before too long though as I want to have a look into iPhone app development.

Saw this in action at last night… it’s good, but not quite as impressive as it looks in the vid – the 45 degree angle of the Wiimote camera is very noticeable up close, you can hardly move before it is out of range. Still an impressive hack though and very easy to set up, give it a try if you have a Wii.

I’ve replaced my main desktop machine, it’s about time too!

Specs are: AMD Phenom 9550 (2.2Ghz Quad core), Asus M3A mobo, 2Gb Corsair PC2-6400 RAM, 500Gb SATAII HD, Nvidia 8600GT dual DVI Gfx, 700W PSU and a nice case + some fans that weren’t 50p each (learnt that lesson the hard way!)

Should have 3 x 22″ widescreen monitors here on Friday. Two for this new PC and one connected to another, linked with Synergy. Play time

I was recently pointed in the direction of XBMC Fox, a useful Firefox extension that adds a new option to the right click menu in Firefox which will send URLS to XBMC (Xbox Media Center) for on screen playback.

Dead handy but it doesn’t work for YouTube though… so I’ve modified it so it does.

For YouTube just right click any link of the form http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aN7mVCbk6M and select “Send This to XBMC” as normal and it will work

Only the firefox extension is required, nothing to install on xbox, just make sure web server is turned on in settings.

Well it might be an IE only DRM’d piece of crap but does it have any redeeming points?

Not that I can find. Had a play with it last night and can’t say I was impressed. 30 mins show at 142Mb, not bad but took ages to download and quality was piss poor on my big telly, loads of artifacting.

With that and the max 28 days to watch (7 days once you’ve watched it once) I will definately be sticking to torrents if that’s all they can offer!

Expected better of the beeb

How cool is this?!

It’s a multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. So now you know!

More at: http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/

A complete in car PC that is the same size as a standard car radio and a touchscreen monitor.

It has a 1 Ghz CPU, 512Mb RAM & 30Gb HD

Yesterday the community VoIP service at VoIPuser.org went live. I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the beta testers for this over the last few months and it works brilliantly. Basically the revenue generated by the use of the Inbound PSTN to VoIP numbers is pooled in to a central community “pot” which can be used by members to make free outbound PSTN calls via a SIP phone. Calls can be made to any number that can be routed to for under 2.5p/min which covers most landlines in the world. More info here.

You might have seen that dual layer burners are now same prices as single layer ones but like me you might never seen the discs anywhere…. well here you go:

Verbatim 8.5Gb Double Layer (x1 piece in jewel CD case)

£9.39 EACH!!  WTF!