The Spotify Effect
I have been using Spotify on Linux for 24 hours now. It has reminded me how great the service is, in the past I have only used it on and off to try out. Since the release onto Ubuntu, it has made want to try it out again. The price of entry for me was £5, the basic subscription charge. Its nice to have no ads, which became annoying after every couple of songs. The subscription is still very low, as much music as you want for £5, with no limits! Though, I still had my doubts. Spotify is using DRM, your £5/10 is only paying for access, not ownership. If you stop using Spotify or Spotify go bust (reports suggest so), you have no music from your subscription. However, the ease of the service and the limitless amounts of music, in the long run it will save me alot of money, from buying individual songs at 69p or Albums at £6 on Amazon.
Fairly quickly after starting my subscription I knew Spotify was my new way to listen to music. Music removed from both of my computers, and archived onto external Hard Drives. I was going Spotify all the way!
Discovering the social feature to Spotify added another level to this service. Linking your Spotify account with your Facebook account, pulled in all your friends who use Spotify. Very quickly I was checking out songs my friends listened too, and adding the songs to my favourites. It has a nice feature to 'send' songs to each other. This started conversations with friends about music, which I have never done. I dont usually talk about music with friends, but since Spotify makes it so easy to share songs with each other, it just sort of happens.
I am loving Spotify every time I start listening and looking for music. Its nice to pay one flat fee and have as much as I want. Its likely that I will carry on paying for the unlimited service, don't like ads! I will be hunting, sharing and talking about the music on Spotify from now on!
Firefox Crashing No-more!
Mozilla Firefox is my browser of choice. It has been the best browser for years, until new and old competitors court up. Google and Opera have been hot on the heals of Mozilla, with lighting fast and feature packed browsers. I will hopefully be doing a article about why I use Firefox over the rest shortly. Mozilla is now having to play catch up.
There is only one feature I like about the nearest competitor, Chrome, and that is 'Every tab is it's own process'. If a tab crashes, it doesn't crash the browser. Mozilla is hoping to solve this issue in Firefox 4. In the meantime, they have gone
Adobe Flash has crashed again! (click to enlarge)
half way with plugin crash protection. Plugins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight is run in its own process, separate from Firefox. If the plugin crashes, it wont crash Firefox. You just need to reload the page to try again. Apparently, 90% of Firefox's crashes is down to the plugin. This new feature was added in a small update, 3.6.4, which is usually reserved for security and stability updates, rather than new features. Find more info here.
Creating a Picture with your Mouse Movements!
I came across a nice cross-platform app, which simple creates a drawing of your mouse movements. Its called IOGraphica. It basically records every movement, click and wait of the mouse cursor and tracks it. In real-time, it will have drawn a picture of your mouse movements. The developers recommend to keep the app running all day, and see your creation at the end of the day!
Its a Java app, so make sure you have Java installed.
Modern Art from your day to day computer usage!
5 Indie Games, Pay what you want!
Wolfire Games, an indepentant game developer, has set up a 7 day sale on 5 indie games. These include World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD and Penumbra. I only own , World of Goo, which is brilliant, but the other 4 games look excellent too. All the games come to a combined total of 480. However, the sale allows you to pay what you want for all 5 games, and some of the money goes to two charities! So you can pay as little as 1 cent (which is just wrong), and some people have paid up to $500!
The problem is I'm not sure how much to pay, I don't want to pay up to $80, since I already own one of the games and the others will be hit or miss if I enjoy them, but I'm not going all cheap skate and pay $5 or less. I'm thinking $20-$30 is a good price. I will have to decide soon, you only have 7 days! Please donate and get some great games! DRM-Free and works on Linux, Mac and Windows!
EDIT - In the end I decided to pay $30, Bargin!
SMART HDD & Utility
For many years, computer hard disc drives have had a much forgotten feature which could save you from data lost. SMART is a technology which will find on all hard drives since the 1990s. It monitors various variables on the hard drive and works out when the hard drive is likely to fail, thus saving you from data lost.
Although many hard drives use SMART, this technology is no use to the majority of computer users. In order for the hard drive to tell the user that the hard drive may fail is with the use of a utility program on the computer. Windows does not currently have a utility which will tell the user SMART information. Both Mac OS X and Linux have utilities to let the user know if the hard drive will fail.
Mac OS X has a tool called Disk Utility which will allow you to manage all your drives on your Mac, as well as view the SMART information on each drive.
Since Ubuntu 9.10, there has been a similar tool pre-installed. Palimpsest Disk Utility does a similar job, allowing you to view information about each drive, format/partition it, perform benchmarks on it and view the SMART data. It will even run in the background, and give you a notification as soon as an error has been found on a drive.
Disk Utility in Ubuntu 10.04 (click to enlarge)
My Thoughts on Synergy
Synergy is a great tool if you have/use more than one computer. It allows you to use your keyboard and mouse on one computer, on many other computers.
One set of keyboard and mouse across a unlimited amount of computers!
It is especially good, if you don't have dual monitors, but you can create that sort of setup with two computers. However, in away it is better to use Synergy than dual monitor, because you can be sharing the computing power across two computers. You can even copy and paste text between computers. Its cross platform, so you can use the tool between Windows, Mac and Linux computers.
Its a great tool if you need to use of different computers at the same time,I found it very useful for IRC client on my eee pc and my general work on my desktop. You can download it here for FREE!
My Thoughts on Apple Jan 2010 Event
It was a big day for the tech industry, Apple Event! As expected, the Apple tablet was confirmed!
Called the iPad, it is just an oversized iPod/iPhone! 10 inch screen, WiFi N, iPhone OS, 3G (on some models). It is a nice thin looking design, with 10 hours of battery life. However, I am not that impressed with a larger iPod Touch, cause thats all it is. It does have nice exclusive apps, such as iBooks (Apple's eReader/Book Store), iWorks for iPad (which is very nice and slick, $9.99 per iWork app). All the apps work with the iPad, and can be up-scaled to the screen size. It has some accessories as well, one which stood out for me, was the keyboard dock. It could be a cheap desktop???
Its a nice new product, but I do not see the point of it. Its too big to carry around, and if you want a excellent Internet device on-the-go, you buy a iPod Touch/iPhone. Jobs seemed to sell it as a home device, but why would you spend at least $499 on a iPad to use at home, when you could just use your computer. I see no point to it, I wont be buying one, I believe it will be a flop!
The pricing, it is not as expensive as I thought but still pricey!
- 16GB - $499
- 32GB - $599
- 64GB - $699
- 16GB 3G - $629
- 32GB 3G - $729
- 64GB 3G - $829
You can also buy a prepay plan (not a contract), its with AT&T. $14.99 for 250mb per month OR $29.99 for unlimited. What is surprising is that it is unlocked!
That was it, 90mins about the iPad! No new iPod/iPhone, no iPhone OS 4, no new Mac Updates, Not even iLife/iWorks 2010 (I was expecting that!)
The new iPad
Speed up OpenOffice!
OpenOffice is brilliant, a fully featured office suite, which is like Microsoft Office, but free!
My only issue with Open Office is that it is slow to start up. Here are a few quick tips to speed up Open Office.
In OpenOffice, click Tools > Options > Memory. Change the following:
- Number of Steps - 20
- Use for OpenOffice.org - 128
- Memory per object - 20
- Number of Objects - 2
- Check OpenOffice.org Quickstarter
Then under Java:
- uncheck Use a Java runtime environment
Click OK, and your done! OpenOffice should startup alot quicker!
My Thoughts on Firefox 3.6
Today has finally arrived, the release of Firefox 3.6. This new release, builds upon a great web browser, by adding a few great additions. Mozilla has this time around focused on four key new features; Personas, Web Technologies, Speed and Plugin Support.
Personas in Firefox 3.6 (click to enlarge)
Personas is a new way to theme or “skin” Firefox. This feature has been out since the development of Firefox 3.5, but was just an optional plugin. It works like the themes we have been able to use in Firefox for years, but instead of themes be able to customise the buttons, look and feel of the browser. Personas just change the 'background' look of Firefox. There are thousands of Personas available at (www.getpersonas.com), just find the one you like and install it instantly. This new feature is a brilliant way to fully customise the browser. My only complaint is the amount of poor quality Persona skins, some of the best ones are designed by Mozilla. However, it is support by the community, so anyone can make a skin.
Like with Firefox 3.5, tons of new web technologies were added to the browser. This release is no exception. Improvements have been made to HTML5, which now can support full screen video. Improvements to CSS3 and Web Open Font Format (WOFF), still the only browser to support it. These advancements, does push the Acid3 score to 94, but still not beating Google Chrome or Safari which have scores of a perfect 100. It is all well and good that Firefox supports all these different technologies, but it is unlikely the end user will see these in action. With most websites which design themselves around the Internet Explorer user, HTML5 and WOFF is unlikely to be used much, since IE8 does not support them. At least, Firefox will be ready for the future, lets hope for the next release, Mozilla can hit that magically 100! Further advancements have been on the JavaScript engine. According to Mozilla, users should expect to see a 20% increase in performance over Firefox 3.5. Can not complain here, we all love performance increases! Sadly, Firefox is still not as quick as Safari or Google Chrome.
Plugin Updates (click to enlarge)
Firefox add-on support is second to none. There are tons of add-ons to choose from, and since Firefox 3, support for add-ons has been improved with the ability to easily manage and update them. Finally, Plugins have received the Mozilla love. Firefox will now check for updates on all plugins installed, such as Adobe Flash, Silverlight, Shockwave and many more. I love updates! So having the ability to check for the latest plugins, is a huge bonus for me.
Firefox 3.6 builds upon, in my opinion, the best web browser. With improvements in looks, technologies and speed; it is a great update over Firefox 3.5. Its a shame that more features were not added, or that more improvements could have been made to speed up JavaScript or get closer to 100 on Acid3. Both Safari and Chrome beat Firefox in this area still. It is a excellent update over Firefox 3.5, however I am not going to suggest that you upgrade immediately if you prefer the stability of Firefox 3.5. It is a nice improvement, just in time as Internet Explorer users look for a new web browser! 
Me!
Ed Hewitt, 19, Studying @ Derby Uni, Blogger, Ubuntu user, Columnist & Podcaster for FCM, Gamer, Admin on Gfire.- Spotify is saved. Usa by the end of the year!
- Back home from work. 2:30am, time for IT crowd!
- Half way through my shift. Time for a double expesso.
