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)
CCleaner, The Tool which all Windows users need!
CCleaner is a tool I always install Windows, and use regularly to make sure my machine is running quick and is clean.
It basically removes unused temporary files, logs, application data cache data and junk files. It has support for many applications, such as; All major web browsers, Office, Windows files, Flash, VLC, MSN, AntiVir, and the list goes on.
Apart from cleaning old files, it has an excellent tool for finding unused registry entries from old application left there after they were removed. Word of warning, it could always been dangerous changing things in the Windows registry, but I have never had an issue using this tool.
CCleaner is also an excellent tool for removing software and managing which software starts on boot up, a far better solution than what Windows is offering.
There are many solutions like CCleaner, but most of them cause damage to your system and slow it down, basically Junk-Ware! CCleaner gets the job done, always being updated to support more applications, and will improve your system's performance. On your first clean up, it will likely find over 2GBs of junk data!
CCleaner can be downloaded for free here!
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization, privacy and cleaning tool
Windows Apps I Always Install
Want to show Windows love today by posting a short article about the Windows applications I install after a fresh install of Windows. All these apps are free to download and use!
Firefox
The first app I install, Firefox is world's most popular alternative browser. I love this browser for its look and feel, speed, addons and tons of features!
Foxit Reader
Foxit is a PDF reader you might have never heard of. Most people will use Adobe's PDF reader, since thats the one most people only know about. I hate Adobe's PDF reader, it has loads of great features, but it is very slow and heavy on system resources. Foxit Reader is designed to lightweight, very quick to load, and just provide the features to view the PDF document.
OpenOffice.org
Microsoft Office is an excellent set of applications, however it can very expensive to buy. If you need an office suite, OpenOffice.org is a free office suite which is very similar to Microsoft Office. It has a word processer, spreadsheet, presentation, database and drawing. Plus, OpenOffice.org can open Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. OpenOffice has about 90% of the features which Microsoft Office has, and I believe the interface in OpenOffice is better.
VLC
VLC is a media player, and I love it, just because it will play any audio and video file format you throw at it!
CCleaner
Windows computers can get full of junk files, old applications and a messy register. CCleaner is an excellent tool for removing junk and cached files, which can save you 100s of MBs of data. It can safely clean out your registry, which can become messy over time. It is also a very good tool at uninstalling applications and managing the startup of applications in the background.
Pidgin
If you need a lightweight Instant Messenger (IM) client which can handle multiple IM accounts in one application, Pidgin is for you. There is no need to have MSN messenger for your MSN contacts and Yahoo Messenger for your Yahoo contacts, etc; you can have all your contacts in one application! It supports over 20 accounts from different providers. Plus it has great features such as tabbed chat windows, video/audio chat and file transfer.
GIMP
Adobe Photoshop is the hallmark in photo editing, however it is incredible expensive. If you need a photo/graphic editor for free, with the majority of the same features as Photoshop, GIMP is what you need!
Got a Acer Aspire Revo!
Not going to be a review, more about my Revo. It is a brilliant computer! It does have a Intel Atom cpu, but combined with the nVidia ION graphics chip, it is
The Acer Aspire Revo! (click to enlarge)
blazing quick. Its pretty amazing, the ION is very small and designed for low cost/low power computers, but deliveries full HD 1080p playback and DX10 gaming! The computer is very good looking, very "Mac-Mini look-a-like", so small.
It cost me £140 for the Revo R3600 from Ebuyer.com. Intel Atom 230 (1.6Ghz), 1GB DDR2 RAM, nVidia ION, 160GB HDD. Comes with Linux, but was quickly removed for Ubuntu and Windows XP (only installed to use Access for my course). Dual boot worked fine, only issues was getting the Windows XP to install. Had a struggle with putting XP on a flash drive, I used a piece of software called WinToFlash. Next I had an issue, trying to get it to boot off the flash drive, I had to set the SATA controller to use IDE emulation. Final hurdle was finding the drivers for XP, they can all be found here. As always, Ubuntu had no trouble installing and setting up, 'It Just Worked!'
The Revo R3600 is brilliant piece of kit, very fast, thanks to nVidia's ION chip and so cheap to buy!
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!
Install all your apps at once with Ninite!
Got a new computer? Installed Windows 7 for the first time? Reinstalled Windows? Need all your apps downloaded and installed easily and quickly? All you need is Ninite!
Select the applications you want to install from the list (such as Firefox, iTunes, Pidgin, AntiVir, OpenOffice, Flash, etc), download the Ninite tool and Ninite will download and install the latest version of the software you want!
Get Your Apps Fast!
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.
