I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
I’m somewhat excited about this film. 1080P Bourne Ultimatum trailer on Vuze, my super duper peer-to-peer net client of choice at present. Ludicrously fast, mostly legal content, sending me over quota quite readily. This month will end in pain, I can tell it now!
I had a sudden compulsion to make my BH-501 work at last with Windows after one too many late-night “I can’t use speakers and can no longer abide cables for crappy earphones” moments. If I had money enough to blow $200 on a decent set of headphones expressly for the purpose of sitting at the PC late at night, sure, but I don’t at the minute. So my mobile’s Bluetooth headphones do a decent job in the time being.
The magical secret, it seems, is Bluesoleil’s free EDR Bluetooth manager software that allegedly has a 20MB data transfer limitation per session until it’s purchased, but I’ve just downloaded it and done over 50MB of audio data transfers in A2DP streams and it’s not complaining. Plus, Buy/Register under the Help menu are greyed out… so I don’t know quite how serious they are about selling this thing.
At any rate, it’s working great for me, though my crappy Bluetooth dongle slows EVERYTHING about this computer down… must try another one, it’s not A2DP’s fault because whenever I pair my mobile with it to sync the same thing happens — even when nothing’s paired, as soon as you plug the dongle in (USB) everything starts crawling.
All that said, BlueSoleil are great. Works well.
This service rocks. It’s free, has a pretty good range of music, and is guaranteed to make me buy more music (on CD, because all electronic music download services are still either illegal or stupid).
The Flash player kicks butt (there’s a desktop one coming soon), and intelligently hooks into the webpage’s markup to update the title with every new song. It’s gold. Song Title by Artist from Album Name. It says Album Name! I’m sitting here scribbling down must-acquire ’90s music.
It uses AAC2+ apparently… all I really know is that it sounds great and is stupidly easy to use.
Brilliant.
But possibly unsustainable… none of my money is going to them. They’re launching hardware devices, so this might just be a ploy to get people to buy them, but I’m more interested in who’s doing all the work. There’s absolutely zero crowd-sourcing going on here that I can see… which means that “Related Artists” list is all professionally programmed. I know the Top Stations are, but the artists bit is going a little far perhaps…
Triple J Unearthed and Myspace and PureVolume, etc., all do it the other way around, which seems infinitely more sensible… but you need critical mass to get there, I suppose.
One to watch. And listen to.
It does a lot of things right. CS2 was good in its integration but pretty mediocre in thumbnailing and metadata support, but this is finally an app worth having. The filter (bottom left) is magical; the thumbnailing isn’t horrifically compressed like it used to be; resizing using the slider is a lot faster; there are three different immensely-useful views built in…
It’s just good. And lots lots lots faster to use than CS2 is (load time is similar, but once you’re actually using it… pure gold).
I saw the most ridiculous Google text ad yet today:
“Shocking Piano Lessons – Piano Teachers Want us Banned Controversial Site Exposes All”
It was one of those zero-relevance Gmail index page ads, which can be a bit quirky… even so. Seriously bizarre.