Widgets

You can now use last.fm widgets on your blog / website. The widget choices we have are recently played / top artists etc., a quilt made up of the covers from your most listened to albums, a playlist player and a radio player. You also get four colour choices – last.fm red (which looks pink to me), black, blue or light grey. You can see the ‘recent tracks’ and playlist widgets in action on my sidebar. I was thinking of adding the album quilt too, but decided that might be slight overkill.

Playlists

Playlists themselves have been around for a while, but whereas previously they only played snippets of a song, they now play the full length tracks (providing they’re available in the last.fm catalogue). Using the aforementioned widget, that means you can easily share your taste in music with your site visitors. The only ‘catch’ is that your list will play in shuffle mode – this is presumably to get around licensing restrictions.

Charts display

It’s now possible to select different periods of time for the charts that show on your profile page. You can choose between your overall charts (as it’s always been) or 3, 6, or 12 month rolling charts. We’re also told that more customisation is on the way.

You can view the official announcement here.

Lately my interest in the Mac world has risen again. Having Intel based processors these days, it’s opened up a whole new world of possibilites. To cut a long story short, we went to the Apple store in Sheffield yesterday, and came away with a nice shiny 20″ iMac, with wireless (mighty) mouse and keyboard.

I have my music all set up on an external drive, along with Harman Soundsticks II speakers (which are very nice, my music is sounding great), and iTunes actually runs nicely on the iMac. The windows version is a complete mess compared to this, which is why I normally wouldn’t touch iTunes with a bargepole. But I think it may become a favourite now (apart from the store at least).

So, I’ve spent the last 24 hours busily exploring new software and various gizmos (like Quicksilver and Growl). It’s opened up a whole new world. I’m sure I’ll be happily exploring new things for days and weeks to come. Oh, and if you’re a Mac user, feel free to mention your favourite bits of software in the comments, although I’ve owned a Mac before it’s been a while!

My software favourites so far are -

• Adium
• Growl
• Transmit
• Quicksilver
• ComicBookLover
• Twitterific

It’s the morning, or should I say afternoon, after the night before, and I’m not feeling too healthy (I’m so not used to headbanging anymore, or standing for 6 hours straight come to that), but it was so worth it.

Slayer really are gods, I will never forget that performance. They opened with the legendary South of Heaven, which immediately had hundreds of heads swaying in unison. And they played Dead Skin Mask! I know, how could they not, but still, I was fearful that they wouldn’t with them having a new album to promote (which is good, but I wanted to hear the classics). They did play a few from the new album (Eyes of the Insane amongst them I’m glad to say), but it was good to hear the old stuff (they did an excellent performance of War Ensemble and Angel of Death too).

The other acts were great too, with the possible exception of Thine Eyes Bleed. I wasn’t too impressed by them. Children of Bodom were great but it was too short a set (I’d have preferred them to have the longer set in place of In Flames). Though In Flames did surprise me, I really enjoyed their performance. Not that I don’t like them, but generally I prefer CoB.

The biggest (pleasant) surprise of the night was Lamb of God. Damn can they give a great live performance, they were excellent. I think it’s safe to say I will be listening to a lot more of them.

And now I’m going to go and dose myself up with paracetamol and hibernate for the rest of the day, in an attempt to nurse myself back to normality. Or at least my version of normality. :)

Doors (not the band, sadly) > 5.00pm

Thine Eyes Blind > 6.00pm

Children of Bodom > 6.40pm

Lamb of God > 7.35pm

In Flames > 8.30pm

Slayer > 9.50pm

If I’m not back and screaming excitement by Saturday evening, please send out a search party. I may have gotten lost amongst the sheer awe of the Slayer set.

1. TiddlyWiki

I love this little gem. Not only is it functional enough to organise oodles of information (or your life), and small enough to fit on a USB key, but because it’s a .html file that also means it’s cross platform. Due to it’s lightweight nature and cross platform goodness, this may well replace Evernote for me, possibly coupled with Google Notebook. However, I have heard reports that it doesn’t cope overly well with large amounts of data, so unless you plan on having a regular clearout of old entries, it may not be the best solution for you.

2. MediaMonkey

I’ve tried a lot of media players over the years (Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Foobar, QCD, and others that I’ve likely forgotten about). MediaMonkey may not be the best looking media player out there, but it’s feature packed and doesn’t suck the life out of your system’s memory. I liked it so much that I paid for it (there is a free version available, but I’d recommend paying for it. It’s not expensive and it’s very much worth it). The only downside is that it’s Window’s only. Which brings me to….

3. Amarok

If there was a Windows version of this, I would be very tempted to drop MediaMonkey entirely. This media player is simply beautiful. Sadly, it’s only available for Linux currently (though I’ve heard whispers that it may be coming to Windows also).

A new version has been released in the past few days which also adds support for Magnatune, a DRM free music store (is this the first linux music player to integrate a music store?). Though it’s hardly a rival to iTunes, being made up of lesser known independent artists, it’s a nice feature.

4. Last.fm

This site is quite simply, a music lovers dream come true. It tracks the music you listen to, compiles your very own music charts, and makes recommendations to you based on your listening habits. It also allows you to keep up with the music your friends listen to, and has streamable radio based on tags (such as genre, similar artists) and user profiles. A recent update has also added event recommendations, a musical taste compatibility meter so that you can see how similar your tastes are to other members, and some free mp3 downloads.

I’ve been using it since last November, and was hooked from the start. Admittedly I am mad about music, and lead a fairly sad life, so the same effect on you can’t be guaranteed. :) However, it has become my most visited website, I’m a complete Last.fm addict. It’s introduced me to so many great artists that I’d never have otherwise come across, and that alone is worth using the site for (Pandora just doesn’t do it for me, though I use that occasionally too).

5. FlashFXP

My favourite (windows) FTP programme. Does exactly what it says on the tin.

Yes, I realise it’s not free, but I’ve tried all the free ones and didn’t like them too much so have stuck with this one.

6. vBulletin

Though not free (even expensive some might say), if you’re undertaking a serious forum project then I couldn’t recommend this software highly enough. It’s good enough to have most things that anyone could need from the start, yet extensible and flexible enough that getting those little extras isn’t a problem (there is a huge user development community behind it at vbulletin.org which provides hundreds of extensions for free). I’ve used vBulletin for 3, maybe 4 years as an administrator (longer as a user and moderator), and have never been disappointed with it.

7. Blue Dot

Blue Dot is a fairly new player on the social bookmarking scene. The difference is that it has various levels of privacy which allows you to share bookmarks only with the people you actually want to share them with (via either the Blue Dot site if your friends are users there, or via email). You can leave comments on other people’s links too, and likewise they can comment on yours. Not sure it’s a feature that I’d really use that much, but it’s nice to have the option. It also doesn’t look horrible, nor does it have a really stupid url (like d.el.ici.ous or whatever).

I have to admit, I haven’t really been overly enthusiastic about the whole social bookmarking thing (though I’ve tried tons of them out). I’ve been using Scuttle for some time now, but development on that is quite slow and there are bugs that are a little annoying. So I’m giving Blue Dot a whirl, I’ll see how that pans out.

8. Democracy

A great (open source) client for viewing your favourite online TV channels / videocast subscriptions. As well as Windows, it works with both Linux and OSX which is a great advantage for me. I’ve only recently started using this, but so far it’s very sweet (and I get to watch lots of videocasts about geeky things). I just need to find some more hours in the day to fully utilise it.

9. MusicBrainz Picard

This is an excellent music tagging tool for the lazy. It scans your mp3′s, arranges them by album, and then uses MusicBrainz to append the correct tags. Though it’s not a completely automatic process (which is a good thing in my eyes, as mistakes are often made that way), it does save an awful lot of time.

An added advantage for Last.fm users is that MusicBrainz is the same system that they use (not fully integrated yet, but is planned for the future).

10 Google Reader

The first incarnation of Google’s newsreader was horrible for anyone who regularly reads more than a small handful of feeds. This time they’ve got it right, with an interface that will be familiar to anyone who has used Gmail. It’s free, easy to navigate, allows flagging (starring) and sharing of articles and because it’s web based that also makes it cross platform.

I love it, and it’s replaced others as my sole newsreader.

11. Citrus Alarm

This has now replaced my ‘real’ alarm clock. Trying to get me to wake up in the mornings really can be like trying to get blood out of a stone. This simple little application seems to work well for me however, because it runs on the PC and allows me to wake up to whatever music from my collection I set it to the night before (which wakes my brain up far better than the radio or a buzzer). Plus there’s no snooze button which helps a lot.

It does of course rely on you having a PC or laptop in your bedroom though. When not using Windows on the PC upstairs (it’s dual booted with Ubuntu) I use a script in Amarok which works in much the same way.

12. Ubuntu

Last but by no means least…

It’s linux for human beings, and I love it (even if you do seem to see the name repeatedly mentioned all over the net these days). Though, aherm, it’s probably best not to attempt an upgrade to Edgy for the time being.

It looks very nice, but it has limitations, namely that you’re limited to using iTunes for submitting your music and it isn’t Linux compatible. It’s early days, and no doubt it will improve (they say for example that in the future you can use other music players with the site), but for now there’s not much to attract me.

Personally, I’ll be sticking with last.fm (which, incidentally, has some nice new features coming in the next week or so, the best of which is a music events tracking and recommendation system). For the moment, last.fm has far more functionality and doesn’t tie you down to a particular player or OS, which is definately a good thing.