I’ve been a huge fan of last.fm since I started using it back in 2006 (for those who don’t know, it’s a social music website that logs every song you listen to, and connects you with people of similar taste, and suggests other music that you might like), but one feature that I’ve often overlooked is the stand-alone last.fm player.

On windows it’s the main tool that scrobbles your tracks as you listen to them in iTunes or Windows Media Player, but you can also type an artists name, or a specific tag, and listen to a stream of similar music; something I’ve been using a lost this Christmas. It’s been great to fire up the player on a laptop and listen to music tagged with ‘acoustic’ while I cook dinner, or type in an artist like ‘John Mayer‘ and find similar artists.

A side-effect of this is that I’ve also discovered 7digital, an online music store that offers DRM[?] free music (last.fm direct you to 7digital if you want to buy an album electronically) which is perfect now that I’m using Linux. There’s also a Linux version of the stand-alone player, and other options like built in support for scrobbling and listening to last.fm streams in Amarok.

One issue that I have experienced since I switched to Linux, is the downside to DRM. I’ve purchased quite a bit of music over the past few years from the iTunes Music Store, which is copy protected and won’t play outside of an authorised copy of iTunes, which is a problem if you’re using Linux and can’t actually run iTunes. Thankfully it’s a pretty common issue and thanks to the Hymn Project I’ve been able to all of my purchased music into a linux friendly format!

Happy days.

Tags: drm, hymn project, itunes, last.fm, Linux, Music, streaming

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Tags: drm, hymn project, itunes, last.fm, Linux, Music, streaming

I know what you’re thinking… My fourth blog post this week ‘he must be bored’. We’ll that’s not true, kind of!

I just clicked a random link in my Wordpress News dashboard and found Photo Matt, I haven’t really had chance to read any of the content but the design of the header really stood out as an excellent piece of design.

Tags: design, inpiration, photo matt, This Blog

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Tags: design, inpiration, photo matt, This Blog

I’ve been doing some internal testing at work this week using Safari, and I’ve moved our Mac Mini onto my desk rather than using VNC. I’ve been using some awesome software called Synergy which lets you share your keyboard and mouse over the network. So I currently have my main work PC (running Windows) which has dual-monitors, next to a third monitor which is hooked up to the Mac Mini. With synergy I can move my mouse cursor between all three monitors and work on either machine without having to switch keyboards, or use a KVM.

Obviously I can’t drag/drop files or move windows between machines, but it’s made life a lot easier for performing Mac testing. It even supports cut/copy/paste from one machine to the other. Here’s a picture of my desktop setup at work (click to see the Flickr version that has notes)

Tags: apple, mac, os x, synergy, work

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Tags: apple, mac, os x, synergy, work

Its official, I’ve decided to drop Microsoft Windows completely at home, and use Linux instead. It started off as a little experiment, to see what Linux is like these days (it’s been a few years since I used it last), but after a few days of using it I love it!

I’m currently running Gentoo Linux, with the KDE desktop (3.5). I’ve included some screen shots of what it currently looks like.

Tags: amarok, avant, avant-window-navigator, compiz-fusion, firefox, gentoo, gimp, kde, kopete, last.fm, Linux, open office, osk, vlc, xine

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Tags: amarok, avant, avant-window-navigator, compiz-fusion, firefox, gentoo, gimp, kde, kopete, last.fm, Linux, open office, osk, vlc, xine

I’ve just updated some images, and CSS styles to expand the size of the site. It should sit nicely inside a browser at 1024×768. We’ve had quite a debate at work about designing sites to 1024×768 rather than 800×600, especially with the newly designed BBC home page being 1024×768.

I really need to do some more work on the design of this site (well to be honest I need to do some design work in the first place because it’s a bit bland at the moment). Maybe if I get bored over Christmas you’ll see some updates.

For those of you reading in an RSS reader head over to the site and let me know what you think by leaving a comment

Tags: design, This Blog, version7

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Tags: design, This Blog, version7