Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Daance!

My last.fm dancehall playlist

1. T.O.K. – Footprints 3:31
2. Seeed – Pressure 2:31
3. Beenie Man – King of the Dancehall 3:35
4. Mellow Mark – Big up 3:14
5. Ward 21 – Style 3:36
6. Hawkeye – We Nuh See Dem 3:41
7. Mad Cobra – Start It Nuh 3:21
8. Busy Signal – these are the days 3:53
9. Lutan Fyah – Natural Herbs 3:51
10. Anthony B – Good Life 3:31
11. Lexxus – thug life 3:20
12. Sean Paul – Like Glue 3:53
13. Spragga Benz – guns & girls & ganja 3:30
14. Harry Toddler – Enemy 3:36
15. Zumjay – Hot Girl 3:45
16. Turbulence – We Can Do Better 3:27

Go to last.fm and play it!

Monday, February 11, 2008

Moving Pictures

An iPod nano cannot play videos.

Wrong!

It can, thanks (yet again) to RockBox. How? Easy!

The plugin needed is already included in RockBox. All you need to do is
  1. Go here and download WinFF
  2. Install WinFF
  3. Download the presets.xml from the RB wiki and put it in the WinFF folder(replacing the old one)
  4. Open WinFF, choose your player and the video file to convert
  5. Drag'n'Drop the converted video on your player
  6. Open the file through the File Browser (make sure you go to Settings>General Settings>File View>Show Files>Supported, I almost gave up on the whole video idea after two hours of trying to figure out where my video went)
You can read everything else there is to know about RB and video here.

Scrobble the Box

OK, as promised, here it is. For all of you whose last argument against using RockBox was "hey, last.fm just got iPod support to work."

Last.fm works with the box. Like a charm, actually. According to last.fm, iPod support only works if you use iTunes to manage your Pod. Rockbox doesn't care. All thanks to a little prog called QTScrobbler. By the way, it also works with the original Apple firmware, and all other players running the Box. Natively, iPod is the only mp3 playe supported by Audioscrobbler.

It's easy to use, too. In your player's menu, activate last.fm log (on my iPod it's under Settings>General Settings>Playback>Last.fm Log). This will create a file called ".scrobbler.log" in the players root directory.

If you are running QTScrobbler for the first time, you will have to set it up. Enter your last.fm login under Gobal>Settings>General. After that, load the log file by clicking on "Open .scrobbler.log", and selecting the drive letter your player is under (make sure it's plugged in, of course). Now you're just one click on "Submit" away from scrobbling from your mp3 player to last.fm.

Another plus of using QTScrobbler for iPod scrobbling is that there is a Linux version of QTS (iPod scrobbling was impossible before)

That's it for today, kids. Tomorrow I'll show you how to get your nano (or any other iPod) to play videos.


And here are the links you all have been waiting for:
Alternatives to QTScrobbler (not tested!)
RockBox wiki page about scrobbling

Last.fm On-Demand Streaming

Yes, I know, these are old news. But they are still interesting though.

On January 23, 2008, last.fm, the music networking site, has launched their newest addition. Users can stream songs and even entire albums - for free! Or so you might think.. After reading deeper into the article I had to learn that, yes, it's free alright, but only the first three plays per song. After that a subscription has to be bought, which then opens the doors to unlimited musical enjoyment.

Another flaw in the system; the artists get paid for every time their songs are streamed. So - the big, rich, popular bands will get a lot of streams, and the big money will start flowing into their pockets, while the small-screen local band with 5 streams a month will keep struggling every time they need a new piece of equipment.

Read the full article here.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Rockin' the Box

It's the perfect combination; a 4GB 1st generation iPod (mine's actually white, but I liked the picture of the black one) and RockBox. It's a setup that never leaves my pocket.

A lot of times companies produce a great piece of hardware (the iPod), and load it with crappy firmware (the original iPod fw). I mean, yeah, it's easy to use and understand, but.. some of my expectations are just not filled. So after I got my Pod, it took me about a week until I decided to load RockBox..


What is RockBox?

RockBox is an open source firmware for mp3 players, written from scratch. It runs on a wide range of players:

  • Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
    (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
  • Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
  • Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5 and M5L
  • iriver: H100, H300 and H10 series
  • SanDisk: Sansa c200, e200 and e200R series (not the v2 models)
  • Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series (not the S series)
from rockbox.org


The First Contact: Install

Ridiculously easy; download the current build, copy it on the player's hard disk, download and execute the bootloader, done. Go get yourself a treat.

(for player-specific instructions refer to the RockBox website)


Fill'er Up: Loading your library

Even easier than the installation; works exactly the same way as before. iTunes, WinAMP, foobar 2000, they all think they are dealing with an original iPod.


Dressing Up: Customize the user interface

This is probably one of the greatest things about RockBox; the GUI is fully customizable. The
menu- and while-playing screens are even independent from each other.
My menus display a slightly modified "Brownstone" theme (download), and my while-playing
screen shows my own creation, based on "Crashbox for nano" (download)



That's it for now. I'm testing RockBox/last.fm compatibility right now, and I'll be back as soon as I can supply some presentable results.

All Simpsons Episodes? Oh My Goddish!

This torrent is for everybody who likes the Simpsons as much as I do. And only those. If you're not one of us, you have a better use for those 45.93 GiB (yes, that is 49315212357 Bytes) of your bandwith/HDD space.

If you do love the Simpsons, this is definitely for you (unless you already own the DVD's, of course). It's season 1-18 (19 is airing right now, so it's not included yet). It's mostly TV rips, decent quality though, looks good even on fullscreen. The episodes range from 83 to 240 MB file size.



================
torrent details

Size: 45.93 GiB (83-240 MB per episode)
Files: 400
Format: .avi (DivX/XviD)

Publisher: Darkside_RG (uploaded by holyservant)
Date: 2007-11-06
Language: English
Subtitles: none

Trackers:
http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/announce
http://torrent-download.to:5869/announce
http://218.145.160.136:8080/announce
http://tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/announce
http://tv.tracker.prq.to:80/announce
http://tv.tracker.thepiratebay.org:80/announce
http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce
http://tracker.prq.to:80/announce

DOWNLOAD .torrent

================