Nope – at least, nope for iPhoto and iTunes libraries. This is a job for Captain Ethernet.
Author: Carrie
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Google Chrome: that’s no moon
Google’s much-anticipated operating system turns out to be real – but it’s built into a browser.
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“Like those yucky strings of poo sometimes seen dangling from goldfish”
A nice contrast to blog evangelism: PC Pro’s Dick Pountain on why he doesn’t blog, and why he thinks blogs are bad for writing.
Publishers, being straightforward capitalists, have a duty to maximise their profits, and one way to do this is to pay writers less or pay fewer writers. To them, the blogosphere is starting to look like a huge open-cast mine of free copy, and the fact that it’s neither researched nor necessarily true is beside the point: that just means they can fire the research department too…
Lacking any quality control mechanism, blogs easily sink into a Hobbesian state of nature – rule by the loudest and the nastiest.
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The futility of flogging music (and the despair when you can’t even give it away)
An excellent article about selling records, file sharing and trying to flog MP3s via Word Magazine:
web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them.
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So long, Glaswegian indie rock radio
XFM Scotland, the radio station formerly known as Beat 106, is to become part of the Galaxy dance music network.
The switch, which will be made in the autumn, is likely to see a radical overhaul of the station’s music output.
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Ubiquity: this could be awesome
Sorry, on deadline just now so this’ll be quick: Mozilla’s Ubiquity could be amazing. More on MetaFilter.
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Maybe I should have waited before shaving my legs
Despite reports, Girls Aloud are not planning to recruit a new member – at least, not according to the official site:
Over the weekend the papers have been filled with false stories on the girls. But instead of the tired old ‘split’ stories, they have invented rumours of a brand new Girls Aloud reality show. These reports could not be more wrong and the Girls are far too busy putting the finishing touches to their brand new album to be filming a new show, let alone bringing on board a new member.
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Baby-proof my iPhone
An unusual request: does anybody know of a crystal case for the first-gen iPhone that *doesn’t* let you use the touch screen? I want to use it as a portable video player for baby bigmouth, but the touchscreen means she turns off the clips in seconds and then beats me around the face with the phone. Any ideas?
It’d be great if there was a preference that turned off the touch interface during video playback…
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A happy Xbox experience
My Xbox 360 developed the dreaded Red Ring of Death the other week, and after trying the various troubleshooting tips it was pretty obvious that the ‘box was broken. So with a sinking feeling I called tech support to try and arrange a repair.
What I expected was this:
- Hours on the phone being passed from pillar to post
- Days and days before my console was picked up
- A couple of months without an Xbox while it sat in Germany gathering dust
- A returned Xbox with “there’s bugger-all wrong with it” written in biro on it
What I got was this:
- Talking to a real person within a few minutes
- An emailed shipping label that arrived during the phone call
- Pickup of the console within three hours
- An email update telling me it was fixed a week and a half later
- Delivery a few days after that, on the promised date
- A note explaining that my motherboard and DVD drive were buggered, so they’d been replaced
- A complimentary month’s membership of Xbox Live
Credit where credit’s due, that’s made me feel very positive about Microsoft.
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Could shutting down Pandora open Pandora’s box?
An interesting post on Broadstuff about Pandora, the web-radio service whose extremely high royalty payments may force it out of business:
it’s clear that Pandora and its ilk will live – it’s far too good to lose – [so] it will just go to the P2P freenet if this practice continues, thus hurting the Industry even more in the medium term. If ever there is a case study of a short sighted tactic to shoot yourself in the foot strategically, this is it.
The problem is that Pandora doesn’t pay the same royalties as other forms of radio, as the Washington Post reports:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.
Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.