Farewell AllOfMP3...

It looks like Russia is finally bowing to pressure from the USA to shut down allofmp3.

As of writing this, the site is still online (and, somehow I've managed to end up with a balance of -$0.21 – Yes, minus 21 cents) so I'm not going to try and get any more credit as it doesn't seem like it will be around for long.

One of the things that sucks about this is that just by shutting down this site, sales of music from RIAA labels will not suddenly, magically increase. When will they realise that the majority of music released today is crap and once they realise that their business practices are straight out of last century? Why don't they embrace this brave, new world and offer consumers what they want (ie, inexpensive, high-quality, non-DRM music downloads)?

As good as the iTunes Music Store is, I can't take a protected AAC file downloaded from there, burn it to CD and play it on the Sony headunit in my car... Grrr!

New Phone

I recently upgraded the old Motorola V3 RAZR to a Sony Ericsson K810i with "Blog This" capabilities, among other things.

The SE K810i is quite a nice phone, it's got a half-decent camera in it (well, the camera part of it is actually branded as a Sony Cyber-shot) it can play back all kinds of media formats (MP3, MP4, AAC, 3GP etc) it must have a pretty decent CPU in it as it can do 3D stuff in Java, syncs beautifully with my Mac (via the use of a £1.49 plugin from mobile.feisar.com) and generally has a nice, responsive UI.

I loved the build quality on the motorola, and the ergonomics of the hardware was pretty good, but the user interface on it was one of the most back-to-front, convoluted pieces of software it's ever been my displeasure to use.

Things that one the K810i are a single click (like deleting the current SMS that you're reading) involve going into the menus on the Motorola. Mototola didn't seem to like paying licensing fees for the T9 Predictive Text Input so they reinvented it themselves, quite badly too. Look guys, there's a reason Sony Ericsson and Nokia both use T9 - it's good.

Nadia also picked up herself a K610i which is great - aside from it also being quite a decent phone, now that we've both got a phone with the same OS, I can more easily answer her questions about it =).

Both the SE phones are 3G, and there's a 2 month free trial of the video calling and other 3G services - I'm not convinced that you really need to see the person you're talking to on the mobile, especially if you're trying to have a conversation in a crowded area (like on a train) as everyone can hear what's going on... I'm amazed at the pace of development of 3G phones, no longer are they similar to a GSM model only twice the size with a slow UI, they're compact, efficient and are now able to be pushed in place of regular GSM-only units...

Blogging On The Go

I've got a new blog happening, Blogging On The Go, which I can post to from my new phone.

When I take a picture, there's a Blog This menu item which formats the post and uploads it to the blog. I'm having difficulty merging the mobile blog with this one as I (stupidly) clicked the "Upgrade" button when I last logged into this blog and now it's on Blogger Beta.

Anyway, there's not much there at the moment, and it will probably be updated even less frequently than this one, but it's kind-of cool that I can snap a picture on the phone and in a matter of seconds have a blog post online...

I can see it may be useful for posting stuff like holiday postcards when I've left the MacBook Pro behind, but I'm hardly going to bang out a full textual blog post, even using T9 text input =)

Mac mini Media Centre

Haven't posted a lot recently, here's what I've been up to (in between changing jobs and a few other things...)



I picked up an ex demo Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 GHz with 1.25GB RAM and 80GB HDD for $850, I then added an Elgato EyeTV DTT USB tuner for $200 and plugged the whole lot into my LCD TV.



For just over $1k, I've now got an 80GB High-def HDD recorder, High-def tuner with DVI outputs (not dodgy HDMI with it's integrated copy protection) a media centre via Front Row and the EyeTV software, 1-click program recording, even remote scheduling of recordings via the IceTV website, all the MP3s I can deal with on tap via the optical digital output to my stereo and all in a funky little package that the wife can easily deal with having in the loungeroom. Oh, and I was able to program my Yamaha stereo's remote to learn the supplied Apple Remote codes so I can control the thing from the other side of the room.



I've added a FireWire 250GB Hard drive for storage of media, so can leave the thing on for as long as I need to to catch up on a few TV shows via demonoid and it's just generally a funky little thing to have...



Now, Equinux's MediaCentral doesn't support my tuner yet, so I don't have an all-in-one Media Centre and TV application, but other than that it's all good - it's just a matter of time before it's all supported.



Add in a bit of Delicious Library action to catalogue my CDs, DVDs and Books, and there's not much more I could want it to do...

Delicious Library

Delicious

I've just been playing with the Delicious Library, and it seems to be a quick and painless way to catalogue your books, DVDs and Music.

You can scan barcodes using either a barcode scanner, or via the built-in iSight in new Macs (or via a standalone iSight attached to a Mac that's missing the webcam) and it will look up on Amazon and enter all the appropriate details for each and every item.

So far, it's been able to find over 95% of the items I've fed it, and it arranges all the items on a bookshelf where you can browse the covers. There are rich searching capabilities and you can loan items out to people and the loans are all tracked so you can easily remember who's got what...