Friday, December 19, 2008

Amazons DRM free MP3s

A couple of nights ago I finally found some time to check out Amazon's new MP3 service and so far I'm pretty impressed.

No DRM


My interest in the Amazon MP3 service was piqued when I discovered all their tracks are DRM free (unlike some other crippled offerings). The songs are encoded at 256 kbps which is a pretty respectable bit rate.

Linux support!


I got even more excited when I went to the getting started page and in the "Buy and Download" section they mention they have a Linux version of their Amazon MP3 Downloader application. And they haven't gone for some budget "one size fits all" Linux solution, but they have binaries for most of the major distros.



It's really encouraging to see this sort of first class support for Linux by companies like Amazon.

What if I'm running 64 bit linux?


If like me you are running the amd64 build of your distro you will need to convince Amazons MP3 Downloader to run against 32 bit libraries. If you use Ubuntu then I suggest the excellent getlibs tool for installing your 32 bit dependencies. After you've downloaded the Ubuntu deb file, install it using:
sudo dpkg -i --force-all amazon*.deb


Then install the 32 bit dependencies with getlibs:
getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3


It's dangerously easy to use


Amazon certainly seem to have a great range of music on offer. To test things out I purchased by Kruder & Dorfmeister using 1-click. The 3 track EP cost me £2.37, you can get full albums for around £6-7 (or $9-11 US). The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a simple but effective app downloading Shakatakadoodub to my machine in a matter of seconds. From there it was a simple job to import into Banshee. One mouse click was all it took to purchase and download a DRM free EP!



I'm a happy camper


Overall I'm really impressed with this offering and can't understand why it hasn't had more press. It amazes me that people stick with crippled solutions like the iTunes store when you have a DRM free alternative like this available. I know where I'll be buy my music from now...


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Thursday, December 11, 2008

Tomboy for windows

When working in Windows I like to use as much Open Source software as possible to make my environment as familiar to my Linux desktop as I can. I have many of the popular applications installed such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, MySql, and XEmacs (who said XEmacs wasn't popular?!).

Recently a Tomboy preview for windows became available and a few nights ago I finally got round to installing on my laptop. Tomboy is a great application and works the way a note taking application should work.

The install is a little fiddly if you are running Vista due to a bug in the Gtk runtime installer, but it's not too challenging to get running.

If you've ever wanted an application to quickly jot notes into I throughly recommend you give Tomboy a try.

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Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Vista performance and Aero

Misinformation everywhere


Do a search for Vista performance tips and you will get dozens of hits, most of which will be espousing the same advice - if you want better performance on your Vista machine turn off Aero.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with Vista Business installed. It's a fairly high spec machine and should be pretty snappy, however coming from using XP at work and Ubuntu at home I found Vista very slow. I followed the advice of a number of different sites and (among other things) switched of Aero. I noticed a marginal performance improvement (probably due to switching off search indexing) but still wasn't happy.

Switching Aero on improves performance


Just the other day I decided to switch Aero back on. It was like I'd found the turbo button. My machine was much more responsive and Visual Studio went from taking around 30 seconds to load to starting in 1-2 seconds.

In retrospec it kinda makes sense. Vista has support for offloading the rendering tasks to the GPU so why would you force all this work back onto the CPU by switching Aero off?

It worked for me...


Turning Aero on improves performance (at least in my experience) so if you've previously switched it off, try turning it on again - you might be in for a plesant surprise!

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Monday, December 01, 2008

Superstring theory 101

I thought I'd post this presentation Brian Greene did at TED in 2005 given that it seems a few people are interested in the book I'm currently reading: .


The presentation is a fantastic primer on Superstring theory and, should it wet your appetite, the book will certainly appeal.

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