tech, news, productivity, views and stuff
Seems iTunes is not the only place giving away free stuff over the festive period.
We’ve got an extra gift for you this Yuletide: £3 to spend on anything in our MP3 store on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Visit us on December 25 or 26, then just add your chosen MP3s to your Shopping Basket (you need to use the Shopping Basket rather than 1-Click) and enter code FREEMP3S at the checkout–£3 will be deducted from the total.
Remember this offer runs out on the 26th December 2008.
It’s typical, I buy some tunes from the iTunes Store and then the very next day Amazon announce their new mp3 Store
Though the songs I got from the iTunes Store were iTunes Plus (ie DRM free) the mp3 files from Amazon are encoded at 256 Kbps compared to the 128 Kbps at iTunes.
Hearing about the US version on MacBreak Weekly I am pleased to see we now have our own version here in the UK.
See what they have at the Amazon.co.uk MP3 Store
I don’t have a Flip camera, but certainly have thought they could be useful.
MacWorld reports on the release of the Flip Mino HD.
Pure Digital Technologies on Wednesday announced the release of the Flip MinoHD, which it bills as the world’s smallest HD camcorder. The Flip MinoHD can store up to 60 minutes of HD video.
Andy Ihnatko (from MacBreak Weekly) has written an informative blog post comparing the Flip Mino HD and the Kodak Zi6.
I’m actually planning a rather ambitious comparison of cheap HD cameras in the next week or so. But there’s certainly been an enthusiastic — bordering on, well, “annoying” — amount of interest in a direct comparison between the Mino HD and its natural commercial enemy: the Kodak Zi6.
I think I might get one.
Finally after remembering to register the application on the phone I was able to use JoikuSpot in the wild!
I am really pleased that I made the upgrade. I can now check e-mail and use Twitterfon. I only checked with an iPod touch, so I still need to check it works with a laptop.
Sorry due to a server failure we have been offline since last night, but we’re back…
If you have the time, the energy, the MacBook and a Windows 7 disk, you can have some fun too, according to PC Magazine Labs.
Here we are sitting in the PC Magazine Labs, and it occurs to us: We’ve got a shiny new Macbook Pro and an early build of Windows 7 on disc, so why not attempt to use one to run the other?
Would you believe that three billion photographs have been uploaded to Flickr? And not all by me!
Wrote about this on e-Learning Stuff.
On my old G4 PowerBook, changing the battery was a piece of cake. Shut the lid, wait until the light glowed, then remove the flat battery and replace it with a fully charged battery, lift the lid and back to work…
With the MacBook Pro you can’t do this… in theory it is suppose to suspend the computer and save the current state if you remove and replace the battery in the same way as I use to with the G4 Powerbook. However from my experience it is very much a 50/50 chance that what will actually happen is that replacing the battery will result in needing to boot the MacBook Pro. Of course this means that any unsaved work is not saved.
Annoying.
The problem is that (as far as I am aware) there is not a way to set the state of suspension manually, you have to let the computer do it.
As a result I do like the hibernation mode that you find on Windows laptops, very easy to replace the battery then, though it can take an age to resume from hibernation.
I knew Spooks was coming back this autumn, however not watching much on the television recently meant I didn’t see any trailers. Nor did I get a newspaper either, so didn’t know that it was on tonight at 9pm.
Years ago it would have been a problem as I would have to wait until repeats.
Now we have a few technologies which make it much easier.
I could wait until it appears on DVD, though generally with BBC programmes it takes a long time to get onto DVD.
With Freeview I can watch repeats on BBC Three later this week…
And of course BBC iPlayer means I can watch it now, less than 30 minutes after it finished on BBC One.
Cool.
If you are combining recordings or have multiple inputs into a recording it can be a real nightmare to get the levels right. Now you could spend a lot of time and money mixing in the different recordings, however a quick and easy method is to use Levelator.
It’s software that runs on Windows, OS X (universal binary), or Linux (Ubuntu) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a few moments later you’ll find a new version which just sounds better.
Find out more about Levelator.