Tim from Switchfoot posts about getting around the copy protection on their latest album

From what Kate says about the Toronto gig, U2 played a good concert with lots of audience participation. I’ve never been to one of their concerts but would really like too, but tickets are so expensive and difficult to get. Incidentally Kate, your comments are not working with a “You need to define a comments pending” error message. Unfortunately this blog is also getting hit with trackback spam – not a good sign for a MT 3.15 installation which I thought was meant to make it harder for this thing to happen.

Adam was kind enough to send me an invite to Pandora, a new music radio site. First impressions are that it looks pretty good but I do not think it is as good as Launchcast with yahoo.
The first artist I added to the radio was Petra – It didn’t have any Petra tracks so decided to add a track similar to Petra. Now Petra are a rock band and the track that was similar was some kind of latino string music – NOTHING like Petra’s stuff at all. I deleted the station and created one for the Newsboys. It told me that it would play a track similar to the Newsboy’s music…and proceeded to play Take Me To Your Leader by…..The Newsboys! The next three tracks were Sunfair by Creeper Lagoon and HumanKind by Grant-Lee Philips (who sounds VERY similar to Newsboys) followed by Radiation Vibe by Fountains of Wayne.
Without the possibility to pause, rewind, fastforward or add other artists to a station to influence the music I’m just not impressed. The only good thing is that it doesn’t have the ads that Launchcast has – but then this is a paid for service (when it comes out of beta) and the paid version of launchcast also doesn’t contain adverts (allegedly). It does live up to its promise of introducing you to new music as I had never heard of any of the three bands that it proceeded to play after the named track.

It’s been a long time coming, but apparently Petra are splitting up at the end of the year. They have been going for 33 years so it probably is about time to retire. Personally I’ve not been as impressed with their recent music as I was in the early 90’s but maybe I was getting older quicker than they were. (This will be good news to Kristen who doesn’t like their music)

My Orb testing is going well and it doesn’t seem too bad. I found out that if you use a server and client on the same network then the data stays within the lan (according to this forum post). After hard resetting the dell axim I was able to stream video (over the lan) with no perfomance issues. Whilst we were at easton on Wednesday I took the opportunity to use their free wifi and was able to access some of the pictures from home (although it was a bit slow but I think thats the wifi access rather than orb). (At this point mediaplayer was not working on the dell so I couldn’t try accessing a film). Overall I’m pretty impressed. I’ve not yet got round to trying VLC so I’m not sure how the speed compares but it certainly compares favourably with slimserver which is my preferred streamer for audio as it has better indexing/searching facilities.

Orb looks like a good multimedia server package that lets you stream audio and video to any internet connected pda,phone or pc. It will also let you look at your webcam and setup tv recordings (assuming you have a compatible tv card) from a remote machine as well as allow you to view previously saved recordings – beats a vcr anyday. I’ve not actually tried this yet as I don’t have a tv capture card although I am sorely tempted to get one – It would be much more convenient to store tv shows on the hard disk than it would be to remember to rewind the video tape, program it and hope it worked correctly.

Kelly passed on a music meme and so here are my answers…

• Amount of Music on my computer 14.6gb although 3.6 of that are talking books
• The last CD I bought Keane’s hopes and fears. Some great songs although they do tend to sound very samey if you listen to them a lot.
• Item playing right nowThe Call’s Let The Day begin – mainly because it was the last tape that I recorded to mp3 before the clearout before moving to the states. I first heard this whilst at Greenbelt in 1988 and loved it. Shame they didn’t go onto do anything else that got popular.
• 5 songs I listen to a lot
  1. Dirty by Audio Adrenaline – in particular the Stoke On Trent remix where the local town was used over the normal lyrics when they were interviewed by Cross Rhythms radio. This new mix got played until the boss found out and pulled it for the official link.
  2. Something by the Newsboys – too many good tracks to mention and is often on my playlist.
  3. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen – keeps popping up on my Yahoo launchcast (which is how I tend to listen to music most of the time when at the computer)
  4. Honestly by Stryper – can you tell I like the oldies?
  5. Manic Monday by Relient K although I’m reluctant to post that as I might get fan mail again from all the females who think that I am somehow in the band because I posted I got to see them in concert. Relient K topped Yahoo’s Who’s Next poll recently so they are starting to go places. (yep thats another 80’s hit)
• Five people to whom I’m passing the baton
  Danny (good excuse to get blogging again!)
  Mike
  Angela
  Dave
  Jon

Slim Server V6 is out and with the purple skin looks nice and seems to perform ok.

I was listening to Radio2 in the afternoon on thursday whilst working from home and heard a bluegrass version of run dmc’s “Walk This Way” which was really funny. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the bands name. This morning I mentioned it to Kristen and she said they were called Hayseed Dixie. A quick search on google didn’t initially come up with any downloads for the song, but I did come across a (couple of) live recordings of their concerts so I’m downloading Hayseed Dixie in concert at Columbus, OH, recorded in April ’04
Update – it definitely was Hayseed Dixie