Google Chrome released
After an impatient wait of ohh, say, 24 hrs (that’s when I initially found out about Chrome), Google has released Chrome as a public beta.
My first impressions are; wow!
In the ten minutes I have used this so far, I am already very impressed. You can see the feature list for chrome here. Or, you can view Lifehackers screenshot tour.
I loaded up my site Skylines Australia in Chrome and it loaded like it was a text document. It was so fast. I also especially like the source viewer and the DOM element inspector. Also, its minimal interface and the start page are also huge bonus’. Hell I could keep going, but all the features that I love are on the sites linked above. I’m looking forward to the first stable release.
Thanks Google (even if it is just another way to collect data about me).
More best filmclips
Ok, so I have been asked to revise my list and add two more. But, then, I figured, good clips come in three’s, so I added one more.
Cyndi Lauper – Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Not sure what to say about this one. If you dont know it, something is seriously wrong. This was also nominated by Brad, which is also a touch strange.
Jefferson Starship – Nothings gonna stop us now. This clip features Kim Catrall who was awesome in Porkys but sucked in Sex And The City.
And Finally. The greatest drum kit that ever appeared on stage (not to mention the greatest chaps);
Van Halen – Jump. Nothing to say about this. Audible Genius.
An average Australian? Not bloody likely.
In a story published today by the Sydney Morning Herald, they talk about an Australian bloke living in Africa and his contributions to the global society as a whole. He owns wikileaks, which, until now, was unheard of by myself. It is a site that allows confidential contributions by whistleblowers all over the world. There have been amazing documents submitted to the site, including many US military documents.
The truth is out there, no matter how covered up it may be.
Nice work Julian, you are now in my list of heroes.
GetUp’s FuelWatch ad gets airtime.
With $70k raised, GetUp’s fuelwatch ad gets a bunch of time slots on multiple channels.
Bloody Awesome.
Use Google Earth to visualise deforestation
A new KML file for Google Earth by David Tyrse allows you to visualise the deforestation occuring globally. He also has one for Oil Spills.
Liberate your music
There are many services out there that (unlike iTunes) offer DRM (Digital Rights Management) free mp3 downloads. This is a great service to offer because the DRM encoded files that iTunes sell have limitations on how many machines they can be played on (not to mention they wont play, even from your iPod, through the Xbox 360 "iPod integration" - a very big selling point for me... ). The problem with these iTunes competitors (such as Napster, mp3.com, Amazon and many others) is that they're only available to users in the US. That leaves us Australians high and dry with no DRM-free, legal, music downloads.
Enter doubleTwist - a free music sharing utility (not a p2p, torrent app) that also strips drm-encoding from your iTunes purchased music. Its a little slow, I haven't compared it to other app's for its speed but it works well and the music files seem to retain their quality well for playback in whatever devices / applications you choose.
This helps me further myself from iTunes that one little bit further, now that I am using Rockbox on my iPod, amarok (Linux) and foobar (Windows) for playback and doubleTwist for music liberation, iTunes is only used for purchasing music.
Nice one. 
Ipod’s weakness
Here's the thing. Ipod's are great for people who are content with things the way others dictate they should be. iTunes is great if you are just happy with things and will just adapt to how things are offered to you. I'm not happy with how things are offered to me and I try to change things to suit my needs. iTunes is great for buying music, even if it's DRM licensing thingo sucks. But I wouldn't let iTunes manage either my ipod or my music collection, no *freaking* way! My emphasis on making sure you know how much I hate iTunes' "management" skills is because it has completely wiped my ipod of all files on several occasions. Something I do not take lightly.
So, because of this, I started looking for an alternative to iTunes for transferring files to my ipod and I found anapod explorer. Now, while most reviews will tell you its terrible and dont touch anapod software, I found it quite good (while it still has several problems, the main one for me is crashing when I am editing my file tags). But the problem here is that it is commercial and I connect my ipod to several machines and damned if I am going to spend $20 on each machine. So, I tried Floola. Yikes. Lets just say that when I left work yesterday after using Floola, most of my music was missing and the music that wasn't missing had incorrect album art and the file names were matched to the wrong files. So Floola is up there with iTunes for trying to ruin my ipod experience.
Then I thought, hang on, why should I need software just to transfer music to my iPod? I should just be able to drag and drop music onto it. So, I bit the bullet and installed Rockbox. Any reservations about Rockbox that I had previously went out the window. It was a breeze to install, it has 100x the functionality of a normal iPod (eg editing music, tags etc on the ipod.) and it stores music in normal files in a normal structure, so you can just drag and drop music onto it. And, as a doubley good feature, it dual-boots with the standard iPod firmware, so it will still work in my Alpine integration box in my car (to play the ipod through my Alpine touch screen).
Rockbox is certainly the business and I recommend it to anybody. No more middle-man software just to use my ipod on multiple machines.
Now I just need to remove the DRM on the music I bought...
Base Jumpers. In Sydney?
I love it.
