Daily Archives: 2010-03-13

last.fm

Posted on 2010-03-13 by pappp

As I’ve been telling myself I would for a while, I set up a last.fm account and attached most of my media playing devices to it:

http://www.last.fm/user/PAPPPmAc

The update behavior is …quirky… but I’m not sure if that is a symptom of my usage or the service. I had a bunch of tracks go from “now playing” to “yesterday evening” (apparently because it is confused about time zones), and a few tracks have been randomly excluded/doubled up/etc. (I think it excludes tracks it doesn’t know?), but I’m reasonably willing to call it working server-side. Client side, maemoscrobbler on the n810 is being twitchy, probably because I’ve replaced a bunch of OS pieces it interacts with with patched versions, but basically seems to work. The last.fm plugin in Rhythmbox on my media machine is much better behaved. I wonder if the squirrelyness is just because I had different clients from the same IP in rapid succession.

There are a couple behaviors that seem natural to me and don’t seem to be integrated: I’d really like to be able to export my whole music library into their connection service, and let it feed back selections to the media player via some protocol; It’s the first thing I’ve come across that even competes with my old Rio Karma’s “Rio DJ” features, and I want to be able to do the unattended “play similar music” stunt with my own music library.

Now to see how long until I leave an album muted on repeat for an entire weekend and poison the account’s history/suggestion engine.

Is anyone else scrobbling?

Posted in Announcements, Computers, Entertainment, General, Music, OldBlog | Leave a comment

A Week’s Worth of Interesting News

Posted on 2010-03-13 by pappp

I’ve built up a week or so of news blurbs I was meaning to comment on/ draw attention to, and never got to posting, so I’m just going to link dump:

The Entourage Edge really is an interesting concept. It sounds like it’s still half baked from the review, and I think the low-power translative screens are probably more promising than e-ink for that sort of application, but I’d love a carry-able device with enough, responsive enough pixels to be decent computer AND the contrast behavior for a decent e-reader. I’d be more impressed if the input and battery life looked better on this one.

The G-Tec Intendix is a $12,250 “consumer” EEG toy. Most of the headband “Brain Computer Interfaces” on the market in the <$250 range are really using secondary indicators (skin potentials, muscle twitches, etc.), this is the first consumer packaged EEG I’m aware of, which is a good step toward getting BCIs into real user applications. Now it just needs to become more usable and cost about two orders of magnitude less…

I’m still hunting for something that is actually equal or better than my N810 (which is slowly falling behind the curve) in every way, so the news that there will be at lest 50 new tablets by the end of the year is pretty encouraging. I haven’t seen anything with an ~4” 800×480 touchscreen, hardware keyboard, open *nix-like OS, and WiFi. Phone is optional; I’d pay for real cellular service if the platform were compelling enough.

In a non-tech bent, This makes me almost incoherently angry. In conjunction with the problems with constantly revising educational standards (which is a topic of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, one of the recent additions to my ever-expanding reading list that I don’t have time for), this is infuriating because it is going to widely alter school curriculum to suit the bizarre beliefs of some unqualified assholes, in disagreement with qualified experts and reality. Genuinely believing the experts on various topics (and/or reality) are “biased” because they don’t agree with your beliefs is psychotic, and should be treated as such.

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