Posts tagged as:

music

iTunes & Nokia Music has a serious competitor – Spotify

by Geekboy on 7 August, 2009


Earning LifeHacker’s “Best Desktop Music Player” post.. I had to give Spotify a try.

It’s free and easy to use.. with looks borrowed from iTunes Media Player but better, simplified interface..
There’s loads of music.. if you type an artist, they will listen EVERYTHING they have and you’ll be surprised (especially if you like remixes). It’s fast and all these are done via cloud computing, which means, nothing is really residing on your computer.. So you can go into any computer with Spotify’s program, log in and get all your favourite tracks!


Even though its streaming music, Spotify does support offline (no internet access) play by storing the songs you played last.. how much is stored, depends on how much disk space you give it. [Check Menu \Edit\Preferences on the program]

You may get the ‘Not available in your country’ notice, because of the various tracks’ copyrights restrictions.

So if you’re in Singapore or any country outside the UK or supported countries… you can try this.

1. Go to http://www.daveproxy.co.uk
2. Enter ‘www.spotify.com‘ into the URL (bottom of the page)
3. You can use ‘A9 9AA’ as the postal code
4. and sign up for free!
5. Download the application and enjoy!


You may need to sign in every 13 days to prevent them from locking you out (because you’re not in the UK). Or try using one of the many available free UK proxies. [Menu \Edit\Preferences]

Spotify is available for Android phones already.

They are working on other mobile platforms, so Blackberry users got to wait some more.

So far it’s been good :)

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Digital Home Storage : Using a NAS (intro)

by Geekboy on 1 January, 2009

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!

As part of my new goals for 2009, I’m going to post more regularly and share more of my living tech experiences and tips for others to benefit. It also serves as a record of what I have found, crawling through the net.

g3435So the first series of articles I’m working on is, having a digital home storage system.

Why?

Because, more of our lives are going digital..

How many of you DON’T convert your new CDs to mp3?

How many of you DIDN’T take the Christmas/New Year/Wedding/Birthday pictures using a digital camera?

How many of you DON’T use a computer? (and if you don’t, I’m quite interested in knowing how you are reading this post :P )

But how are we storing all these pictures/videos/documents?

Keep buying hard disks? burning to CD/DVD-ROMs?

They work.. and there are many ways of doing this.. but I’m have been thinking for some time about this… getting the most value for money but yet and more importantly, protecting my digital memories.

I want a simple system to meet all these requirements.

  1. Big storage
  2. Backed up (mirrored storage -> with Raid 1 at least)
  3. easy and fast access to all the files
  4. reduce the need of multiple files on different computers
  5. lower power usage – so can be left on 24/7
  6. Can even be accessed thru the internet
  7. can be used as a server for my media (mp3/video) files.
  8. share photos easily with user and group access restrictions (big bonus)
  9. my whole family can use (my non-tech parents and sister)

rainbowphotoboxSo after careful researching, I decided on getting a NAS. A Network Attached Storage, basically a machine that houses harddisk(s) and you connect it through your network router/switch.

The next post, I’ll share with you the different NAS systems I have looked at.

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