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Pandora music player

June 28, 2006 By Leave a Comment

I just ran across the Pandora music player… Wow.

The idea is to identify a song or artist that you like, and by using the Music Genome Project Pandora tries to identify similar songs and artists. You can guide it by saying you like a certain song or dislike it, you can prevent songs from being played for a month or so, etc.

The whole player is browser-based (it uses Flash), and has a lot of neat little features (like a progress bar underneath the album cover for the song, and cool little animations when you provide song feedback).

This is a free service that shows and displays ads, or you can subscribe to an ads-free version for $3-4 a month depending on the subscription plan.

Filed Under: Music

Actiontec Internet Phone Wizard – part 2

June 22, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Well, it’s been about a month now that we’ve been using the Actiontec Internet Phone Wizard with Skype, and it seems to be working OK.

My wife has used it for a couple of long-distance calls to family in the States, and some of those calls last up to 1 1/2 (she’s a professional talker…). I’ve used it to call family overseas, and the only complaints we’ve heard is the occasional stutter in the speech, and on one overseas call there was a hollow sound to the phone call.

The hardest thing is to remember to set up a speed dial code for a long-distance phone number – meaning there is a limit of 100 numbers you can set up as well. An incidental call cannot be made without setting up a speed dial code – unless I missed something in the documentation.

One gripe about the setup is that you have to be logged in to Windows to use the Phone Wizard and Skype. It would be nice to run this all as a service or something. For now, I think I have to resort to an automatic login (I remember seeing an option for that in Windows XP somewhere).

All in all, I like the Phone Wizard. There is room for improvement, but the quality is good, and you can’t be the cost of Skype…!

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Google launches Picasa Web Albums

June 14, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Google has once again launched a new service, called Picasa Web Albums. This is Google’s answer to Flickr and Yahoo! Photo’s, integrated with the Picasa software running on your desktop.

Interestingly enough, this is not touted as Beta, but rather as …

The only limitation (apart from it being invitation-only) is that the storage space is limited to 250MB of free storage. For $25 per year you can get an additional 6GB of storage. The system requirements section leaves out the fact that Picasa is also available for Linux.

It looks like an interesting alternative, and I’ll definately sign up for an invitation. I like the Picasa software, and even got my wife to use it, so this would be a natural extension of the photo experience.

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