I have just discovered a whole area of IP based LAN technology I knew nothing about until this week! It’s known by various names including Zeroconfig, mDNS and Bonjour and I think this has the potential to completely change home networking.
I have been toying with setting up a DNS server at home to resolve all the host names for the machines on my local LAN, but in my research I spotted a suggestion to use Zeroconfig instead. After a bit of digging I realised this stuff looks very good.
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Gadgets, Internet | 
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Posted by freakent
Another recomendation from the BBC’s Click tv show is Pandora. Pandora is very clever. You start by telling Pandora the name of an artist or a track you like then Pandora starts playing a stream of music which is similar. The concept is very simple but the technology behind it looks quite sophisticated. Once your “station” is playing you can train Pandora by adding extra artists or by using the thumbs up and down buttons as each track plays.
So obviously I created a station based on Massive Attack and then added Portishead and Faithless to it. I have called my station “The Trip Hop Lounge” and it can be accessed by anyone (just click the link). Pandora really works because before long it also played tracks by Dubstar, Cabaret Voltaire and Tricky.
The really interesting thing about Pandora is that it is playing music that I like from many artists that I have never heard of before. I have already ordered two CDs by Curve just because they keep playing on my trip hop Pandora station.
My favourite podcast author, Scott Sigler, just released his third podcast novel called Infection. His previous novels, Earthcore and Ancestor, had me on the edge of my seat so I have high hopes for this story too. I am now on a mission to get as many people as possible to experience Scott’s work as possible - so if you are reading my blog, I insist you go to http://scottsigler.podshow.com/ now and start listening!
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Internet | 
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Posted by freakent
Hot on the heals on Earthcore, Scott Sigler is Podcasting his next book, Ancestor. I’ve been batching up a few episodes at a time and listening to them in the car on the way to work. Earthcore was really good, but this story is even more exciting. Great job Scott, can’t wait to see the movie 
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Posted by freakent
Wow, I really like this. I heard this track on Adam Curry’s show on “Podsafe music“. Adam and Patricia obviously have very different tastes to me. I must listen to more of 46bliss and see if they have a CD.
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Internet, Music | 
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Posted by freakent
This is just a little bit of fun I saw on this week’s BBC Click Online. Visit Cyborgname.com and try it with your own name. I’m looking forward to a bit of nocturnal troubleshooting…
I have started using the online photo service Flickr to share my photos with friends and family. It has some really nice features, like viewing security, excellent slide show in your browser and these cool Flickr badges (check out the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist in the sidebar) . The service is free if you can live with a 20MB per month upload limit, although you can pay $24.95 per year to increase this limit to 2GB per month (and they remove the adds from your pages). I’m using the free service. I wish the slide show images were a little larger and the UI could be a little less confusing to someone who hasn’t seen it before, but all in all it’s a great service.
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Posted by freakent
I first heard about this new Internet-TV show on the “This Week In Tech (TWiT)” Podcast. Kevin Rose, one of the presenters of Systm is a regular guest on TwiT. Systm just released their 2nd episode. This episode is all about building a Linux based MythTV PVR. They go into quite a lot of detail and explain stuff quite well. The first episode showed how to build a box of tricks that would pick up wireless video cameras. This show is very cool and is very professionally produced despite being free to download. You will need a Bittorrent client to download the show, I’d recommend Azureus. If you like Systm you should also check out From The Shadows.
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Posted by freakent
I’ve discovered a new Podcast called EarthCore. It’s not like all the amateur radio shows, it’s a talking book distributed a chapter or two at a time as a Podcast. The story is a kind of sci-fi horror with plenty of people comming to not so pleasent ends. It is read by the author Scott Sigler and he makes a great job of bringing the characters to life. Check it out, I can’t wait until the next episode.
This is an interesting Podcast on IT Conversations about how the combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python (a.k.a. “LAMP”) has become the mostly used web application platform. Despite being one of the biggest supporters of Java and J2EE from the start, I have long been pointing out that most of the web seems to be still running on CGI. Actually come to think of it, this blog is powered by LAMP. Peter Yared interviewed here is from a company that has put together an “Enterprise Grid” enable LAMP product. He reveals a few interesting facts about web application servers - I especially liked the bit about heterogeneous two phased commit.
Peter Yared on IT Conversations >>
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Posted by freakent
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