From the side yard.
Lala.com
I’ve used lala.com’s CD trading service off and on ever since they bought WOXY.com. They seem to have a new business model; store your music in “the cloud”. Their new website design has a music player built-in (flash) and a little program that you can run on your pc to tell them which songs you already have. Then you can listen to your music collection from any place with an internet connection and a flash-capable web browser. You can listen to any song once for free and if you like it they want ten cents for you to listen to it online again. If you want to download it (as an mp3 thankfully) then it’s a very reasonable 89 cents.
So far it seems like a pretty cool idea.. one that might take off if Apple lets their iPhone application into iTunes App Store.
I just bought new DJ/Rapture album (downloaded as an mp3) for about $2 cheaper than amazon had it. Their little download/upload application is grabbing it right now.
The Diamond Age
I’m currently reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age in hopes of making it through to the three books in his series The Baroque Cycle. Apart from constantly needing to consult a dictionary I’m really enjoying it. It’s no Cyrptonomicon but it’s close enough. I recently purchased a Sony ebook reader and have really been enjoying reading a book about an electronic book on an electronic book.
Apple TV
I got tired of hooking up my Macbook Pro whenever I wanted to watch a movie. It’s a nice little device, simple interface and easy to get going. Sadly it does not play a good deal of the video formats out there so I guess I’ll have to hack it to add more.
Nokia N810
I bought a used Nokia N810 and it arrived today. So far the hardware keyboard seems much nicer than the one on my Nokia N800. The GPS does seem to suck so far but I hope that gets resolved on the next update. My first toy for it will be a little app that uploads data from the built-in GPS and makes it available…. sorta like APRS does.