The Flock of Geek

While jogging across the interweb last night I came upon the most advanced audio sampling technology currently available. Unfortunately you cannot buy it in a shop and it does not integrate too well with cubase. These shortcomings can be excused however as the sampling quality is excellent. This is a very rare piece of kit and we should make every attempt to preserve it for future generations. I will bore you no longer, here it is: The Lyre Bird (Patent Pending)

First there was electronic music, then came electronic mail (maybe they were tantric and came at the same time), but now ladies and gentlemen we have the electronic cigarette....

I shit you not, some whacky scientists in China have come up with a way for you to smoke in clubs. Thats right you can now get a nicotine hit in your favourite night spot without having to freeze your reproductive organs off in the freezing cold.

While trying to download a 6Gb file from Furk via HTTP I learned that Virgin Media will throttle your bandwidth down to mere trickle after the first 4 gigs. The advice on Furk is to use a download manager for these situations.

After a bit of searching I have found the best download manager for Ubuntu. Well, its the simplest and easiest to set up. For me that makes it the best way to Resume Downloads on Ubuntu.

This weekend I had the pleasant experience of setting up a Logitech Squeezebox in our living room. After months of hearing CaptainMish from subVS.co.uk rant about the extra dexterity and charisma points that you get for owning one of these devices one finally manifested into my life.

Converting files between different formats has always been something of an arcane art. A lot like alchemy. You take a bit of lead, heat it to 3000 degrees, apply sulphuric acid by the light of a blue moon, cool it down in a bath of sheep bile and you get some gold... or a bit of slightly yellowed lead.

Today a small Miracle occurred, an open source TV player called Democracy Player rose from the ashes and transformed itself into a new and more user friendly player called Miro.

GET MIRO HERE

Miro is the first of the new generation of TV players to actually work on an operating system other than Windows. In fact it works on Windows, Apples and installs easily on Linux which is more than can be said about the likes of Joost and its stream of clones.

Why is Miro better and cooler than Joost?

Back in the day, not so long ago in fact, if you wanted to download a backed up copy of a game from the web you would first have to remember which free web page provider you left it on and then you would have to leave your computer dialled into the Internet for 3 days while you downloaded it. This old school method had two major drawbacks:

-The free hosting people would normally delete your file, bummer.
-Your Phone bill was always larger than the cost of the software you had backed up.