Pandora [ http://www.pandora.com ] is a project that grew out of the Music Genome Project, and promises its users that it’ll let them find new music that they’ll love. I can back that up. I’ve been using Pandora for quite a while now, and find it a very robust and useful service; full of bands and artists that I both know well and have never heard of before, and able to present me with listening options for some of even the most obscure artists that I tested it with.

All flash based (which means compatible with any web browser that can deliver flash content), Pandora is part online music player, part radio station; but what sets it apart from other services that are somewhat similar like Yahoo!’s Launch and Last.fm is that the service doesn’t just learn from your up or down ratings of the songs that play, but can also generate stations based solely on the artist, band, or even specific song that you give it to work with.

Continue reading Review :: Pandora…

Ever since the Leap_A worm/trojan appeared on the scene a couple of weeks ago, Mac users have had the relative absolute safety and security of their platform dinged pretty badly. The Macintosh is still, at least in my opinion, one of the most secure platforms out there and Mac OS X one of the most secure, mostly because Apple identifies vulnerabilities and patches them quickly and takes security into account when designing features and elements of the operating system. (Now before everyone goes nuts, I think that other operating systems are secure also, but I wanted to hit on this specifically)

In response to the Leap_A issue, and to the fact that Mac users will likely see more and potentially more dangerous and harmful malware coming to the fore in the near future as Macintosh computers become more popular, the Macintosh operating system becomes more popular, and more and more crackers target Mac users, we’ve decided to refesh the Mac audience’s memory on a couple of useful pages in the Apple Knowledgebase that will help you practice safe computing and keep your computer clean of malware and keep your data safe. Let’s take a look, shall we?

Continue reading Safe Computing Tips for Mac Users…

I know, I know, I can’t stop talking about the MacBook Pro, but it’s probably because I want one so badly. Over at iFixit [ http://www.ifixit.com/ ] the fine folks there have posted what I think is the first complete disassembly guide for Apple’s MacBook Pro, and it’s incredibly complete and has detailed photographs and instructions as well. This is no slouch guide; they seriously documented the process step by step in case anyone might possibly have to do it. I’m really really impressed. I can’t imagine why you would have to disassemble one so early on in the product line, but perhaps if we start seeing hardware problems this will be an invaluable guide. Head on over and take a look at the guts!

[ iFixit :: Performing Complete Dissassembly ]

One fine blogger decided to see what would happen if he/she added 100 of the most popular Firefox extensions to their Firefox installation. The result? An incredibly crowded set of browser windows, but all in all the experimentor claims that Firefox, even laden down with over 100 extensions, was still mostly stable!

Doubt me? There’s screenshots to prove it; including probably the biggest right-click menu I’ve ever seen in my life thanks to all of those extensions having been added. The poster reports that Firefox definitely slowed down, but all in all the extensions coexisted rather happily, and few crashes altogether. I definitely wouldn’t reccomend doing this (and I’m sure the author wouldn’t either) but it definitely makes for a great experiment to watch someone else do!

[ Splasho :: The SuperBrowser ]

According to Microsoft, this most recent build of Windows Vista is feature complete and all full of the goodies that they intend to keep in the upcoming new version of Microsoft Windows. Well, who else but the fine folks at ExtremeTech to take us through a nice long photo tour of some of the things we’ll see in the upcoming version of Windows, due out later this year. Some of the graphic effects are really pretty, and the addition of integrated search, more plain-language features and error messages, and finally the ability to transfer files and settings between Windows computers, all make lots of sense and make the OS one to anticipate. But then again, these are just screenshots and we’ll see more when people actually get down to playing with the build for real and see how it runs. So far all of those beautiful graphics and features look to be significant memory hogs, and the test box running it above has 2GB of RAM in it. Yikes. Either way, only time will tell.

Here’s the photo gallery from ExtremeTech:

[ ExtremeTech :: Inside Windows Vista, Build 5308 (Feature Complete) ]

Can’t wait to run Vista yourself? Try this article from ExtremeTech on how to build your own Vista box today!

[ ExtremeTech :: Build a Windows Vista System Today! ]

Maybe it’s because I want one so badly that I’m paying special attention to Apple’s MacBook Pro, but I can’t help it; they’re so sexy and have nice hardy Intel Core Duos under the hood! I just have to have one. But before I make a purchase, I want to make sure I’m getting good bang for my buck and I’m not walking into a nightmare, like any good computer buyer!

Well, MacWorld comes to the rescue with a first-day review of the MacBook Pro that looks pretty good, and will only get better as more of the commonly used professional applications that are currently only available for MacOS running on the PowerPC are ported over to the Intel architecture that the MacBook has under the hood. So far so good, and hopefully in a couple of months I’ll be blogging from my brand new baby!

[ MacBook Pro: First day, First Lab Tests ]

It’s official; over a billion legal songs have been downloaded from the iTunes music store since it opened. The iTunes Music Store is available in over 21 countries, and the winner of the billionth song download has been notified that they’ve won the billionth song grand prize; or in other words a 10 60Gb iPods, a 20-inch iMac computer, and a $10,000 iTunes gift card! What a prize, eh?

Quite a benchmark Apple is celebrating today, and a well-deserved one; Apple almost singlehandedly responded to the demand of the music loving community and offered them a method to download only one or two songs they liked instead of having to purchase an entire album, and gave us all a way to get our music digtally but also legally. Congratulations Apple, and congratulations to the billionth song downloader!

[ Apple :: 1 Billion Songs ]

Update :: The billionth song and downloader have both been announced to the public! The billionth song was “Speed of Sound” and purchased as part of Coldplay’s X&Y album by Alex Ostrovsky from West Bloomfield, Michigan. Congratulations, Alex!

[ Buzzpatrol :: iTunes Billion Song Winner Revealed ]

The Democracy video player made its official debut today! Brought to you from the folks who started the Participatory Culture Foundation in their efforts to bring you a way to experience online video and internet television in a new and centralized way where you can watch your favorite shows, reccomend them to other people, experience new content through their channel guide, and explore new content that you may not even know is out there.

The application is available for Mac OS X and Windows, and you can even bring in your own favorite video shows, podcasts, and other online media, and will go out and get it while you’re watching other things. It’s definitely the best way to experience web video someone’s come up with to date. Head on over and check it out today.

[ GetDemocracy.com :: Democracy Video Player ]

The first volley of MacBook Pros that Apple announced at the MacWorld Expo last month have finally started shipping and are arriving in the hot little hands of the folks that ordered them. A couple of people have posted their photos of the unpacking of their brand new hardware, and even one group has already taken their MacBook Pro apart! Quietly in the background however, Apple has quietly removed the 15-inch G4 Powerbook from it’s online store today. So if you’re shopping for a Mac laptop, the MacBook Pro is the way to go.

Anyway, the hotness has definitely arrived though; and people have the pics to prove it! Engadget broke the first set of pictures here, including links to a previous unpacking of an Apple Dev test MacBook. Regardless, check out all three sets here:

[ Flickr :: MacBook Pro Unpacking (reportedly from Apple Campus) ]

[ .Mac :: MacBook Pro Unpacking (end-user order) ]

[ OWC :: MacBook Pro Unpacking...and Disassembling! ]

The number of blogs on the web is growing exponentially, and everyone knows it. But here’s the kicker; there are about fifty or so that are most often linked around the web, and an interesting web of relationships ties a lot of them together. From the blogs of Gawker Media [ http://www.gawker.com/ ] that includes blogs we love like LifeHacker [ http://www.lifehacker.com/ ], to the extremely personal stories of Dooce [ http://www.dooce.com/ ] to the liberal political blog DailyKOS [ http://www.dailykos.com/ ], similar relationships abound between the most often read and linked to blogs on the net, and now someone’s bothers to put the relationships together into a tidy little graphic.

Sorry, Gears and Widgets isn’t on the list, but maybe we will be someday! Here’s the story, the entire list, including a nice infographic PDF that you can print out if you like the list:

[ NY Mag :: Linkology - The World's 50 Most Often-Linked Blogs ]