blog@osd.se

I got an invite a couple of days ago and I wanted to write something about it. It’s mostly positive. Almost only positive things, but lets take the bad first. Not all my music was available (no surprise) which is a bit annoying when it’s more like a music player than a radio (like Pandora or last.fm). You can’t really use Spotify as your only music player when you can’t listen to missing songs, free songs found on the internet or any other general sounds that you might find/have. You’re limited to what they have to offer. This was mostly annoying in the beginning when I wanted to listen to specific songs in my old playlist. After a while I more or less stopped listening to them, because it was too much work to switch between Spotify and my other music player.

Now the good stuff. What really impressed me at first was how fast the songs started and how jumping in the song really is as fast as your ordinary music player. No delays whatsoever. The interface is nice, iTunes-looking. There are of course some things that could be smoother, but I won’t go into them here. Even though it’s negative that not all my music was available on Spotify, they had a lot of stuff that I didn’t expect to find. I wonder if they agreements cover the same amount (or more) for a released product, or if the content is just for the beta.

The radio is so-so, but does its job I guess. You select zero or many genres and they try to play music from those genres. Sometimes you don’t really agree with the genre set for a song, and sometimes it’s plain wrong, but most of the time it makes reasonable choices. You can also select from which decade it should play music, which was something that I liked playing with.

Time to go back to listening to Dilated Peoples again (though some of their albums are missing in Spotify).

Awesome music. Enough said, I think.

Nah, they deserve more;

Ed Banger Records is a bit hyped lately, but they’re worth it. I find most of the stuff they release really good. I’m a big fan of Justice and DJ Mehdi mainly. DJ Mehdi’s Signatune is simply awesome. First time I heard it (the album version) I just wanted more of it (it’s only one minute long). Fortunately for me, Thomas Bangalter had already made a longer remix of it. Check it out on YouTube. I also suggest you check out Justice vs. Simian – We are your friends, because the video alone is easily worth it. If you want more, check out their (Justice’s) songs D.A.N.C.E and Phantom too.

Another good label is Institubes. My favorite artist there is probably Para One, who has made some really good songs. Dudun-Dun is one of the best.

(This post is based on the content available in Sweden. We don’t get Comedy Central, for example.)

A couple of days ago I got myself a Joost beta invite from GigaOM, so I’ve been testing it out a bit. To start with, I miss sitting in the sofa and relaxing, because my chair isn’t nearly as comfortable as my sofa. I do have a computer hooked to my TV, but that computer runs Ubuntu and I have no plans to change that – at least not just to run Joost. There is a a Linux client planned for Joost, but it’s not yet available. Also, I think Joost gives you a better experience if you have a mouse to control the application with. Even if the available keyboard shortcuts worked well, they didn’t quite cover all my needs. I also missed the relaxing part with TV; just watching and letting someone else decide what to show. Being able to chose between lots of material is not the same as only having a bunch of channels to switch between, but I guess that’s what Joost wants to change too.

Something that they seem to have added more of lately is ads. Not like commercials on TV, but very short ones, lasting just a couple of seconds between the shows. Saying things like “brought to you by hp.com” while showing a blue screen with a hp logo on. There is also this small box popping up in the lower right corner every now and then. I’ve seen a couple of different company logos there and you can actually click the box and it seem to be a ordinary hyper link which opens in your browser.

I watched for a while, but besides some music videos, I didn’t find a lot of material that was interesting to me. Often what seemed to be a interesting program when reading about it, turned out to be a five year old crappy talk show clip, and it was harding knowing what was old and what was new. To guess that “Episode 152″ is older than “Episode 160″ is fairly obvious, but there’s nothing that tells you if it was recorded 1999 or 2006. I couldn’t find any interesting TV shows or movies that I’d like to watch (except possibly Fifth Gear). However, if you do like Lassie, Poker, Indy 500, MTV-like shows, silent movies, fighting and soccer, there’s stuff for you to watch. Unfortunately, I don’t really like any of those.

One should keep in mind that this is a beta version. I hope they add a lot of more content before release, because it’s needed. Rumors say that a release is close, so I hope for their sake that they have time to do it before that. (Their financial part seem to be working at least, because they recently announced a $45 million funding from various companies.)

Unfortunately the content isn’t Joost’s only problem. When I started watching today, some (old) Fifth Gear episodes, it wasn’t smooth at all. The download speed wasn’t fast enough (I have a 10Mbit/s connection and wasn’t using it for anything else at the time), so it couldn’t fill its buffer to deliver smooth sound and video. It kept skipping for the first few minutes or so, then it got better for about ten minutes, and then the skipping started again and continued until I decided it wasn’t worth watching. To start with, I wish they would have used a larger buffer so it would download more data between the buffer underruns. The pauses would of course last longer then, but I think it would have been a better experience. NewTeeVee reports about infrastructure problems with P2P and it could indeed be related to my own problems today. It will be interesting to see how this develop, because the hype in its own will probably keep Joost alive, at least for a while after the launch.

If you want an invite anyway, just let me know.

There’s a new World in Conflict trailer out and the game still looks great. I think it could be a really fun game. Unfortunately, you can’t really know that until you can play it. I hope for another great Swedish-made game.

Download it either in 852 x 480 (52MB, torrent) or 1280×720 (83MB, torrent), 720p.

Yes, it’s The Pirate Bay. If you don’t like that, grab it from Fileshack, but you have to get yourself a login then.

(This isn’t really news, but I felt I had to mention it.)

The coolest game idea in a very long time!

If Little Big Planet is done right, it’s the kind of game that could make me buy a PS3. Since I probably won’t buy a PS3 before it’s released, I hope I remember to try it out when it is.

Enjoy!

• Little Big Planet Environmental Creation Demo At GDC 2007
• Little Big Planet – GDC 07 Online Co-op Trailer

(Edit: “daniel” sent me an invite. I’m not sure who you are, but many thanks!)

I wonder if Spotify is as cool as it sounds like. If only I had an invitation so I could try it out *hint* *hint*. Now when we in Europe can’t listen to Pandora, there’s definitely room for something new and Spotify looks like it could fill that spot and more (the social part, that Pandora doesn’t really have). From what I’ve heard (in Swedish) about Spotify, it at least sounds like a cool product, even though the social parts are apparently missing right now in beta.

I tired Pandora for a month or so back when it was brand new, but I didn’t like it that much. I often want to listen to a particular artist and only that artist for some time and that’s something you can’t do with Pandora, or last.fm for that matter. That’s why this quote

Other times you need to scratch that itch with one of your oldest favourites. (From Spotify.com)

made Spotify interesting to me. I’ve just recently started using last.fm, but not mainly for listening to music, and I like the social idea about it (though I have to admit that I don’t use it a lot yet) and like David wrote, it gives you an idea about what you can do – what Spotify could do.

This was pretty cool: http://homepage.mac.com/digego/study_in_keith.mov

I’m not good enough to actually hear exactly how the code translates into notes, but the entire idea is kind of cool, and so is the result. I only got the link, so I’m a bit curious what the background is. If anyone knows, please tell.

Edit: I suck. This is of course the origin. Impromptu is the name of the programming environment. This is just so cool.

When do Google Reader check for new posts really? Not often enough in my opinion, but I guess that’s what you get if you want someone else to do it. Perhaps it’s time to check out some Firefox plugin or other program to keep track of my RSS flows.

Unrelated to Google Reader, but this made me remember how glad I am that I didn’t bother to expand my own WordPress theme to cover the blog features of WP. IE is a mess to work with (or rather against).

(Yes, www.osd.se does also run WordPress, but not the same installation. I was consider trying to do that, but I decided not to bother. It gives me some extra work on upgrades, but a lot to bother with now. Upgrading WP is usually really smooth anyway. I upgraded www.osd.se from 1.5.2 to 2.1.3 without basically any trouble at all. A third-party plugin needed an upgrade and another was made redundant (static first page). That was it.)

Firefox crashed on me while writing this text. Thanks WP for automatically saving the post while writing and reducing the amount of stuff I needed to rewrite. Shame on Firefox!

Yesterday I noticed a C&C3 (Command & Conquer 3) guide on IGN. Normally, these guide consists of five pages listing all the buildings, their usage and cost to build. Stuff that anyone who have played the game picked up after a few minutes, and is always present on the screen while playing. Then the rest of the guide lists the units. Just trivial facts. Facts that aren’t interesting to anyone. I’ve always wondered why people like writing those guides, since I doubt anyone read them.

Anyway, the good news is that this was not one of those guides! The first part (”Basics”) was very basic, but it was just one page and the name kind of hinted that it would be basic too (…) so I can live with that. The rest turned out to be a guide for the campaigns. Each mission (I assume; I haven’t actually played through all missions) had its own page with some screenshots and some text giving hints on what to do and in what order. To give you an idea on how the text could look, I’ll quote a part here from the GDI campaign walk-through:

It’s probably a good idea to establish a refinery and a War Factory by the Rift Generator, but your top priority should be guiding some Mammoths north from your primary base to take out the Disruption Towers. These are cloaking the Nod base, and if you take them down soon enough, the Mothership will head for Nod instead. Now mount your attack on Nod, gathering all the Mammoths you have and plow through. (From IGN.)

What positive to see is the hint for taking out the Disruption Towers to get the Mothership (dangerous Scrin unit) to move towards the Nod base instead. Now, if this is information that you’re given in the game, then it’s not interesting at all, so I’m a bit nice here and is assuming that it’s not and that it’s actually a helpful hint.

The guide is pretty large (42 pages) and covers not only both the GDI and Nod campaigns, but also the Scrin (yes, there’s a third faction in C&C3) campaign. However, I haven’t played that campaign and the guide only features four missions, so it might not be complete. Someone who have completed the game should correct me on this.

I really miss subjective information based on opinions on the web. Facts are good too, but when I browse gaming sites for guides, I’m usually interested in some really good hints on how to use some units in a creative way, or some other way to gain an advantage towards my opponent. It seems to me that people don’t really dare to be have their own opinion and argue for it (if you draw it to the extreme). However, a couple of days ago I found this guide (linked from Planet CoH) on how to use some of the tier 3 Axis units, in Company of Heroes, in a good way. It was interesting and fun to see, even if I don’t agree with everything in it. (I’m way too much of a defensive player myself, so I need my 88mm AT/AA guns…)