Having had my little Sony MP3 player for a week now it’s just reminded me of the many failings of listening to tunes on any digital platform. Not even mentioning the lack of any tactile feedback from these devices, why does the software make it so hard to do what you want, which is just listen to the tunes you love?

Having bounced around from Winamp to Musicmatch and back, then onto XMMS and finally to a nasty hack I cobbled together myself, I still (to quote those noisy irishmen) haven’t found what I’m looking for…

Fine grained control of which tracks you like and which ones you don’t. A rating of one to five just doesn’t cut it anymore. (Well not for me…)

A random playback mode uses the preference data intelligently, plus details of when you played things to give a truly useful random play mode. (No more Scooter or thrash metal as you’re about to turn in…)

Totally transparent downloading of album and single art and lyrics, don’t keep asking me, just do it!

If you know of any tools out there that fit the bill then let me know…

Aprils Fools Day. Harumph. All across the world in tv newsrooms and newspaper offices, in radio studios and in front of PCs yesterday, people were desperately scrabbling to come up with something vaguely amusing…

As a result, with so much eratz news about the joke wears a little thin. Emperors new clothes thin. What annoyed me even more was my RSS reader. Of the 40 or so posts I got yesterday, 38 were bollocks, and the other two I can’t take seriously in case they’re nonsense as well….

This one looked the most plausible of the lot but I’m just not sure. Is it? Isn’t it? You decide

Rant over. jpf out.

Just got myself one of these. 2Gb, dinky little colour lcd, USB charging. 30 hours on a full charge and about the size of a pack of gum. I would use my mobile phone as an mp3 player but I don’t want the headphone cable acting as a waveguide for the radio signal and piping it straight in my lugholes…

The only downside is that it’s not a true drag and drop usb device. You’re forced to use Sonys bastard SonicStage software. If I’d realised that at the time I probably would have gone for the equivalent Phillips model. There is a way round it, but I’m not that brave…

I guess the lesson for the day is mea culpa. But that’s what you get when you’re a sucker for Sony style. Damnit they get me every time.

I’ve been scraped, which is both a surprise and a disappointment at the same time. Some automated system has decided it liked the look of my post on the 12th and decided it fit the criteria for inclusion on their entirely synthesised site. Nice of them to include a link back to the original article, so that makes it alright then…

Of all the things that I considered when I started this test installation, and I’ll reiterate that it’s only a test at this stage, being used by a automated tool to provide handy chunks of content for someone else’s link farm wasn’t one of them.  Frankly I didn’t think there would be anything that’d interest anyone else other than myself and a few friends I’ve pestered into helping me test the site.

So the lesson for the day is, underestimate the depth and breadth of the internet at your peril. Here endeth the lesson.

Aarrgh! Why can’t application developers just agree on a few formats and then stick to them. I’ve been having problems with a file created just two years ago. The only bit of software that will read it is the program that created it. I can’t even persuade Corel Draw to open the pdf.

Now I’m stuck with the option of using the the original application or re-working the design from scratch. It’s not anything complicated, it’s just the sheer replication of effort that annoys me. Hardly an ideal state of affairs…

So if there is anyone out there who fancies knocking up a quick flyer advertising a caravan for let, drop me a line (Or better yet drop me a finished file…)

This message was brought to you by touch-typing, i.e. incredibly slowly…