Archive for March, 2009

In all other countries [not United States, United Kingdom or Germany ], listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month. There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio.

src: http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

It happened. Another company turned away a massive portion of the world. Well, they are making them pay for NOT being where the advertisers are. More countries might be added to that list down the road but for some countries like my own, that is highly unlikely.

So everyone else gets about 2 hours of radio. Per account. I am not seeing people going trough the trouble of making multiple accounts to be able to listen to more but come on.. how about limiting people to listening to the charts ? Or to songs freely given to Last.fm for promotional purposes ? You cannot tell me that Last.fm pays for each and every song that is played on it. With a audience as big as this, I bet there are people who would pay for their music to be played more frequently and I wouldnt blame Last.fm for excepting that money.

One of the reasons I think that is already the case is the inability of someone to ban a certain artist or tag. http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/380227/4 And dont go saying it will ban a artist when you ban enough songs. It is simply imposible to get rid of Bri#### Spea## of the pop radio.

I am a subscriber. I love Last.fm (probably tuning in 90% of the time my workstation is on). There was no real reason for me to subscribe back when I did. I just wanted to give something back. I didn’t care and I don’t care for the little things i get extra for subscribing.
And there is where I think the problem is. How about making people want to be subscribed ?

• Songs on demand
• Official Premiers (you say you work directly with artists ?)
• Tickets to concerts .. official ware from artits..

etc… there is so much that could be done.

And fix the damn song exceleration/flickers after a long time of usage. (only noticed that on Vista trough.)

A new toy to add to my collection, SpaceNavigator.

Put some extensive testing into it the past day, installed it on Ubuntu 8.10, MacOS and Windows Vista 64bit.

My initial reaction is, wow. It really shows they put a lot of effort into making it work where ever one might need it. Ubuntu needed a bit of configuration, as 8.10 has this hotplug Xorg driver that gets in the way. Then just a regular install and it works with a updated Blender.

The configuration tools are the same throughout platforms and usability is also identical. Trough the device depends on the applications use of it for OOTB functionality, it also has some individual program configurations.

The SpaceNavigator itself has absolute positioning, although it registers as a relative positioning device (that makes linux use it wrong without drivers). Phisically its a big heavy metal ring with plastic/rubber controol ends. The metal is there to keep it grouned while you use the up/down axis. Rotating it left/right works to about 5 degrees and about double that for all the other axes.

The thing I disslike about it is really something I fealt before with the graphics tablet but didnt mention. The bright blue circual light. When I leave my pc standing for some time, monitor turns off and the room turns blue. (not as bad as with the pulsating bamtoo tablet but non the less brings alot of unneeded attention to itself)

The best use I found for it is Google Earth and Blender. Worth the 60$ ?

Just a quick reminder that Open Source has to be founded too.

Love you

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