Category: technology

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Service agnostic song sharing.

Sharing links to Spotify or Apple Music tracks always bothered me. It felt like I was indirectly saying “here, only you folk with an account on this service can partake of this joy I am feeling.”

I noticed that some people skipped the two big streamers and just went straight to YouTube – which at least is free, but what if you just want the audio? What if you don’t like to use YouTube?

Then I came across https://song.link. Funnily enough, it was through following Ricky Mondello – a Safari developer with Apple – that I came to hear of this service.

Song.link allows you to share an iTunes link appended to its own URL, and creates a landing page for the song, complete with album art, and with links to all the major streaming services that the particular track is available on. Perfect!

Having looked into how it worked, I decided I needed a simple way to pre-pend the song.link URL and share it to either twitter or Facebook (or both), or to just pop the link into the clipboard to use elsewhere.

If this sounds like something that would be useful to you, you can download the shortcut to the Apple Shortcuts app by clicking here.

Hit me up in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions for improvement.

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Healthy Cynicism and Free Chocolate.

There are scams doing the rounds. Double check sources everyone!

I just sent this email out to our staff – under the title “Don’t believe everything you read.”

We are in the unfortunate position of having to request that staff exercise a level of cynicism – especially regarding requests for assistance that come via email or other methods that aren’t “face-to-face”.

There are people out there who will attempt to take advantage of the general ‘want to help’ nature of our staff – please be aware of any financial requests that come to you (requests to purchase iTunes vouchers for example) – even if the email purports to be from a current or ex-staff member.

Any request like this should be double checked with the individual – either face-to-face or via a known phone number (e.g. not one supplied in the email requesting the assistance).

If in doubt, you can double click the display name of the email sender, to see the email that the request originated from. If the email address is not an internal one, it’s likely the request is a scam. Even if it is an internal one, the request should still be double checked if it is financial in nature.

Thank you for your attention, and stay safe out there! Our staff are our last line of defence when it comes to these sorts of scams.

Oh, and the free chocolate? Unfortunately, that’s an example of not believing everything you read. 😉

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off with the xandros, on to eeebuntu

Wandering around the net looking for EeePC information, I came across this.

Ok, that and the fact you can’t effectively secure the sudo access on this wonderful machine, made me have at look at options.

Right now, I’m using eeebuntu – the Netbook Remix Edition.

Very nice – particularly the UME launcher….

Startup and shutdown is a *tiny* bit slower than the standard Xandros install – but not so much as I thought it might be. In fact, once it’s going, general use is actually quicker (like starting OpenOffice writer etc). Though, that could be because it’s the 2.4 version rather than the 2.0 version…

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Of netbooks and laptops

So, yesterday morning, my shiny new EeePC 900 arrived. One of the first few in the country no less. Very cool.

After having played with 701 series for some time through work, I decided that I’d really like one of those as multi-purpose kind of 2nd home PC cum roadtrip toolbox. I decided to go for a white one as I wanted something different from all those darkly coloured PCs and always had a soft spot for the white Apple hardware. Plus, wifey likes the pearlescent white finish. 🙂

I’m staying with the Xandros linux OS for now, though I’m watching Ubuntu’s netbook remix with interest. That would be rather cool as I use Ubuntu at home (~7yrs) and work (~3yrs) at the moment.

So far, I’ve loaded up some useful work type stuff (nxclient from nomachine.com, pptpconfig, wine+VNC viewer – the enterprise one with AD authentication, bluetooth pairing to use the Palm 750v as a 3G modem) and some more personal stuff (GnomeSword, mplayer).

The quick among you may have noticed the bluetooth reference – no, it’s not built in. I purchased a wee micro-USB dongle for ~$25 off of trademe – works a charm too.

Watch this space….