An hour ago I found Grooveshark. It’s Spotify with these changes:

• It’s in your web browser, meaning no download. Perfect for people on the go who want their digital life in the cloud
• You and (even better) others can upload to the service. If there’s a song you want on the go which isn’t available, upload it – but someone else have probably already done it..
• Don’t seem to see a point to go premium (no higher bit rate, no ads (using adblock))
• If I want to go Premium, it’s over 3 times cheaper than on Spotify. It’s only $3
• It has Requiem for a dream, which I have been forced to go to youtube to enjoy
• Oh yeah, and there’s a WordPress plugin..
• UPDATE 1: Playlists can be ordered in “playlist order” meaning you can create a “mixed tape”

The negative

• I get an error saying song can’t be played sometimes (trying again fixes it)
• No keyboard shortcuts
• iPhone app isn’t out yet
• The sound quality can be (or is always?)  better in Spotify. Example: Alice Cooper with Poison

Norway won Eurovision in 1995 with the song Nocturne by Secret Garden

But one of our best and most fun contribution was in 2005 with In My Dreams by Wig Wam. We ended up in sixth place

10 years ago we sent Stig Van Eijk with the song Living My Life Without You. We were sure we were going to win that year, but it went terrible. But today, ten years later, we’re back to believing we have the winner song with Fairytale by Alexander Rybak

What song in this years Eurovision is your favorite?

Enter http://filesharer.org and post a mug shot of yourself!

Firefox won’t disappear tomorrow, but with time the fox will disappear.

Why will the fox die out?

Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, have developed their own rendering system: Gecko. Google Chrome however uses WebKit for its rendering.

Wait, wait, wait – rendering system?

A browser can be divided into two parts. What you see around and on top and the main area – where the web page is. Around the web page you find stuff such as: Addons, Tabs, etc. In the main area the rendering occurs. Because of this, web pages do not look the same in different browsers. The goal is that of course that the web page is rendered in the same way in all browsers, which is a web developers wet dream. A web page is written in codes, such as a headline: <h1> Wait, wait, wait – rendering system?</ H1>. The different browsers to disagree on what this <h1> code and how it should appear / rendered on your screen.

Ok, keep on

So Google Chrome uses another open source renderings system: WebKit. Gecko (Firefox’s rendering system) can compete with WebKit today. But WebKit will evolve to become a standard of the Web that Gecko won’t be able to measure up against. To find out why, we’ll have to look at who’s behind WebKit.

The fact that Google is supporting the WebKit development can be enough to kill Firefox, but little Mozilla (the developer of the Gecko) must not only compete against big Google. The biggest contributor to WebKit is Apple, which uses WebKit for the Saferi browser on their Macs, PCs and iPhones, and if if that wasn’t enough, Nokia also supports WebKit.

What do you think? Does Mozilla stand a chance against Google, Apple and Nokia?

The problem however, is that there’s no standard javascript library. So every (fancy) plugin loads it’s own library, which slows the blog heavily down. The load time of this blog was almost 10 seconds on a 1.44 mbit connection. After doing some optimizations and disabling some plugins (removing the fancy image effect, lightbox, alone took away 3 seconds) the blog now loads in 5 seconds on a 1.44 connection.

New features:

• Finally an archive of my posts!
• Pages 1-5 in the footer instead of just next and previous post
• iPhone plugin – try accessing my blog from your iPhone :)
• It’s now possible to answer comments. This is great since some of my posts got over a hundred comments
• My posts no longer ping each other. Not a huge problem, but still pretty annoying.

/etc/xdg/autostart

Did this help you? How?

Kontera In-Text website advertising solutions allow publishers to monetize their content without taking away additional webpage real-estate.

From the Kontera webpage

I’ve been trying Kontera for a couple of weeks and I’m now removing the in-text ads. Why? I’ll tell you why!

1. The “Publisher center” isn’t good at all. It’s only good for getting the code to embed and viewing your revenue. I would however like to be able to help Kontera with the targeting – Select how many ads are shown per page or per word in the post – View the revenue by post. I want to feel I’m in control over what’s happening on my blog.
2. Kontera is from Israel
3. This is the main reason: I think product placement is bordering to unethical advertising, and selling your voice and getting payed to write a biased post is over the border. Turning the text into mouse-over ads isn’t unethical, but is certainly annoying to the reader. There should be a certain payoff for the publisher  for being an asshole, and the the payoff from Kontera is not big enough. In two weeks, I’ve made $0.35. And for what – annoying my readers?

Kontera’s sucky text-ads might work better for you, as a publisher, if you’re writing about mainstream stuff and not geeky stuff like Linux.

First of all – I like the name: Firefox Tablet. I hope Mozilla approves the use of it. It they don’t – please don’t call it Icecat Tablet.

My first idea was to add 3G connectivity to it. A little SIM card reader under the battery can’t be too expensive.

My second idea is to not only select a small screen and a slow CPU because of the price, but also because of it’s power consumption. About 10″ should be enough or what do you think? The resolution is more important than the screen size. Minimum 1024 pixels wide – please don’t give me that Asus Eee 800 pixels crap. It would be amazing if we could squeeze 6 hours use out of it.

My third and last idea is to have a “little arm” on the back. It’s important that it’s not in the way when holding it. But when you’re have a video conversation, it can be nice to put it down on the sofa table. And the great idea here is that when you recharge it, you put it in an upstanding position, plug the cord in and it turns into a digital picture frame – streaming pictures from you computer!

Do you have any ideas?

In their mockups they’ve used Windows and Safari, but it’s going to be powered by Linux and Firefox. I’ll be blown away if it ends up as thin as they’re hoping for – And I sure hope they don’t go for that bluish border.

The idea is that it should boot Firefox right up, no window manager, and should also come with Skype. I like that they’re going for Skype instead of Ekiga, like Ubuntu Eee. Can I have a 3G connection as well please?

Update: More ideas :)

As for the advertising; I’ve looked into a lot of different advertisers the last weeks. With most of them, like Comission Junction, you have to select exactly who or what you want to advertice for. I’ll might try that out, but Google Adsense really got an upper hand with their automatic way of finding compelling ads.

In other news; mastercard just bought me a Xbox 360 and GTA4 – thanks!

Working on

• Selling a webshop / eStore solution. I built it for Norwegian non-profit organizations and thought that instead of selling it at a normal eStore price, I could sell it cheaper but to more organizations. It’s not selling as good as I would hope though.
  You can try it out here: http://jonramvi.no/auf (Norwegian)

• Ubuntu Eee. A customized version of Ubuntu for the Asus Eee. It comes with not only free (as in speech) software but also free (as in beer) software. Eg: It comes with Skype instead of Ekiga. And there are some driver fixes and other customizations. Ubuntu Eee 8.04 isn’t really that different from the regular Ubuntu release, but maybe we will have more customizations ready for the 8.10 release.
  Follow the development here: http://ubuntu-eee.tuxfamily.org/index.php5?title=Community_news
  
  
• A Facebook application. The idea is a kind of hybrid version of Underskog (Norwegian), StumbleUpon and MMORPG.
  
  

Would like to work on

• Write great blog post regularly (once a week?)
• A blog system that allows me to have two front pages. One in Norwegian and one in English. The Norwegian one should show all posts but the English one should only show English posts.
• A dazzling blog design

Wine is one of the fastest developed open source applications. A new Wine version is released every two weeks. Not only can you run World of Warcraft, but new and heavy games like Call of Duty 4 are also supported. One application that users have been wanting to run on Linux for several years is Adobe Photoshop. We’ve been doomed to use version 8 until recently. Google is helping out with the development to have Photoshop CS3 supported. As for now, Photoshop CS2 runs without any problems.

Here I’m running Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu. No tweaking or hacking needed. Just double clicked the exe files

However, a couple of hours ago Louis Lenders managed to install and run Adobe Photoshop CS3. He used the latest available source of wine (from git) which will be released in under two weeks as wine version 0.9.57 0.9.58.

As you can see the GUI is not correctly rendered yet

Give it a couple of weeks, and you can run your precious Adobe applications on Ubuntu / Linux
UPDATE: I’m getting a lot of traffic from digg.com (G’day diggers!), so I’m glad WordPress is hosting my blog.
To all you OS X fan boys: this isn’t a “Linux is better than Leopard and Vista combined and pwns the world!!1″-post. I know OS X can run Adobe applications. They were made for OS X in the first place. This is just a post with the latest status on running Photoshop CS3 using Wine.

1. Open up a Terminal and copy&paste these 3 commands:
   wget -q http://download.tuxfamily.org/blueman/blueman.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

   sudo wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/blueman/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blueman.list

   sudo apt-get update

2. Go to System – Administration – Synaptic …

3. Find “blueman” and “obexfs”, mark them for installation and click Apply

4. When done, all open applications can be closed .

a
Use Blueman

1. Start Blueman from Applications – Accessories

2. Click Inquiry, select your phone and click Bond

3. Type the same pin on both your computer and your phone and the bonding should be successful

4. With the phone selected, click Other and select “Set trusted”

5. With your phone selected, go to Properties – Get Service List

6. Take note of the OBEX File Transfer channel (ex: 11)

7. Click “Device Information” and copy the Device Address (ex: 00:1D:FD:6C:9B:66)

8. When done, Blueman can be closed

a

System changes

1. Click Alt + F2 and the Run Application dialog pops up. Write:

   gksudo adduser YOURUSERNAME fuse && gksudo chgrp fuse /dev/fuse

2. Log out and in again (System – Quit – Log out)

a

Create a folder

1. Go to Places – Home Folder

2. Select File – Create Folder and name it Phone

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Make shortcuts for mounting and dismounting the Phone

1. Right click Applications and select “Edit Menus”

2. Click “New Menu”
   Name: Phone
   Click the image and select any icon

3. Select Phone in the sidebar and click “New Item”

4. Name: Mount Phone
   Command: “obexfs -b THEDEVICEADDRESS -B THECHANNEL /home/YOURUSERNAME/Phone”
   (ex: “obexfs -b 00:1D:FD:6C:9B:66 -B 11 /home/ramvi/Phone”)
   Click the image and select any icon

5. Click OK and “New Item” again

6. Name: Dismount Phone
   Command: gksudo umount /home/YOURUSERNAME/Phone
   (ex: gksudo umount /home/ramvi/Phone)
   Click the image and select any icon

a

Here’s some icon ideas:

1. http://www.iconfinder.net/?q=phone
2. /usr/share/icons/ on your machine

aUPDATE
There seems to be a bug in Ubuntu Hardy’s obexfs. I’m only able to read files. I’m not able to write files to the phone. This should be working in Ubuntu Gutsy though..? The bug in hardy will probably be fixed soon as well.

Everything in the guide is really (that is, when you’re following it) without the quotes.

a

1. Install needed applications
a

1. Go to System – Administration – Software Sources
2. Select Third-Party Software and add “deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/blueman ubuntu bluetooth”
3. Close Software Sources. It will ask for permission to update. Yes, you’d like that…
4. Go to System – Administration – Synaptic …
5. Find “blueman” and “gnome-ppp”, mark them for installation and click Apply
6. When done, all open applications can be closed

a

2. Configure Blueman
a

1. Start Blueman from Applications – Accessories
2. Click Inquiry, select your phone and click Bond
3. Type the same pin on both your computer and your phone and the bonding should be successful
4. With the phone selected, click Other and select “Set trusted”
5. Now go to Edit and select Services
6. Enable Serial, check autostart and click the configuration button
7. From the Host dropdown, select your phone
8. From the Service dropdown, select “dun: Dial-Up Networking” and click Add Port
9. When done, Blueman can be closed

a

3. Configure the dial-up
a

1. Start GNOME PPP from Applications – Internet
2. Click Setup and write “/dev/rfcomm0″ in the Device field
3. Under Options, I recommend you check “On connect Dock in notification area”
4. Click Close
5. If you have gotten your own unique username, password and phone number, write those in
6. Otherwise, write your phone number as username and password and *99***# as phone number”"
7. “Remember password” must be checked (this is a bug)
8. Now, click Connect

How to connect in the future

1. Start GNOME PPP and click Connect

a

UPDATE 8th of May 08

How to use the data cable / usb cable instead of bluetooth

1. Connect the phone with the cable
2. In 3.2, where you type /dev/rfcomm0, click Detect instead.
3. Close and Connect

1. fring (http://www.fring.com)
   fring is an IM client that supports MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, SIP, Twitter, AIM and Yahoo. Nothing to get too excited about, other than the fact that it’s free. The really cool thing is that it supports Skype – with calls. Most new Nokias got WiFi now, so this application is gold. Call for free to others on Skype and almost for free to anyone (with SkypeOut) anywhere you’ve got WiFi access. I would however like to see it take use of the camera in the phone.
2. Nokia Search (http://europe.nokia.com/A4568514)
   If this didn’t come with your Nokia, you should start downloading straight away. This is a dektop search (like Google Dekstop) for the phone. It searches though you messages, notes, landmarks, calendar events – the list goes on. While not as fast as I would have hoped, this application is really a time saver!
   While I was searching the Norwegian phone list with Nokia Search, I thought it would be great if, when I found the person I was looking for, it allowed me to call or navigate to the person using the data it found. To my surprise, I was actually able to do these things. Great work Nokia!
3. Gmail (www.gmail.com/app)
   Google has taken taken the time to make an excellent email reader. Thanks for that!
4. Nokia Maps 2 (http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/maps)
   Nokia Maps (1.5) which comes with Nokias with GPS is good. It’s better than Google Maps but it does have it’s flaws and missing features. It’s all fixed in Nokia Maps 2! Photo / hybrid maps, not just start using your Internet connection, actually differs between when selecting Walk and Car, quick search (for businesses etc.)
5. Conversation (http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/conversation)
   This application shows you your text messages like a chat. It’s not that amazing, but very handy if you’re going through some texts. It integrates with the Contacts-application.
6. Location Tagger (http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/locationtagger)
   Got GPS in your phone? This application runs in the background and get the longitude and latitude of position you take your phones in. Flickr and other picture sites / systems has a function for letting you view photos from where they were taken. Some people tag all their photos with the position. Have an application do it for you
7. Opera Mini (http://www.operamini.com)
   The browser that comes with Nokias is great. And it’s open source, which tends to mean I like it even more. It does however have some memory difficulties. If if runs out of memory, which it does when loading a heavy page, it just quits. While this is also a problem in Opera Mini, it happens less often.
8. WidSets (http://www.widsets.com)
   An framework application for Internet widgets. It’s got potential, but it’s not that exciting yet. It’s good for getting the weather report.
9. Nokia Podcasting (http://europe.nokia.com/podcasting)
   Lets you automatically download podcasts. When you’ve got a WiFi phone, why first download podcasts to you computer before synchronizing it over to your phone?
10. Share Online 3.0 (http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/shareonline)
    This application integrates into the photo application and lets you upload pictures and movies on the fly. Newer phones got it installed by default. It only works with Flickr and Vox. That’s supposed to change. I would really like to see Facebook support.

I tried Songbird when the 0.1 release candidate or something was released. I really wanted to like it, but I couldn’t see what all the fuzz was about. “Hurray, it’s Firefox with a black skin which plays mp3s”. A friend of mine has now open my eyes though. The current Songbird version is “developers release 0.4″, but don’t let the name fool you. It’s fully operational, in the same as Gmail still is in beta.

Just like Firefox, Songbird is all about add-ons. The application itself is an iTunes-looking player that plays lots of different formats. It also has bookmarks to several music websites (which can be customized). One of these bookmarks is Skreemr which searches through blogs for the song title you enter. The results are great, meaning you can through out Limewire, DC++, KaZaA (if you still had any of those lying around) and have a great download client right in your default music player. And the great thing is that Songbird lets you stream or download directly into your music library.

But as I said, it’s the add-ons that turns Songbird into a premium music application. I’ve got these add-ons installed: Album Art Manager, Audioscrobbler, iBird, Now Playing List, Wikipedia and Norwegian translation. I would also like to install AlbumApplet when it supports the 0.4 release, as it gives you the nice CoverFlow function from iTunes.

• Album Art Manager takes care of fetching album art, displaying them and showing a nice notification when the song changes
• Audioscrobbler gives you basic last.fm support
• iBird is a feather (read skin) that makes it look like a native OS X application
• Now Playing List divides the music library into two parts, as in Amarok, so you’ve got a playlist-view and a library-view at the same time
• Wikipedia fetches and displays information about the artist
• And there’s a translation for pretty much any language imaginable

What I would like to see is:

• Better last.fm support. I would like to have pretty much have the same possibilities as in the last.fm application (which is open source, so it shouldn’t be a problem if someone just copy&pasted the code into Songbird)
• Nokia music transfer. Probably not going to happen though, as Nokia loves keeping things closed
• Replay gain which normalizes the sound of all the tracks in the library
• Lyrics fetcher and viewer
• Adblock which removes ads from the different bookmark (maybe it’s possible to just add the Adblock add-on for Firefox?)
• *UPDATE* When the last.fm support is in, I would like to send the song now playing straight to Skreemr, hey, and why not automatically download the first hit? So what I really want is a download button in the last.fm radio.

If you actually read all of this, why not take Songbird for a spin?