Muser – Inspiration in an iPad App
Tweeticide – for when you absolutely, positively, got to kill every motherfucking tweet in the room
Maybe you’re a born again Christian politician caught down a back alley having your hose hoovered by a rent boy (what are the chances?!) Maybe you’re a woman-beating grammy-winning hip-hop wanker with a big mouth, a small penis and a knack for winding up WWE wrestlers. Or maybe you were just indiscreet after the office party.
If the evidence is on Twitter and you’d like it eradicated, then you could usefully employ this app, which will wipe your Twitter account clean without having to create a new account, leaving your screen names, followers, and direct messages intact while destroying the tweets. As long as you understand that this is an imperfect process and that once something’s online, it’s probably online forever, Tweeticide may prove useful.
Read MoreWith Flickr’s rebuild impending and SnapJoy on the way – 500px launch a redesign and (finally) a store
Well here it is, 500px users – the long-awaited store. Ever since the big fall out with Snapfish, 500px subscribers have been waiting for a way to monetise their expensive hobby by flogging prints, greetings cards and mousepads with their photos on them. I gave up all hope of ever seeing a return on my subscription to ‘Awesome’ and set up accounts elsewhere, but the slow turning cogs at 500 have finished rotating and here’s the result. It’s all quite underwhelming – basic canvas prints at $500 a go – no choice on size or frame, let alone finish. I dare say it’ll improve in the future, but at present the 500px shop is shockingly mediocre.
The Best Internet Radio Players for Mac, Windows and Linux
Internet Radio has been around for longer than you think. I can remember tuning into some American stations way back in 1995 courtesy of Real Audio’s player. I couldn’t stay online for long because I was on a metered ISDN line, but it was amazing listening to that station and its adverts and traffic reports.
More than 17 years later and now the vast majority of broadcasters transmit their shows online as well as over-the-air. There are also specialised Internet-only radio stations and you may even find that you can get some stations unmetered over your broadband connection. Sure you’ve got Spotify, Pandora, Last.FM and Google Music offering their services too, but proper managed radio shows remain the easiest way of listening to music you love and discovering new songs.
So the question is – what’s the best way of listening to these stations? Now it’s worth pointing out that iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp and Banshee can all play streaming radio stations, but we’re not interested in some bloated media centre behemoth hogging memory and CPU cycles – we’re after something specialised, lightweight and flexible. These are the three best Internet radio players for Mac, Windows and Linux.
Screamer Radio – Windows – Free
Screamer Radio has two things going against it. Firstly, it has a stupid name and secondly it has an interface only a mother could love. Neither of these things detract from that fact that Screamer is far and away the best Internet Radio player for Windows and we shall just have to accept the name and the interface in the name of quality and flexibility.
Unlike some other radio player applications for Windows, Screamer comes fully equipped with one of the most comprehensive lists of stations I’ve ever seen. These have been divided into four sections – Categories (Dance, Rock, Hip-Hop, News etc.), Country, Foreign Language and Network. So for instance if you wanted to listen to the Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1 (and why wouldn’t you!) you can find the station in Network > BBC and in Country > UK. If you listen to a particular station a lot, add it as a favourite for speedy access.
Amongst Screamer’s other tricks are recording (it’ll record individual tracks or blocks of time and can even be set up to record on a schedule), lossless audio encoding and basic audio effects. It’s incredibly easy to use, comes fully loaded with all the stations you’ve need from install and can be minimised to the System Tray for easy access. Yes, the interface is very plain, but that also makes it very simple to use. I’ll take Screamer over iTunes any day of the week.
Radium – Mac – $24.95
If I’d been writing this article six months ago, then I’d have chosen RadioShift as the best Mac Internet radio player thanks to its massive TuneIn powered database of over 100,000 listings. Unfortunately Rogue Amoeba have ceased development of that app and so while it’ll continue to work for existing owners, everyone else will have to look elsewhere. That means that Radium is currently the best Mac radio player you can buy.
Radium lives in the menu bar for ready access to all your stations. It doesn’t come pre-loaded with stations – you need to search for them and then add them as favourites. This cuts down on clutter and listings for stations and shows you’ll never listen to, but it means you need to be a bit more pro-active at discovering listening sources. You can search for station names, country, city, language or genre and then click on a search result to listen or add it to your favourites.
Amongst Radium’s neater features are full AirPlay support, social network sharing, customisable shortcuts, Apple remote support and an equaliser. There’s also an awesome history feature which lists all the songs you’ve listened to online in the past and enables you to listen to them again or buy them on iTunes. Radium’s an awesome little radio player, always at hand thanks to its menu bar interface and surprisingly powerful once you start exploring it.
Radio Tray – Free – Linux
There isn’t a massive amount of variety for Linux users when it comes to listening to Internet radio (with the caveat that media players Banshee and Amarok will do this) but it only takes one good app and everything’s sorted. That’s definitely the case with Radio Tray, which takes its design cues from Radium and serves as a simple and reliable radio player for all Linux users.
I installed Radio Tray via Ubuntu Software Centre, but you can grab the tarball or Ubuntu distributable from the website if you want a direct download. It’s a tiny application that sits in the system tray and has to be configured manually with radio stations. Stations can be grouped in categories and are added directly via URL. It’s a bit of a pain in the arse adding all your stations manually, but you only need to do it once.
Radio Tray can play most streaming audio formats, including PLS, M3U, ASX, WAX and WVX formats. That selection encompasses pretty much every streaming broadcaster meaning it’s unlikely that you’ll find a station that the app can’t play. Audio quality was great, with swift connection to audio sources and a cool notifier on-screen showing station and song information.
Alternatives
If you don’t want to install an app to listen to your radio then it’s perfectly easy to do it directly within the browser. Most radio stations have their own feeds on their homepages, but if you want a comprehensive list of stations and shows then TuneIn is where you should look. You can search for stations worldwide at TuneIn and listen to shows directly in your browser using the site’s Flash/Sliverlight powered player.
Shoutcast have been serving up streaming audio for nearly as long as the format has existed and they’re still going strong. They offer 50,461 right in the browser and supply good listening to over half a million people daily. Finally, there’s RadioPaq provide access to radio station worldwide.
Borderlands 2 Trailer Blends Guns, Cartoon Styling and Dubstep
Ubuntu for Android
As awesome ideas go, this one’s pretty cool. Ubuntu are proposing that future Android handsets come embedded with Ubuntu OS in them – the idea being that you simply dock your phone and use that to work on, instead of having a second PC. I have no reason to believe that this isn’t perfectly feasible – Ubuntu runs bloody well on very crappy hardware and it makes perfect sense to me to have all your ‘stuff’ in one place. I wonder what the take-up will be though.
Read MoreHövding – Instantly Deployable Gas Powered Head Protection for Cyclists
Hövding is an ‘invisible’ helmet for bicyclists. It utilises similar technology to cars to compute when a cyclist has been involved in an accident and deploy accordingly. It inflates in 0.1 seconds and provides full protection for the head by inflating an eveloping shroud using a cold gas inflator full of helium. It’s available now and the fashion conscious cyclist will be pleased to hear that the protective collar will be available in a range of trendy styles.
Visits – Google Analytics in a Menu Bar App
Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the most useful tools that Sergey and Larry ever gave us. By inserting a bit of code in your website you can drill right down into the data on your website’s visitors and improve your pageviews and bounce rates. However the actual Analytics website isn’t the most accessible and checking visitor metrics becomes something of a chore. Visits is a small Mac app that enables you to view top content, referrals, search keywords, browser stats and locations for all your tracked sites. It distills the pertinent data down into an easily digested format and is always at hand on the menu bar if you want to see how your day’s views are going.
Read MoreTaxi for Mr Heywood Jahbloemee – Letterboard for iPad
It wouldn’t make much sense running this particular app on anything less than an iPad, because your intended audience would probably need their reading glasses to see it. Letterboard enables you to create the kind of signs the limo and taxi drivers hold up at the arrivals lounge at airports. It’s classy, simple and undoubtedly easier to read than Sharpie on cardboard.
Read MoreRedNotebook – An Excellent Cross-Platform Journal App
If you’re the sort of person that likes to record daily events, but doesn’t necessarily want the world to know that the Swedish meatballs you ate for dinner have given you explosive diarrhea so violent that you can’t sit down without a doughnut cushion, then private journalling apps are a good option. The exact opposite of blogs, journal apps like RedNoteBook enable you to record your life’s twists and turns in private, tag and format your text and insert images and files within a secure personal environment. Should you have a change of heart at some later date and decide that the world needs to learn about your collection of 1970s caravan catalogues, then you can export to PDF, HTML, Latex or plain text.
Read MoreFlipTime XL – The Perfect Partner for your iPad Dock
I‘ve always loved flip clocks – there’s something so very comforting about that old analog action and its coolness can even survive being transformed into an iPad app. There are plenty of flippy-number clock apps on the App Store, but I reckon FlipTime XL is the best one and the ideal app to have running on your iPad when you plug it into that fancy desktop dock of yours.
Read MoreTrack Your Local and Broadband Traffic and Bandwidth with Networx for Windows
With ISPs in many countries cracking down on bandwidth and rolling back the generous packages they used to lure everyone onto broadband, it’s more important than ever to be able to track your usage. Networx is a great free utility that enables you to track and analyse every aspect of your network connections whether they’re LAN, WAN or off-plan. It can monitor your broadband usage and alert you when you’re getting close to your cap and, if you have an SNMP enabled router, will even monitor that directly giving you the full picture of all traffic on your household network. You can get it here.
Read MoreCobra Tag – for when ‘down the back of the sofa’ won’t cut it
The Cobra Tag neatly tackles two first-world problems in one go. Firstly it functions as a proximity alarm, reminding you when you’ve left your keys, bag, infant child (or whatever else you tag) on the bus. Secondly it can be used to locate your missing items by sending out an alert sound when you trigger it. The whole system is controlled from an Android or Blackberry app called PhoneHalo. It’s available now for $79USD.
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