Google have released their official Gmail Notifier. Sits unobtrusively in the systray and checks your gmail every few minutes.
An interesting and amusing comparison between the iPod and The Cassette Tape (found on Hydrogen Audio).
Ok, so I’d be the first to admit that Apples iPod and iPod Mini are two sexy looking bits of kit, but I’d never buy one. In response to Cheah Chu Yeow’s post pointing to ‘Five reasons not to buy an iPod’, here are my reasons. Ironically none of them are the same as any of the five given in the article (well, maybe one!).
It won’t play any of my music.
I made a conscious choice quite a while ago to encode all of my music in Ogg Vorbis format, which has some advantages over MP3. Better quality at the same bitrates, sample granularity for perfect gapless playback, and open source so I know I can always play my music on any platform (at least that’s the idea). The iPod will not play this format, rendering it pretty useless to me. And yes, I’ve seen the iPod Linux project!
It doesn’t do gapless.
Bit of a show-stopper for me this one. I listen to quite a lot of prog stuff, Dream Theater, Marillion etc… so a player that inserts a gap between every track would just annoy the hell out of me.
It’s pretty expensive.
This one isn’t such a big deal any more, the iPod isn’t really that much more expensive than most others, although it is still one of the highest price units on the market. The iPod Mini in particular is a bit pricey. Why spend
Wow, somebody has re-written Lemmings in DHTML! It plays exactly like the original too.
An excellent guide to tweaking the hell out of Doom 3 has appeared at Tweakguides.com.