Firefox Add-on Alert!

I’m a huge proponent of using Firefox and I think everyone should be using it.  So, if any of you are, you should know that some of the add-ons have been made with pseudo-malicious-intent.  You can check here for a list of addons that are doing more than they say they are (e.g. transmitting personal data).  If you have any of the extensions listed on that page, delete them.  This is no reason to go jumping ship, because if you’re not using the Fox, the ship you’re on is already sinking.

Web 2.0 Update — Music

I’ve found some goodies that all music lovers will enjoy. First is Songbird. It’s an open-source music browser built on the Firefox architecture. It’s still in developer preview status (i.e. it’s not finished) but the functionality is there. It’s great for searching the web for new music, old music, rare music, any kind of music. Songbird is being built to replace your current music program (e.g. Window’s Media Player, Itunes, etc…) but it specializes in finding music using a variety of search engines and music blogs. When it finds a song for you, it allows you to either add it to your library and keep the song on the web, or you can download the file to your own machine. It provides mp3 player support, Audioscrobbler, and “add-ons” so the features will keep coming as more and more users write software for it. The full version is set for release sometime this year.

For those of you looking for more adventure, you can make your own media player with Foobar2000. LifeHacker wrote a post about this program that shows what some of the readers were able to come up with. You can read the original LH post for more information about Foobar2000 and some of the functions you can control. As far as I know ( I haven’t used it yet) Foobar2000 only plays media files, it won’t go finding media for you a la Songbird. However, I’m sure someone will come up with a way to get these two gems talking before long, for now, just find and download the music with Songbird and listen to it with Foobar2000.

There are lots of other music tools out there, I don’t have time to talk about all of them (or try them all for that matter). Some others I’ve used or heard of are:

Last.fm internet radio

MediaMaster online media library storage

finetune internet radio

and of course: Pandora

If you know of any other good music utilities on the web, please leave a comment and share.

Time for me to get back to work.

“How’s Texas?” you ask.

I recently returned to Purdue to visit friends and the first question everyone had was, obviously, “How’s Texas?”
Well, thanks for asking. I found the perfect answer tonight when I got home and read Beto’s latest post alerting me to this atrocity. I know summing up Texas based on the rape of one persons civil liberties is a gross over-generalization, but the Dear Leader did come from this state, and personally I think it’s further evidence that American civil liberties have gone the way of the Dodo.