Last.fm
I just added my recent tracks feed from Last.fm to the sidebar. Had to use the Magpie RSS parser to pull the data from the Audioscrobbler API. It kind of doesn’t work as flexibly as I’d like it to, though. I’ll tweak it around a little more and see if I can make it better. Later…
Picture of the Day
This picture is from the Georgia Aquarium around last Christmas. The tank is full of an assortment of fish native to the Amazon River.
File Sharers Kazaa Settle Out Of Court
The online file sharing company Kazaa (Wikipedia entry; real Kazaa site hosts malware, surprise, surprise!) just settled out of court for a cool $115 million. 
They were simultaneously being sued by Warner Music, Universal, Sony, and EMI. One now has to wonder where all that money came from, since the spyware-riddled Kazaa wasteland could not possibly be that profitable. I guess one thing to remember is that Kazaa used to be run by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who just flipped Skype to Ebay for $2.6 billion… So you’d have to assume that offing Kazaa to Sharman Networks (a company headquartered in Sydney but incorporated in the South Pacific island of Vanuatu) would have given them enough money (and remoteness) to fight the RIAA/record companies/et cetera that wanted them dead. Oh well, hopefully that just means fewer zombie, spyware-infected machines souring the internet for everyone.
Michael Scott-isms
Dubai Waterfront
The other day, I saw a whole documentary about the Dubai Waterfront project, currently underway in the United Arab Emirates. The construction itself is absolutely amazing, consisting of 3 massive “Palm Islands” (like the one pictured, Google Earth .kmz placemark) that will be home to 400,000 new residents. Construction is being undertaken by a company called Al Nakheel, in conjunction with hundreds of architects, engineers, designers, and developers from all over the world. As yet, the completion date is undetermined, (understandably so, considering the ludicrous amount of work to involved in even creating the land for all this property). This whole thing reminds me of Venice, Italy times about 1 million.
At the center of the whole final development will be Al Burj, which will be one of the tallest buildings in the world (built on a few feet of sand, mind you). All I can say is, I definitely have a reason to become filthy rich now.
Microsoft Zune Will Come With Some Content
According to the Microsoft Zune blog, the Zune (Microsoft’s new iPod competitor) will come packaged with “some content” preloaded on it. Way to really go public with that information and not tease the public and build hype, Microsoft.
The Zune doesn’t have a release date scheduled yet, but some seem to think that it’ll be sometime in 2007. The Zune is also supposed to work with Microsoft’s URGE music service, and I’ve heard it’s pretty nice, though I have not actually used it.
Online Feed Readers
I just recently listened to Mike Arrington’s TalkCrunch podcast concerning their overall breakdown of the online feed readers. I decided I’d go check some out for myself.
I basically checked out all the readers they discussed, save Feedlounge, due to the cost factor. I had used the Newsgator product before, and I liked it alright, but it seems if I was solely a Mac user it would be more useful (considering their NetNewsWire product syncs with Newsgator online, but currently there’s only an OS X version). In the end I’ve decided Rojo is a great product. It’s fast, Ajax-y, and the social networking features really interested me. Lately I’ve been using reddit’s online reader (super-light and beta I believe) and the FeedReader desktop application, which is open-source and pretty slick, but I just use too many computers to not have the read/unread synchronization. I think it’s now safe to say that the combination of digg and my Rojo feeds will now waste a fair portion of my free time…