There are some really great places online to buy music. The small independents are getting the right idea. The store I was on today was the best yet, full length previews, all formats the same price just a great experience.

It’s pretty simple, listen to the album you want to buy, click BUY, select your format (MP3, AAC, ALAC, FLAC etc…) enter you Paypal details and boom your downloading your stuff. No signing up, no messing about.

It was easy, simple, and overall a good way to buy music. I still prefer CD’s but as they offer ALAC and FLAC it’s fine and reduces wear on my CD drive.

Bought an album and an EP for £8, all FLAC so I can convert to any format I want, just good stuff.

I joined Twitter a while back and have been getting in to it. Pretty good for updates on stuff.

I’ve recently ordered a new computer and like with all things when they are new you gotta check them out for faults. Screens are always a worry, so with this in mind I’ve knocked together a little tool that simply allows you to check the display for various little things.

The tool is set out in two phases, the first phase consists of the tones white, black, light gray, gray, and dark gray. These will let you spot the easy pixels, gray is nice as you’ll be able to see if the panel is evenly lit. The second phase is just an RGB test, cycles red, green, blue, yellow and magenta. This will show any pixels that are stuck in those main colours.

It’s pretty simple and a tiny download written in Java so you’ll need Java installed. Mac OS X users have the Java system by default, Windows users will need it, thats if you don’t have it already, most people do. There is a Read Me included in the download with full instructions.

Any problems / help, or if you have something to say let me know.

I have written about Streamripper before (removed the older post as is was out of date), it’s an interesting little application that I use now and then. I originally wrote about compiling it back on OS 10.5 Leopard, at that time the current version was a bit busted but in the end I got it to work and posted the details here. Times have changed and software changes so I thought I would update the world on my use of Streamripper. After all the messing about I had with the 1.62.x range of Streamripper I had settled on using 1.61.27 with security patches. I used this for quite a while, last year I thought I would checkout the newer versions of Streamripper and found that they had taken the great little tool and added a whole bunch of stuff that had a dependency on the glib2 library, which is massive when you just want a single little tool. I suppose it’s ok if you are running on a Linux box where you have glib2 installed as it gets used by lots of applications, but on other platforms it’s just overkill and I can’t be bothered with it.

With this I mind I got the source code for the last of the standalone versions 1.62.3, it does everything, and doesn’t have a massive dependency problem like the recent versions. I made a small change to the source, compiled it and life is good again, much easier than compiling for 10.5 and all that bag of hurt of the older versions :)

The reason I have suddenly posted this is I have just re-compiled Streamripper for Snow Leopard using the new Clang and LLVM-GCC compilers. As all of Snow Leopards utils are in x86-64 I did Streamripper as x86-64, a few years back I never thought I’d be compiling Streamripper as 64-Bit just seems overkill, but why not :)

I won’t bother with all the building stuff like my last post on the subject as it’s not that hard really.

Enjoy!

I really like the colours of the syntax highlighting in Apple’s XCode, I apply the colouring to all of the other code editing applications I use, these being Netbeans and BBEdit. For the 3.2.x versions there are only some small changes in the colours. With the advent of OS 10.6 Snow Leopard we get Apple’s new Menlo font which is very nice. Colour values were taken from XCode 3.2.3.

XCode Colours (RGB)
Selection: 167, 201, 255
Comments: 0, 116, 0
Documentation Comments: 0, 116, 0
Documentation Comments Keywords: 2, 61, 16
Strings: 196, 26, 22
Characters: 28, 0, 207
Numbers: 28, 0, 207
Keywords: 170, 13, 145
Pre-Processor Statements: 100, 56, 32
URLs: 14, 14, 225
Attributes: 131, 108, 40
Project Class Names: 63, 110, 116
Project Functions and Method Names: 38, 71, 75
Project Constants: 38, 71, 75
Project Type Names: 63, 110, 116
Project Instance Variables and Globals: 63, 110, 116

Default font: Menlo 11

All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Paul A Dull Boy.

Christmas Countdown was the first piece of php code I ever wrote, back then it was a function called daysToChristmas() and was 17 lines of code. This was actually way back on the 14th of December 2005 according to my comments in the source file.

After all these years I thought it’s time for a rewrite, I’ve learnt a lot more since then and seeing as it was originally an exercise to learn some basic php I thought why not have another crack at it now. I rewrote it last week and it was looking much better, today I thought why stop there so I have got rid of the old single image and replaced it with 7 new ones taken fresh today. All images are items from my Christmas tree :) Now you will get a Christmas image at random, and for good measure I’ve also thrown in a few more festive messages for certain days :)

Some of the images may clash with the text colour so I’ll keeping an eye on that and I’ll fixit if it’s really a problem.

Enjoy!

Cool all up and running. I’ve recently moved over to 1and1 hosting, was a pretty smooth move apart from Gallery 2. For WordPress / Gallery integration I use the wpg2 plugin. Problem is that when you try and validate the plugin you either get a nice error of a blank page and no images on your site.

Time for the solution :) In your .htaccess file add the following line

Right all done and working? Good enjoy your images. Hopefully I’ll get back to posting more regularly now.

Before I tried this I did a lot of asking around and the only real answer I got was to either use “Back To Black” or another car cleaning product that does bumpers and trim. The draw back after reading about all these products was that after the car has had a few washes the layer left by the products was gone and the dry wax look returned.

I stumbled across some other forums which mentioned the use of peanut butter, most people were ignoring it and I can see why smearing a food stuff on a car sounds like a bad idea. Personally I don’t have problem with it, peanut butter is pretty natural, I eat it, where as other people seem happy to apply some form of chemical solvent, now that sounds crazy.

A quick note, I bought a pack of cheapo toothbrushes which I also use to clean my alloys with, I just used another one of those to get any tiny bits of peanut butter to went in to tiny seams out once it had dried. If you find this helpful then please leave me a comment. Oh and by the way as the disclaimer on my about page basically says you do all of this at your own risk :)

One extra note, for small little line like on grills and other tiny bits of rubber trim a normal pencil rubber with some water works great.

This is pretty nasty noise, it’s booked in to see the Puma man next week so I’m hoping that it doesn’t cause any damage in the long run.

If you have any ideas about the noise let me know!

Update

All repaired, I took a trip up to PumaBuild yesterday and in the end the nasty noise turned out to be the water pump.