Archive for November, 2009

November 23rd, 2009

Spotify for S60!

by Florian Jensen

E71 with SpotifyFinally, it’s here! Spotify for S60! It was worth the wait.

I have spent all morning playing with the App, and it’s as beautiful as the client for Mac. The entire UI is not as “chunky” as Nokia’s Media Player, it’s more like an iPhone app, in the sense that it has smooth transitions between the different panels, which makes the entire experience very nice. As you can see on the picture on the side, you have something similar to Apple’s Cover Flow, which shows you the current previous, current and next track cover art. Another thing you should check out, is skipping in a track. It gives you big digits on top of the cover art.

All in all, very very sleek.

Spotify Playlist SyncOf course, it wouldn’t be Spotify, if it wouldn’t sync your playlists in realtime. This is, pardon my french, fucking awesome! Like on the iPhone or Andriod, you can select which playlists to sync, and you’ll see it syncing.

Just a note at this point: Don’t even bother syncing a few big playlists like mine via 3G, unless you’ve got a data plan that allows you to download the entire Internet. I synced my Calm Mood and Various Goodness: Dance playlist via WiFi, which generated 1,15GB of traffic. So yeah, I wouldn’t even try that.

Screenshot0010But the guys at Spotify have thought of everything. They added an option under More, which allows you to say that it should only offline-sync stuff when you’re connected via WiFi, which is probably a setting you should not change.

However, don’t be afraid to listen to Spotify tracks via 3G/HSDPA. Just listening to a few tracks on 3G won’t cost you too much traffic. It’s about 3-4MB per song.

I tested it on Three UK, and it worked surprisingly well. Just as good as the Desktop client, which I think is an amazing accomplishment!

So all in all, if this doesn’t make you upgrade to Spotify Premium, I don’t know what will! It’s amazing! The only thing missing is the possibility to queue tracks.

November 22nd, 2009

UK DVB-T Status

by Florian Jensen

I had some spare time today, so I spent it by re-configuring my EyeTV. If you don’t know what EyeTV is, it’s probably the best DVB-T client in the world!

So, after having realized, that you need a huge antenna here in the UK to actually get some signal, I set that back up. Now, turns out you also need to tilt that in the correct angle to get any signal. But once that is done:

Screen shot 2009-11-22 at 18.43.46Woop woop! 392 channels!

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November 16th, 2009

Facebook XMPP Server

by Florian Jensen

Evening.

After having had a very productive Sunday, I seem not to be able to stop doing stuff :)

So I started playing with chat.facebook.com (Facebook’s XMPP Server).

Having read P1′s article that Facebook would be using Ejabberd made me curious, as I don’t believe Ejabberd would scale anywhere near the needs of Facebook.

So I investigated the XML responses, and got a hint by Artur that the message IDs look nowhere near the message IDs of any server.

Now, if Facebook would’ve used an existing piece of code, they wouldn’t rewrite the message ID generation. That would be useless.

So, I checked every server I had access to, and I can say, it doesn’t behave like: Tigase, M-Link, Ejabberd, Jabberd14, Jabberd2, Prosody and Google’s XMPP Server.

Thus my conclusion: They have written their own XMPP server.

Update: Or maybe they are actually using EJD.

November 1st, 2009

Airport Security

by Florian Jensen

A few days ago, I saw this coming on XKCD.

bag_check
A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it … hey! You can’t arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!

It’s so annoying that you always have to get everything out of your pockets, and your bag, for “security reasons”. There is no added security. If I really were to blow up the plane, I would have tons of options that wouldn’t be detected. It’s just a matter to let people think they’re secure, at the expense of travel comfort.