I haven’t listened to music on Spotify or iTunes since discovering mixcloud. I’ve been using it for a number of weeks and am hooked. After stumbling on one of the mixes from somewhere else I found that I can find more of the music I like to listen to so much easier than the other two services. Every mix, track and artist are all tagged so clicking on a track I like displays other mixes which contain the same song. And there are no annoying audio ads to interrupt the music. Simples!

Now if there was only a mixcloud iPhone app.

Brilliant vintage posters for Facebook, Youtube & Skype.

I’ve been happily using the Mail app in OS X for the past few years. Since I moved to Prime Focus I hit a brick wall when it comes to our corporate email and that brick wall has a name: Outlook Web Access. Slow, lumbering and exasperating as with all Microsoft products. What made the situation worse is that Exchange 2003 is unsupported in Snow Leopard (but supported perfectly well on the iPhone!)

I downloaded and installed a trial of Office for Mac to use Entourage and immediately hated the software. Uninstall and eradicate. After loads of searching I found DavMail, an open source solution for Exchange 2003 and Mail. DavMail sits in between Mail.app and the Exchange server and acts as a bridge. The config instructions need to be followed carefully but it works perfectly. And it has full support for Global Address Lists and iCal events as well.

No, not that Flame. This is a lot of fun. Flame Painter is a Java applet that lets you paint lovely freeform swirls. Prepare to lose yourself for a little while.

An article in the Guardian, before.

The same article in the Guardian, with Readability.

Film School Rejects, before.

Film School Rejects, with Readability.

PC World, before.

PC World, with Readability.

eWeek, before.

eWeek, after.

It only works on articles not main web pages, but when it works it makes reading on the web a pleasure again. Go get the bookmarklet, drag it onto your toolbar and whenever you see a flash-heavy page, cut out the fat.

Update: Can you use Readability on the iPhone? Yes you can!

Danger Mouse – DJ, producer, music auteur and one half of Gnarls Barkley – has teamed up with Sparklehorse and produced a fantastic album, Dark Night of the Soul.

There’s quite a quarrel between the artists and EMI so the CD’s distribution is unusual, to say the least. The package looks good, with a beautifully printed booklet with visuals by none other than David Lynch. Oh, and a blank CDR. Yes, you read that right. The CD is blank. The artists encourage you to, uhm, “find” the music online and burn it yourself. NPR is streaming the whole album but it’s available in loads of places if you know where to look.

The album is fantastic. Go get it!

The first time I heard the name Clay Shirky was through a post titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus on Daring Fireball. I watched his Web 2.0 presentation and was struck by his clarity of thought, the way his arguments made sense and the way I would go “Yeah!” at every salient point he would make.

Again, through Daring Fireball, I read Shirky’s latest essay on newspapers, journalism and the revolution we’re going through. This is a must read. It compares the state of online publishing to what happened around 1500 A.D., right after Gutenberg invented movable type and the printing press. Newspapers, advertising, walled-garden content, micropayments, subscriptions… it’s all there in this essay.

If you have some free time I would highly recommend reading this and then watching Clay Shirky’s videos on YouTube. Even the titles of the videos make you think! How about this one: It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. You immediately have an “A-ha!” moment just reading that title!

I think his book Here Comes Everybody is one I’ll read on holiday.