Hey everyone. Last week I was studying podcasts in Media Studies, and we were given the task of creating a single episode for a podcast. Cool, eh? Well, my topic I chose was to review the album “Incredibad” by American comedy troupe The Lonely Island – makers of the immensely popular tunes “Jizz in my Pants” and “I’m On A Boat“.
So if you wish to listen to my 5 minute quick review, click on the groovy button below. If you want to download the MP3 for whatever reason, just right click and select the “Save As” option.
Hey folks. From here on, look out for a new series of posts called “Oh, the Delicious Irony…”, in which I will be covering news topics that are just so unbelievably ironic, you may as well think i’m making these stories up.
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During the summer, we had a big swine flu outbreak, as we all know. Even I, suffered from the virus. During this period, the UK government and the NHS made a few broadcasting and print based adverts for swine flu. Here, take a look:
Well, at the beginning of August, the Daily Mail published an article that confirmed the actor in the blu jacket, David McCusker, had caught, and then suffered from swine flu, himself.
Now, I know you are all saying that he, like everyone, is just as susceptible to the virus as anyone else… but, come on… If he was IN THE ADVERT, as a PAID ACTOR, SURELY he would know how not to catch the virus…. SURELY!?
If you have a mid-2008 or earlier MacBook Pro (this one, the previous gen, non-unibody), and you have upgraded to Snow Leopard – you may have discovered this fantastic new feature that wasn’t previously available for our model.
Snow Leopard adds the four-finger trackpad gestures, when Leopard could only previously handle three-finger gestures on this generation MacBook Pro. Yes, the unibody MacBook Pro’s could do the four-finger gestures in Leopard, but Snow Leopard extends the compatibility to all previous MacBook Pro’s (though someone may need to confirm this for me.)
We all know the real musts that you must never do while drunk (eg. drink and drive), but in this post I would like to share some things (from my personal, and others experiences) that you should not do while drunk, except the obvious. This is absolutely not a post to persuade people away from drinking – that’s just mad and a huge kill joy – just advice for what NOT to do when you get hammered. Enjoy.
Take a mental note of these things as what NEVER to do once you’ve been drinking!
1. Send text messages from your phone.
This is my number one rule – after you get your lift back home, turn your phone OFF, and give it to someone you trust who is not drunk… otherwise, the consequences can be disastrous. I speak from personal experience when one time I texted my dad when I was extremely drunk asking if he had any beer I could drink (incidentally, he was four thousand miles away at the time… on holiday…), and another time when I texted someone that I had previously fancied… with embarrassing consequences. But the point is this; when you are drunk… you can text ANYTHING. There was some bloke in America, and I kid you not – triggered an FBI investigation when he rather drunkenly texted his islamic friend and talking about 9/11.
Right, lets get down to it – we all love music, right? But all of us don’t have a huge bank account, and there are some people that want to download music from around the web… without paying money. However, it’s getting harder and harder to do that.
In this series of blog posts I am going to show you where I commonly get my MP3 music files from – without, technically, being illegal. Look and learn people.
This site was created by a popular YouTuber, Jimmy Ruska, and what he has done, is created a modified Google search that trawls through the internet and looks for free MP3 files. He has posted a video tutorial on YouTube that explains the step by step process, but I thought I would demonstrate the steps myself since the site is so efficient. Though first, I want to toss up the PRO’s and CON’s of the method:
PRO’s = Fast, relatively simple, free and technically legal for personal use.
CON’s = Sometimes contains dead links, often filled with spam, files mixed with bad quality files and ringtones sometimes (annoying!), and only works with the most popular songs and artists. Unwell-heard of artists are often not really found.
So this is how you do it, step by step. In this example, I am going to use the song Billie Jean by the recently late Michael Jackson. So, step 1 is to go to the site and search for the song, like so:
After pressing the Super Google Search button, you’ll see a new window containing a Google Search with a rather long query. This is what mine looked like:
And this is the rather long query. It’s all jibberish to the average person, so don’t worry about this too much. However, you can see the query YOU searched for at the beginning:
Right, so on this page, we have to look through the results, and find a page that may have a legit download link for your song. The top result for my Billie Jean search seems ok because of the following reasons:
the website link displays the words “Index of” at the beginning.
the website description displays (somewhere inside) the full name “Billie Jean.mp3″ in bold writing. If you see just “Billie Jean” as it is, without the “.mp3″, this may not be enough.
the link also features “Micheal Jackson” as a subfolder, meaning the user who uploaded the MP3 file probably contains even more MJ songs. This point isn’t completely necessary, but is always a good thing to look out for.
The domain (green writing) does not contain a spam link. Two of the biggest spam domains I see around are indexofmp3.net, mp3index.net and null3d.com. Just ignore these links.
Ok, so click on the link, and you should get an index page of some sort, similar to this one. If you go to a page that contains rich web content, you’ve got a spam or dead link. Go back and try again on a different link.
Now we need to search for our file. I can see it there, as the files are in alphabetical order, though you may want to try the handy Ctrl+F/Cmd+F trick if you can’t find it yourself. You want to check before you click on the link these two crucial things:
The file name ends with “.mp3″ or other audio file extension. NEVER, ever, download a .exe ended file, as this will almost certainly be a virus. Ohh dear. You can check the MP3 status by looking at where it says “MP3 audio file” under the description column, if applicable.
Check the file size of the file listed. This .mp3 file looks legit for a song as the file is 4.5MB in size. This is good as the average music file is about that… typically between 3MB and 6MB. If you get something at 100KB, that’s obviously either crap quality, a ringtone, or snippet from the song.
Ok? Yes, click on the link. The page will now open a small QuickTime snippet similar to this one, and start playing the file once buffered.
If this plays how you want to (it’s always worth checking), you want to go back to the previous index page listing all those files. Instead on clicking on the link again, right click on the link, and click either “open with iTunes” (Safari on Mac only) or “download linked file” (or could be “save linked file as”, or similar).
Now, the file starts downloading:
Once downloaded, as seen here in my Mac’s download stack, you drag it into iTunes, or whatever music library software you use, and there you go – you’ve got your free MP3.
Woo!
Now, just to recap – as I know someone is going to ask – downloading music like this is classed as stealing, and you could get your wrist slapped by your employer, peer or what have you. It is legal, however… so long as you use it for personal use. ie. you don’t publicly play it, use it in video projects, distribute it further, etc. It is only illegal for you if you break those rules just listed, or you are the person originally uploading that MP3 file to the internet for public use.
These, I know are the rules within the UK. As for the USA, or the rest of the world, it could be illegal, I don’t know, but I presume that it follows suit worldwide.
I am SICK and TIRED of logging onto my Twitter page or YouTube account and simply seeing an endless stream of bollocks about a coming up Apple event. Ok, I know I used to get excited about events like these in the past, so I’m not going to take the piss, but that was the old Apple that used to introduce Mac computers at Media events. Now it’s just the iPhone, something about the App Store, and for this media event today – iPod’s.
I’m happy that Apple is a strong company and whatever they may release today will be some cool new product (probably a new iPod touch and iPod nano with cameras judging by rumours…), but seriously, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE GETTING SO EXCITED.
A NEW IPOD TOUCH. WOW. As you already know, I already have one, and I have no intentions of getting a new one. This is not to mention that every other Apple devotee around the world probably has either an iPod touch or an iPhone… so they don’t actually need a new one. People have to realize that what Apple is announcing today is a big announcement for the music industry, not for Apple fans – unless of course you are brand new to the Apple world, and you want to buy yourself an iPod… but, for the most part, those people are found few and far between.
So when, I see people tweeting “I’m looking forward to the Apple event today”… and this is not a stab at anyone in particular, it’s bollocks, you’re not! You have an iPhone already, and none of these iPod’s you’re gunna buy. You are only excited because you are attached to Apple that much, and to you, I say, get a life.
My opinions. As I say, this post, and all my other posts are aimed at absolutely noone in particular, this is just me voicing my opinion. If you disagree, feel free to comment – I won’t mind at all.
A few posts ago, I wrote about how I favoured the Guardian news website against rivals, but today I stumbled across something that really rather annoyed me (for you folks outside the UK, you probably won’t understand this post, sorry.).
On the front page of all the major news websites, right now at about 9.30pm, there’s some story about the war, politics or something like that… but not The Guardian. The lead story here is about how, according to a survey, the Great British public support the BBC as a public corporation. Great news none the less, and this post is not a contest of that – but there findings are a bit interesting.
First, this all kicked off when James Murdoch, the CEO of News Corporation in Europe attacked the BBC, and this was at a keynote speech at the Edinburgh TV festival last weekend – an event sponsored and broadcasted by the Guardian Media Group. The next few days saw the reaction to this, and the poll, published by the company ICM, that the article refers to was introduced… great, but hang about… is this not a company heavily influenced by the Guardian Media Group as well? Oh yeah, I didn’t mention, the poll was also hosted on, and only on, the Guardian website. Great.
Some of you may be thinking what’s the problem with this. Well, the average reader for the Guardian newspaper is slightly left-wing… meaning they support public companies and object to privatisation. See where I’m going? Oh yeah, the BBC is one of those companies.
That’s right. By that line of thinking, everyone who actually visited the website and voted was heavily influenced already! Independent survey!? Bollocks to that! I would imagine had the survery been hosted on the Times Online website… or the Telegraph website, the results would be much different.
Taking a break from my normal technology or design related posts, I thought I would share my experience of Swine Flu.
Turns out that I caught the virus on the week of the 16th August, and I suffered from it on the Thursday to Sunday. I have to say – it was nasty. I had a killer headache, a massive fever, frequent chills, muscle pains and a rather upset stomach (mind you, I wasn’t sick, which I was happy about…).
Initially, I dismissed the idea that it was actually Swine Flu since I knew absolutely no one else with the virus, and even bigger give away was that I had suffered no such ‘cold like’ symptoms; such as coughing, sneezing, runny noses, runny eyes, etc.
However, a few days after falling ill, and getting better, it turns out I had passed the illness onto my mother – who, suffered a lot worse (probably because she’s a women and can’t deal with pain as well!). It was then we gave it the thought that we could both have had Swine Flu.
After ringing up the rather unhelpful Swine Flu Pandemic Service (England only), it turns out that there are strains of Swine Flu that are less serious – without the cold symptoms. We didn’t get sent Tamiflu, since we had both got better rather quickly.
To be honest, it wasn’t that bad – for me at least.
Hi there!
My name is Moggy, and I moan. My interests are web design, graphic design, technology, Apple products, politics, media and geography. Plus a few other random things.
I hope you enjoy all my posts. If you do, why not pass the word onto a friend, leave a comment, subscribe to the RSS, or even get in touch with me?
Lots of love all you gorgeous people!
Mogs
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