Making Foobar2000 Social

If you’re a user of foobar2000, the player now has all the components you need to enjoy the online music revolution, right from your media player! With just four downloads, you can add last.fm support and XM Radio to foobar.

The easiest is XM Radio support. Just download foo_xm from this website. Unzip the file, and copy the dll file into the components directory of your foobar2000 installation folder. Then open prefferences, and enter your XM email and password. You can now add XM channels to any foobar playlist, just like you would add any other type of streaming radio. No more opening your browser, loading flash, and logging in just to play XM. Also, now-playing notifications can be shown on the system tray, in your msn status, or anywhere else you already have foobar set-up to show now playing info. You can even use your DSPs on XM streams. It’s all the power of foobar, plus XM.

If you have a last.fm account, with a little more work, you can make foobar your last.fm headquarters. The most important download is foo_audioscrobbler. Download it, install, and enter your username and password in the configuration. Everything you play in foobar will now be sent to last.fm, without having to install the crappy last.fm client.

The next step is to get last.fm radio inside Foobar. Download foo_lastfm_radio and add it to foobar. Add your last.fm username and password in it’s configuration area, and you’re ready to go. You can open any last.fm radio stream from the file menu. You can also right click on a song in one of your current playlists, and select menu entries to play the last.fm artist radio or tag radio for that track. You can also download albumart of the currently playing song, skip songs, see upcoming songs, etc. This makes it really easy to switch between playing tracks from your local music library, and streaming similar tracks from last.fm.

The last step is to add the power of last.fm to your foobar media library, to help you create playlists based on your last.fm profile. Download foo_scrobblecharts, install it, and you can right click on any song, and select a menu entry to automaticly create a playlist of similar songs you already own. This is extremely useful for people who, like me, are two lazy to set-up playlists by ourselves.

Thoughts On Jungle Disk

It all started with a discussion between a group of us over how we could share large multimedia files in production between group members, without a lot of expense and hastle. The ideal solution was determined to be cloud storage. That is, you send your files to another company (like amazon, racspace, mosso, or google) and they store the files for you, on multiple computers, in multiple locations. When you need the file, you can call it up without worry over how, or where, it happens to be stored. For our cloud storage provider, we wanted a solution that was: cheap, unlimited (multimedia files can be huge), fast, extremely secure, multiplatform, and point-and-click both for set-up and accessing our files.

Several companies exist to do this. The way they work is, they create a virtual hard drive on your computer, but instead of all the files on that drive getting stored on your computer, anything you put there gets uploaded into the cloud.

The first provider we looked at was ZumoDrive. It looked interesting: easy to use, fast, and well supported. Unfortunately, it had several problems. First of all, it only seemed to be available for Windows and IPhone. When one of us had windows, another OS X, and a third a linux netbook, that just wasn’t going to cut it. Second, some of the features for optimizing the cache, like changing the bit-rate on mp3s so they could be streamed over low bandwidth connections, or determining what to cache locally based on file type, seemed to be rather insecure. If we wanted our storage provider, and everyone in charge of the networks between them and us, to know what we were storing, we could just use FTP or WebDav to my dreamhost account. Third, we knew we were eventually going to want 500 GB. At $80 a month, the pricing for ZumoDrive was a little high. However, according to the reviews, Zumo Drive used a storage provider called Amazon S3. I figured I’d go looking for other companies using S3 to do the same thing.

The first one I found was Jungle Disk. It runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux. It has extremely secure encryption; neither Jungle Disk, nor Amazon S3, can tell what you’re storing in the cloud. With Jungle Disk, you use your own Amazon S3 account; Jungle Disk doesn’t bill you for anything, or provide you with anything other than the software. That means that if Jungle Disk shuts down, your files will still exist, unchanged. You control your data, not Jungle Disk. I’ve been using the software for a week, now, and I’m overall pleased with my experience. Set-up is a little harder than with ZumoDrive, but the price is also a lot cheaper. It’s 10 cents per gig. That means that if I use 500 gigs in a month, I pay for 500 gigs. If I go on vacation for two months, and use 0 gigs, I pay for nothing at all. For the screen reader users reading this, almost everything is accessible. The automated back-ups on OS X aren’t accessible, and they’re really hard to use on Windows as well, but other than that everything worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the Windows version of the software has a few problems:
1. under network settings, I had to turn off the option to use a windows file system driver, and use a virtual WebDav server instead. If I didn’t, Jungle Disk would crash Windows Explorer, and it couldn’t be relaunched until reboot.
2. Copying files to any jungle disk drive using Teracopy has serious issues.
But once I got those things fixed, everything worked well. One other, small, thing to keep in mind is that Jungle Disk uploads items to the cloud in the order you paste them. So, if you paste in 14 gigs of wav files, then paste in a 20 kb text file, the 20 kb text file won’t be available to other machines using your jungle disk until all 14 gigs of wav files have been sent up. It would be nice if Jungle Disk could detect extremely small files, and shuffle them ahead in the transfer list, so they’d be available to other computers right away.

update: Thanks to a poster in the comments, I was lead to try Wuala. It uses both cloud storage, as well as peer to peer storage, in an attempt to limit costs, increase available storage, and allow for more flexability. It looked, at first blush, as though it was ideal for my needs. Unfortunately, it has several major flaws. First off, purchasing more storage is expensive. You pay per year, rather than per gig used or per month. This is a steep up-front payment for a poor student. As well, it requires even more for-thought as to amount of storage required. While you can trade storage, if you have storage available, you can’t get more than 20 gig until at least 10 percent of the 20 gig you’re offering has been used. As well, your computer must be online for at least four hours in a row, every day. This does not work well for laptops. But the most serious flaw of wuala is that, instead of writing native code for each operating system, Wuala uses Java. While it’s not particularly family friendly, the most accurate, and concise, criticism of Java I’ve heard runs as follows: “saying that Java is good because it runs on all platforms is like saying that anal sex is good because it works on all genders.” I hate and despise Java. It’s slow. It’s interface is strange, and while it’s accessible with NVDA, the interface doesn’t follow any windows standards at all. It eats memory faster than an extremely fat person eats chips. I don’t trust Java to run my entertainment software. Under absolutely no conditions am I going to trust Java with my important files. Some of the features of wuala, like the world feature, could be useful for filesharing and warez. But at this point, in my opinion, it’s not a serious file exchange and file storage system. That aligns with most things peer to peer. Peer to peer is a useful toy for avoiding responsibility for breaking the law. But it’s not useful for when real, legal, work needs to be done. Wuala is an interesting social and thought experiment. But, at the moment, it’s nothing more. I haven’t even gotten into the problem of trading storage on my computer when my ISP caps my bandwidth. In theory, depending on what wuala stores on my computer, it could wind up costing me even more to trade storage than to buy storage.

The Problem With Invisible Links

While I’m talking so much about things related to web development, I thought I’d post a little rant about a subject that’s been bothering me for a while now.

Can developers please, please, please JUST STOP IT ALREADY WITH THE INVISIBLE LINKS! I often work with people who are looking at the screen. When I encounter links that they don’t see, this does absolutely nothing but ad confusion for both of us. If a link is not displayed on the screen, it should, at the absolute minimum, be labelled “invisible” by my screen reader. This will stop me from asking sighted counterparts to, say, click the “skip to main content link, then look two or three lines down,” when the skip to main content link only exists for screen readers. This results in exchanges like this:

them: “What skip to main content link?”

me: “the one at the top of the page.”

them: “I don’t see it.”

me: “It’s, like, the first link.”

them: “No, it isn’t.”

me: “Oh, never mind. Just skip down to the main article. Did I spell all those street names right in the second paragraph?”

them: “Nope. You’ve got an extra d in Dundas. Third line. Fourth word.”

me: “Hold on. I think my screen reader splits lines completely different from the browser.”

Congratulations, everyone! We have now reached the point, in accessible technology, where it is almost completely impossible for a blind person and a sighted person to communicate with one another about a web page. If anyone needs me, I’ll be over here in the corner, banging my head against the wall. It’s more productive than trying to work with my sighted classmates, some days.

The ARIA Saga Continues

This post is all prompted by Google’s recent addition of ARIA technology to Google news, that I blogged about Yesterday.

My post generated a lot of (unexpected, to me) discussion in the web accessibility community. I feel that I’m much too hard on ARIA in my original posting, because user-facing information about what ARIA does is thin and scattered. I’ve been asked how information about ARIA can be better communicated. Honestly, I don’t feel that the problem, in this case, lies with the developer community. As I said in a comment on my blog entry, the fault is Google’s. Google created a link on Google News and Google Reader to websites enhanced with ARIA. However, it failed to explain what ARIA can do for the user, what software the user must have to take advantage of ARIA, or give any introduction of what changes ARIA brought to Google News. Most users, who have older and out-dated software, will find that the ARIA link does nothing, and leave baffled. Those of us who try and investigate will find information about ARIA directed at developers, that provides little to no information about what ARIA does for us, and how to make it work. When, in my case, I finally found out what ARIA enhanced Google News did, I assumed that was the limit of the technology, and left unimpressed. I think that, at this point, the best thing the Web Accessibility Initiative can do is stress the importance to developers using ARIA of ensuring that the user has software that can support ARIA, and explaining how exactly the ARIA page is different from the non-ARIA page. Perhaps some of this effort should also fall on the shoulders of screen reader programmers; most screen readers have anounced to developers that they support ARIA, but they haven’t explained this feature to their users. Perhaps the WAI could create some sort of user-facing documentation for ARIA that developers could link to whenever they create an ARIA enhanced page; but I’m not really sure that that’s the job of a standards body. As things stand right now, blind users are starting to see ARIA links popping up on accessible websites, trying to find out what ARIA means for them, and coming up confused or empty handed.

My original comment follows:

@Shawn Henry: This seems clear enough, but it’s a document for web developers. To me, the user, this is all just theory. What should probably exist somewhere (and maybe does? Google doesn’t index
everything.) is a page describing websites using the technology, discussing what differences it makes for users (like interaction with google chat, the pop-up menus in gmail, etc),
and what screen reading and browser combos support this technology (the only one I’ve got working
thus far is firefox 3+NVDA; Freedom Scientific says they support it, but something must be broken
on all three of my windows boxes because I just can’t make it work). The people who should probably
write this kind of user document, in fact, are Google. They’ve suddenly presented all screen-reader
users of Google News and Google Reader with a mystery link about “ARIA,” (a link that our sighted
counterparts apparently can’t even see, so we get strange looks when we ask about it) and failed
completely to explain anything at all. When people search for information about ARIA on google
itself, it seems they wind up at either web developer resources, year old discussions of google
reader, or my blog, depending on what keywords they use. IMHO, the way to do this would be to
present a kind of “ARIA information page” the first time the user clicks the ARIA enhanced link,
explaining what software they need to be using, and what extra functionality ARIA ads to the page. Pressing questionmark for help, while an interesting interface enhancement, is just so far removed from anything I would ever think of doing on any normal page, that I won’t try it unless prompted with a “press questionmark for help” message. Otherwise, I’ll go hunting for a help link. Because that’s what you do with web pages: you click links on them.

Accessibility Improvements To Google News

I just noticed this yesterday. I usually read Google News on my Nokia N82. It’s sort of like a morning paper. So it wasn’t until recently that I noticed the regular version of google news had gotten some recent accessibility enhancements. The most important is that each news story is now, finally, a heading. This means that screen reader users can jump from story to story with a single command, instead of cursoring down through all the story content. This makes things much, much quicker! The second is that an ARIA enhanced version of google news is now available. I’m not sure exactly what features this adds, as most screen readers don’t fully support ARIA, but it’s a good sign to see google continuing to adopt new and cutting edge accessibility technology.

Make Youtube Audio Sound Better

The following tip comes from Derek Lane, who originally got it from The MIDI Magazine Users Group.

If you’re watching a youtube movie online, you can add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL in order to get high quality audio. Surprisingly, this higher quality audio is available on most things uploaded to the website. For example, visit this un-modified URL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcjkkBtXgIc
With the following URL, after &fmt=18 has been added to the end:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcjkkBtXgIc&fmt=18
That’s not the most dramatic example of youtube improvement, mostly because that song sucks, but it was the first URL I had handy (don’t ask). Okay, a better example: compare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvbK2YpSGrQ
to the better sounding
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvbK2YpSGrQ&fmt=18

I have no idea why this works, or why it works. I can’t find anything on the webpage that links to the higher quality URL; maybe I missed something?

SJAMS Beta Download

As the official website seems to be under construction, and a lot of people have asked me for it, you can download SJAMS (the leading talking IRC solution for mIRC with Jaws for Windows, Window Eyes, and SAPI) from this link. Atmospheric rumblings have been heard about an update to the SJAMS codebase going under the name Bexirc, but I will neither confirm or deny anything at this point.

Bell’s Unlimited Wireless Plan Isn’t

Bell recently rolled out an unlimited wireless internet plan; however, Michael Geist notes that amung other things, you can’t use the plan for multimedia, email, or VOIP. Bell customers beware. If you’re looking for a good ISP for your home, try ca.inter.net. They offer really unlimited internet, and VOIP, at reasonable rates.

Story Via Techdirt.

The Future of Digital Content

The content landscape is changing, for consumers and publishers alike. What brought on this change? The computer, of course! Digital content is unlike any other type of content civilization has yet seen. If it’s digital, you can make exact copies with no significant cost to you, you can mutate and remix it, share it, and have more control over how you consume it than ever before. If you’re an old style publisher, this is a disaster.

So, publishers did what old business models everywhere have always done: they attempted to stop, and even reverse the flow of progress. How? They created technology called drm or Digital Rights Management. This technology tried to control how you could use the content, how many computers you could use it on, how (and if) you could copy it, how many times you could use it, and more! Unfortunately for the publishers, consumers like the new digital freedoms, and countless tools were created to bypass this DRM technology, and open up the content once more.

Thankfully, however, the publishers are finally starting to catch on to the new digital age. DRM is dying a slow, painful death, and consumers are slowly regaining their freedoms once more. If you’re looking to purchase some digital content, why not try looking for DRM free stuff at some of the following stores.

EMusic: After Itunes, EMusic is the number one music store in the world. They offer all DRM free mp3 music, from both indi labels and major artists. The Disadvantage is that they are a monthly subscription service: you can’t just buy a single album. Instead, you need to start a monthly subscription. Also, they’re owned by AOL; if you’re a Winamp user, you’ve probably seen promotions for them whenever you install the program.

PayPlay: PayPlay sells DRM Windows Media Audio for $0.77, and DRM free mp3 for $0.88. They don’t sell major label artists, but they have a much more vast selection of indi artists than does EMusic, or any other store I’ve found.

Bitmonk: Bitmonk has a strange kind of digital marketplace going on. It’s got a Java application, and some kind of peer to peer thing, and less selection than any other store, and it’s confusing. But it sells books, software, and things other than music. So…I dunno. Maybe it’ll be your thing.

CD Baby: If you can’t find it at any other store, check CD Baby. They’re the CD distributer for thousands and thousands of indi artists. You can buy the CD from them if you like, but if it’s available for download, CD Baby offers links to all the websites that have it. This is a good oppertunity to engage in some good old fassioned price shopping around.

Fictionwise: If you’re looking for ebooks, Fictionwise is the king. They sell many different

href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ebook">ebook formats, from all kinds of authors. Take care, though, some of the fictionwise offerings do have DRM. However, those that do are clearly indicated, and you can exclude DRM ebooks from your searches, if you so desire.

Webscriptions: Webscriptions, owned by Baen publishers, were the first to offer DRM free ebooks. All Webscriptions offerings are DRM free, and offered in several popular formats.

Did I leave out your favourite website for digital content purchases? Why not share it in the comments! No captchas, no accounts required! It’s easy.

Ontario Election in Two Weeks: Are You Ready?

Still don’t know how you’re going to vote in the Ontario Election? Well, elections are getting closer and closer every day! Maybe it’s time to start thinking about it. Here are some links to help you out.

Find Your Electoral District: Knowing where to vote, and who your candidates are, really helps. Elections Ontario has lots of other useful information, too.

New Democratic Party Of Ontario: The website of the NDP. The right choice, in my opinion.

The Ontario Liberal Party: The website of the Liberals. Not a bad choice, especially if you like the “I told you so” feeling of voting for the winning party.

Ontario PC: The homepage of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario. A much, much worse choice.

Green Party of Ontario: The “official website”. Well, it’s better than voting PC. An excelent choice if you’re a flake, hippy, or university student.

Family Coalition Party: The home page of the FCP, the official Christian fundamentalist party. Don’t worry, they’re harmless; they never get any seats.

BigDecision.ca: You didn’t forget about our _big decision_ did you? This site has the info.

Change The System: And this website has the opinions and idealism.

Vote for MMP: They want to change it all.

No MMP: No! Bad dog! Bad idea!

Did I miss a website? Post it in the comments! Disagree with me? You’re wrong, but you can feel free to go ahead and show everyone just how wrong you are by making a comment, anyway.

Is The Internet Replacing Sex?

One in five Americans say they’re having less sex to spend more time on the internet, text messaging and similar technologies, a new survey suggests.

Read More.

I think the CBC is just a tad confused; we spend time on the internet because we aren’t getting any sex in the first place.

How to be Annoying on IRC

I originally wrote this list for everything2, but it was rejected there. This will only be funny to those of you who spend time on IRC (internet relay chat). Unfortunately, it’s almost entirely based on real experiences I have had while on IRC!

1. join #windows. Ask what type of glass is best to use for a skylight. Become upset when people don’t help you. Threaten to report the channel to the network administrators and get everyone in it banned.
2. Install a now playing mIRC script. Play Unknown Artist – Unknown Album – Track 01. Discuss what an awesome song that is. Change to track 2 . Repeat until end of album. When people yell at you, act surprised that “You guys can’t hear the music? Something must be wrong. Lemme try again…”. Start from the beginning of the album. When people say it doesn’t work like that, tell them they have something wrong with their speakers because you can hear it fine. Make remarks about people who are too stupid to hook up speakers properly.
3. Say ” lol ” or ” rofl ” after every single message in the channel. Include joins, parts, notices, quits, and ctcps.
4. Set up a script to /msg everyone who joins the channel with a personal greeting. Say goodbye when they part. /msg them with the fact that you’ll miss them when they set status to away.
5. Paste an appropriate article from wikipedia into the channel whenever anyone asks a question. When people yell, act offended and claim you were “only trying to be helpful”. If you get banned by a flood protection bot, msg an op and promise never to do it again. When you’re unbanned, send your wikipedia articles as private messages instead.
6. Change your nick every few minutes, and pretend to be a completely different person. When people comment on this, act amazed at there l33t h@ck3r sk1llz and ask how they figured out you were the same person. part before changing your nick next time, then rejoin. When people try to tell you your computer has an address, become extremely alarmed. Tell everyone that they “better not come to my house or I am gunna whoop y’all asses.” Message the channel ops and demand that anyone who accessed your “address” be banned right away. Claim to have everyone’s address and be “calling the cops on you hackers right now!”
7. Join a sex channel with a nickname like SuperHotSexGirly743 ( real IRC networks do, in fact, allow nicks this long). Set your ident to ~HarryThompson. Set your whois name to Harry Thompson, sr. Ask the race of everyone in the channel before talking to them. /ignore anyone who says they’re a different race than you. Message an op and demand that all those dirty people of $OtherRace be forced to leave because you’re an innocent young girl and shouldn’t have to put up with that sort of thing. When people express doubt about this, accuse them of slander and threaten to call your lawyer and sue them for all they’ve got.
8. Join a Christian channel. Say that you’re a member of Gays4Jesus. Ask if anyone is interested in worshipping God and getting some hot man-loving next Wednesday. Tell them about your apostles slash fanfiction.
9. Join #unix. Tell everyone that they misspelled the name of their channel. Laugh at them. Invite them all to #eunuchs.
10. Say you’re just trying out this IRC thing, but it’s stupid. Tell everyone in the channel how much better Yahoo Chat is, and that IRC is just for old people.