Today I am a fan of Spotify.

Internet radio is not new.  Spotify is new. It is currently only available as an invite-only beta (let me know if u want an invite ...)

What is new is the dimension of choice. I have a Canadian friend who always says if you have cheese, you have choice. I have no idea what he is talking about, but there is certainly nothing cheesy about Spotify.

Spotify is, however, rather cheeky. On the download page it states cleary that Spotify is supported in Windows and Mac operating systems. However, under the "other platforms" tab it says that "if you want to go ahead and download the windows or mac application for now we’ll keep quiet about it." So I did. And it worked oh so easily. I'm running Spotify via Wine in my Ubuntu installation (oh how did I live without Wine?)

My favourite part of Spotify is the collaborative play lists. From across continents I can share my favourite music with my friends.  Yet another way to feel connedcted in this lonely digital world.

Ofcoarse there are the occasional adverts. For 9.99 per month with the "premium" version you can have advert-free music.

Asside from some occasisonal inexplicable freezes which may have more to do with my wireless network than Spotify I am impressed by this new form of internet radio. All I need now is better speakers for my computer ...

I'm not the only one lamenting the inexorable rise of twitter.

Suddenly everyone is twittering. Barak Obama tweets. Any politician worth his salt has a twitter page. Celebrities are at it (arent they always). Every man, woman, child, company, pet .... has a twitter page.

Twitter has fed into the unmet needs of the nosy neighbour in the digital era. Twitter pages have a certain air of keeping up with the Jones; not only in the content of the posts but also in the design of individual pages.

For me, twitter is just facebook without the interesting bits.  

Savvy advertising gurus have embarrassed this new advertising medium. Both directly and subtly Twitter is being used to advertise products, brands, individuals, politics and ideas. The internet is constantly opening up new methods of reaching consumers. What will come next?

And some of the best advertisers are the publicists of prominent celebrities.

Ashton Kutcher tried to beat CNN to be the first person with a million "followers" on twitter. He has now outstripped CNN and beaten them to 2 million "followers" as well! But does he actually say anything interesting? Anything important? Or actually - is anything that appears twitter page actually written by him? There was certainly a great deal of impressive advertising involved in this coup - it was on the front page of the times website for goodness sake!

Is twitter a good way to get your news updates? Bite sized chunks of news are delivered directly, in real time by all of

The netbook is a strange entity. Halfway between smart phone and laptop markets, it is in a vortex which satisfies neither entity.

There are technical definitions as to what constitutes a netbook but I think that there are three main requirements:

1. Small

2. Cheap

3. Internet access

Price tags typically sit below 500 pounds, and in some excellent cases below 100. Part of that ethos stems from the whole one laptop per child thing. However, not all netbooks are cheap. Take the Asus with swaski crystals inlayed into the keyboard or the sony P series (I know they say it isn't a netbook but what the hell is a “lifestyle computer” anyway?). These are fashion statements not computers. We have come a long way from the off cream box that was once your desktop.

As with everything, size does matter. The 10 inch netbooks are the commonest ones I have spotted around town, in coffee shops and on buses. 9 inch netbooks fit nicely into my new handbag. And 8 inchs would work on the Sony if the screen resolution was better.

The dell mini I've been borrowing has a 9 inch screen which is more than ample. It performs surprisingly well. It can have open office, chat client and browser running merrily at the same time. I want to really stress it out though – do you think it would manage music streaming? Iplayer? Wine? Wow under wine? It's poor little processor might melt ...

What I particularly like about the netbooks is that so many of them come with linux as

Palm is about to enter the the realms of the mobile-internet-touch-screen-smart oober phone with the new Palm Pre.

Well, almost about to.

It was supposed to be launched in “early 2009” but the latest rumored launch date is the 7^th June. Lets hope the latest rumor doesn't disappoint.

The Pre is supposed to have, well, everything. So far none of the smart phones do all the things I want my take-over-the-universe phone to do. Even the iphone falls short of my ultimate phone with its inability to have a blue tooth keyboard attachment or decent document editing on the go.

I think that the Pre looks stunning. It is like a cute rounded pebble. However, this has not gone down so well with the macho tech crowd. It is thicker than the iphone, but includes a fold out qwerty keyboard. I've never been sure about how useful keyboards like that actually are and some of the forums are suggesting that this will be the achiles heel of the Pre. The screen looks a reasonable size. Reasonable, not huge. But then my hands are quite small anyway. I'm not sure you would really manage to watch a film on it. But then is it really good for your eyesight to watch a film on the iphone? Just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's always a good idea ...

When it comes to useful applications the iphone has an impressive head start. The app store has an extensive community of commercial and individual programmers. However, it has been suggested that the Pre may be

LOLcatz has an answer for everything ...

Oh shiny. Deep red metalic sexy computer that fits in my pocket.

Um really? Do I want a laptop that fits in my pocket? I may need a new handbag to put it in.

On the internet the new sony P series looks amazing but that may be the photoshoped shiny images.

In real life I wasn't so sure. Either side of the screen are tacky half inch bars of plastic. I can work out why they are there - the keyboard was made large enough to be good for typing (which I like) but the screen size had already been set. The widescreen 1600x768 screen is good but its just rather a shame that its surroundings are a tad tacky. There must be a better use for that space. When I get mine I need to find some good stickers ...

So screen I don't like. Keyboard I do like. Size I definately like (have an appropriate bag lined up to buy as well). Joystick nipple navigation I definately don't like. But for the sake of size I can put up with the lack of a touch pad as long as there is an appropriately cute, small bluetooth mouse. At only 638kg I can put up with a lot of things.

With wifi, 3g mobile, bluetooth and gps I will be permanently connected to everything in the world (maybe my iphone is redundant ...) But beware privacy wary celebrities who fancy buying this - theoretically your laptop could be tracked. Hmm - for me that may be useful. I want to be able to track all of my belongings with GPS as I keep loosing them. (Anyone seen my ipod??)

And the

Maybe I spoke to soon about how easy printing was with ubuntu. Bloody wireless printing has stoped working and I can't work out why. But then I cant get it to work in windows either. Maybe it is a problem with the network, or the printer. Gonna try the classic switch it off and back on again. Bloody printers ...

Someone has made a keyboard just for us!!!

It's big, it's pink, and the keys are titled just for blondes.

It seems that there are rather a lot of "useless" keys on the keyboard. I particularly like that the right control key is called a "totally useless key". There's LOL, OMG, smilies and all the other things a blonde needs to type regularly. Other cool keys are the escape which says "NO!" and caps lock which says "warning size xxl letters".

It may be uggly, it may be tacky, but put it on my christmas list (it will go perfectly with my jewel encrusted mouse).

http://www.keyboardforblondes.com/

Today I discovered wine.

Not the half bottle of rose in my fridge, but Wine with a capital "W".

Wine stands for "windows is not an emulator". Bad joke isn't it? The wine developers have succumed to cheap alcohol related humour with their logo and entire website covered in alcohol related graphics. They are rather particular about how you write the name of the program aswell. Apparently it's Wine not WINE. It seems that recursive anacronyms are so last season.

Installing wine was easy - I just selected it in synaptic and clicked apply. Working out what to do with it once it was installed was more complicated.

(Again reading the documentation may have helped but life is too short)

I copied the program I wanted to use off my windows partition and into the "D directory" created by Wine. Supprisingly when I double clicked on it - it worked!

Woot - I now have World of War Craft running in linux using Wine. It actually works better than when I'm using windows - but that may have more to do with windows needing reinstalled ...

www.winehq.org

http://wiki.winehq.org/

Today's challenge was to get my new printer working in linux.

Previously this has been a tedious task, however today I was pleasantly surprised.

Printing in linux is all about CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System. In the past getting a printer working involved various tedious command line complexities. However, today I used the a CUPS configuration tool, system-config-printer. It was very logical to find in the ubuntu menu.

system -> administration -> printing

Then all I had to do was click on the new printer icon (oh and remember to switch on the printer!) and it discovered my siny new HP. I had thought that because it was a network printer there would be more hastle and configuration but not so. The five tabs allow you to adjust the details of the printer but the defaults seem just fine.

Read more:

http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/overview.html