PS – TS is also cross-platform, unlike Ventrillo, etc.  So there’s your reason, don’t ask me.

Hey guys.. AlLnAtuRalX here again with more news about MineCraft.  As if my last post wasn’t enough I am now announcing a MineCraft Build Contest on Sunday.  I know many of you don’t want to buy the game, and that is justified.. It’s a steep price.  But if you have building talent, we want to reward you with a chance to win the game for free.  We chose Sunday as the day, as that’s the day when most people are home.  The contest will take place from 10AM EST to 5PM EST and the winners will be announced at 8PM EST.  They will then contact me by e-mail to arrange the game’s purchase.

Come to Reddit Public Server at 10AM EST

The most creative / best structure will win, judged by a panel of ops.  The contest will take place on Reddit Public Server after a fresh wipe with the default terrain.  The only rules are: No bots, no autoclickers, etc.  Nothing which is not provided with the game.  Also, if you purchased the game already, please give someone who has not a chance to receive it.  Violators of these rules will be thrown out of the contest and banned from Reddit Public.  So come to Reddit Public at 9:30 AM EST on Sunday to start!  The times are 3PM – 10PM in GMT (winner announced at 1AM GMT), for anyone who doesn’t know what EST is.  All participants will leave their e-mail for further contact.  Well, for any questions, drop me an e-mail at phil [at] linux [dot] com.  Good luck!

Fortunately, it was easier than I thought.  The names were not even MD5′d or otherwise hashed to make it hard for us to detect.  It wasn’t in a hidden folder.  It was all public in minecraft.net/skin.  What I mean : My raw custom skin PNG was stored in minecraft.net/skin/AlLnAtuRalX.png.  Notch’s is in minecraft.net/skin/Notch.png.  Easy right?  Also fun… Everything is public domain now.  Just see someone with a skin you like and grab it.  Here is a zip of a few I grabbed earlier today (yes, there are some awesome ones in here).

Notch's Custom Skin (Currently)

Notch, I tried to notify you, but you weren’t on IRC.  Oh well… I have a feeling it’ll get fixed soon enough.  Or hell, you can leave it.  This is an awesome feature IMO, and I want people to use it.  Download as many skins as you can before it gets sealed up forever!

Cheers,

AlLnAtuRalX

Reddit Public Server Admin

Today, I decided to take the plunge and support Pandora, and I bought a subscription to Pandora|One, their paid for service. This service touts a desktop application, custom skins, ad-free music, a mini-player, and custom skins for their web interface.

After playing with this service, I have mostly good things to say about it, and I know I will be renewing my subscription next year for another $36.  Let’s start with the easiest feature to review : the audio quality.  No complaints here, it sounds much better than regular Pandora on my surround sound speakers, though nowhere near as good as FLAC.  Not too much of a setback for me, but audiophiles beware.

Next, we come to my favorite feature: the desktop app.  I was wary of this going in, due to the fact that I run Linux.  I was afraid that I would be downloading the dreaded .exe file, and I was severely disappointed in that regard.  The folks at Pandora (and I love them for this) decided to use Adobe’s AIR framework.  Criticize it as much as you want, but it’s definitely the way I am listening to my Pandora from now on.  The interface is amazing, and feels like the iPhone application (which I also use).  It has an awesome notification system that reminds me of screenshots of the Ubuntu 9.04 notification system.  The audio quality is also 192 kbps, and they skinned it black, which happens to look great with almost any desktop (fit right into mine).  Once again, I want the Pandora guys to know how happy I am that they decided to support Linux.

The Desktop Application : It Looks Great

(Click to Enlarge)

On to the next feature : the miniplayer.  It is the same mini-player that used to be available for free.  This is the one place where I would like to criticize Pandora.  Taking out a perfectly good, free feature in order to “add” a feature to Pandora 1 is unacceptable in my opinion.  I would have paid to get rid of the ads on it, but making free users suffer is really not something that I like to see.  If it is still available and I just did not see it when I was still Free, just drop a comment and I’ll withdraw this.

Next, the skins.  They are really just a bunch of background changes; nothing spectacular.  There are some nice ones, but I really don’t think we needed something like that.  Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a bad touch if you’re stuck on the web inteface, but they could have done more (skinning the whole site not the background).  I have faith in Pandora, and I hope they will be able to put something like that together.  If not, so be it.

One of the Many Skins

(Click to Enlarge)

Last features are unlimited skips per day (still six per hour though).  Nothing much to be said, except I wish they would work out more skips with licensing companies.  I understand that it may not be possible, but hey, I can dream.  The no-ads is a nobrainer, and I didn’t have a problem before due to a certain FireFox extension.

Well, that’s all. Drop your feedback, and feel free to correct me.

I know none of these people are ever going to read this letter, but seriously, I need to vent, and having no friends….

I’ve been a proud iPhone owner since it came out.  I always saw the future of the phone and its browser, which I consider to be the killer app of the phone.  The one thing that it was always missing in my eyes was applications.  These applications would turn the iPhone from a web gimmick to a quasi-computer, useful in many ways.  When the jailbreak for the iPhone came out, it was like being in a candy shop at 5.  Developers were all doing their thing, and experimenting with all the unique features of the iPhone.  The first attempts were lousy, bounce the ball around the screen type applications, but as developers grew and learned, the apps exploded in quality.  Backgrounding, custom SMS replacements, theming, and tethering are notable things that have come out of this community.

When the App Store came out, I was, of course, thrilled, as were we all.  Finally, developers can make money from the iPhone.  A whole new market was opened, and it was to be filled with everything from medical dictionaries to farting applications.  I saw this as a sort of mainstream jailbreaking, available to everyone and anyone.  But I was to be disappointed.  At first, the App Store was, like Cydia, filled with poor quality first try apps.  The difference?  They were $0.99 on the App Store.  Who would pay for them, nobody knew.

Which brings me to today.  When I want to find a useful, free productivity app I can use to manage tasks or my time, I have to sort through tens of pages of “lite” applications before I can get to the actual, useful application.  These applications bost top 5 star ratings, and prominent spots in the App Store.  The first developer that realised that giving away free versions of games would make people buy the full game was a genius.  The problem is, everyone followed suit.  I do not want to waste my time on a lite stick wars game where I get two levels that I can beat in 45 seconds from starting the game.  I do not want to get an application, only to be told the feature I really need is only available upon purchase.

Developers need to make a living, and I understand that, however, flooding the free market with crippled apps that are not, and will never be free is not the way to do this.  The solution to this is easy.  Now that Apple is realizing that this is happening, they should put two and two together and create a “lite” section of the Appstore.  This will encourage more lite apps to be developed, as well as boosting free apps which were pushed to the side by the likes of “Coloring Book light”. It is truly sad to see so much potential wasted on mornoic trials that probably have an average install-period of four minutes.  It only helps to turn the free section into the bastard-child advertising section of the paid section.

For someone who loved this device since the homebrew start, I have to find myself going back to hacks and unofficial solutions to satisfy my need for good, free apps. We know you could do much better, Apple, and hope that you will hear us.

-KN

Another useless user trying to validate both their online and actual existence using WordPress viewer count.

Another blog you’ll visit, never add to your RSS, and laugh at.

Another empty page to litter the highway that is the Internet.

So hello world, and welcome to my blog.  I am important.  Please love me.

Getting an invite is pretty easy, all you have to do is sign up on the waiting list, and in my case, wait a few days.  A LaunchPad account is a prerequisite.  So, many of you might ask why is this so much better than any service such as DropBox.

The answer to that is, it’s not.  It is certainly a decent service, for free or for a decent price, but besides Ubuntu brand-name fanboyism I see no reason to use this service.

Ubuntu One is a program that you install on your computer that sits in your taskbar and creates a folder in your home directory called Ubuntu One.  In this folder, there is the My Files and Shared With Me folder.  These are your gateways to the Ubuntu One world.  Simply dragging a file into the My Files folder will upload it to Ubuntu One, and it will show up on any other computers you organized along with the Ubuntu One homepage at ubuntuone.com.  This is fairly convenient, but has many shortfalls.

The Slight Clunky Web Interface

Let me start with the positives.  Ubuntu One is not only well supported (as it is developed by Canonical), it is also lightweight.  It seems to take up few or no resources, and you can start it up when you need it.  There is a 2gb limit, which is not bad for casual filestorage (though it has serious limitations for backup use), and you can update to 10GB for $10 a month.

Now, we can start with the cons.  One con is it has is the fact that it is Ubuntu only.  The installation process, from the specialized PPAs to the actual client, are all only available for Ubuntu.  I had to bring out my netbook, as I use Fedora on the desktop.  This is also an immense shortfall when you want to synchronize accross platforms.  In my house, I have a mix of Linux and one Mac computer, this would not be useful to exchange files accross machines.  A comparable service, DropBox, supports Windows, Mac, and many Linux distributions.

Also, the Ubuntu One team gives you 10 GB for fr $10 per month, while Dropbox gives you 50 GB for $9.99 a month.  Also, the interface is not as clean as Dropbox.

Furthermore, as one blogger pointed out, One is not open sourced or released with any open license, and this seems to be a slap in the face to the Ubuntu name, trademark, and community.  It is basically using the established, open Ubuntu name to promote a service that has little or nothing to do with Ubuntu itself (besides being the sole operating system it can run on).

The speeds are fine, but I did not put it to any heavy tests, and it is convenient to have one account for both Launchpad and One, but that is not too big of a plus.

Overall, I think that users looking for this kind of storage solution should go with Dropbox, as it has many more features than One.  If you are loyal to the Ubuntu brand name, and you must, go with Ubuntu One.