iTunes is going DRM free!!

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At last, senior vice president of Apple marketing. Phil Shiller finally announced at Macworld yesterday that iTunes is in the process of going DRM free!

Yesterday, 8 million tracks were converted to non-DRM tracks thanks to a deal with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner music, and it has been said that all 10 million tracks on iTunes will be DRM free by the end of this quarter.

It has not yet been confirmed whether music you have already bought from iTunes will be stripped of its DRM, but we’ll soon find out.

If you use iTunes, which millions of us do, this is a big day. This may well cause the end of DRM forever, eventually.

Good times!

Review: Sony MDR-V150 Headphones with Reversible Housing for DJ Monitoring

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I needed some decent budget headphones, preferably by a good brand and if possible under £15. So I went looking on Amazon, and found these –Sony MDR-V150 Headphones with Reversible Housing for DJ Monitoring.

I didn’t find the headphones from the company I’ve linked to, because when I ordered them (25th Dec 08) they were available direct from Amazon. However, they were around the same price if you include shipping costs.

For budget headphones, they are a fantastic buy. Since I only paid about £10 with Super Saver Shipping (available at the time), I wasn’t expecting much quality. But they are very good – the bass sounds good and can be adjusted through Windows.

They look and feel relatively sturdy, although the ear muffs look a little cheap. However, the headphones are very comfortable and I would be quite happy to wear them for extended periods of time. They are dispatched as 3.5mm jack headphones, but a 6.3mm jack adapter is also included.

I had a quick go at seeing if I could easily pull them apart and they didn’t come apart. The ear muffs aren’t detachable which I find very good as I hate headphones that have detachable ear muffs. The moving parts don’t come apart without a severe snap. You can drop them onto a hard surface and they survive easily.

They have a size adjuster of 9 sizes, which should fit most people.

Overall I think they are very good for the price. They are Sony which makes them very good sound and sturdiness. There are definitely better headphones around if you can afford to splash out, but I wasn’t requiring top-notch headphones. If you need budget headphones that will sound good and last, these are the ones to buy. Don’t go with cheap unknown brands as they will not be good and probably will be very cheaply made.

A definite buy if you want to save a bit of cash in the credit crunch and still get a good sound!

Web browsers… is there still one leader and one leader only?

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The web browser “war” still rages on.

It’s been going on for years. What is the best web browser? I don’t think there will ever be a final decision, although I would think most people would agree that Firefox has to be the safest and easiest way to browse the web.

The dreaded Internet Explorer is still used by millions. The reason for this is that many people just don’t know about Firefox or other web browsers. They just stick to whatever comes on their Windows PC. I suppose, if you were a computer novice, you’d just do the easiest thing and stick to Internet Explorer. Such a shame… if you use IE, you don’t know what you are missing.

Firefox is still extremely popular. It’s got just what everybody wants. A reliable, safe, fast browser that can be customized beyond belief. It is an extremely good browser – I’m using it to write this post now. It does exactly what it claims it does. It is very easy to use, I can trust it for any online payments, and I can use a huge range of plugins to make it do whatever I want it to.

With new web browser, Google Chrome, has Firefox got a challenger? Well, it has got a range of clever features. For example the tab management is very good. Instead of using just one process to manage all of your tabs, it splits each tab into a different process. This means that if one tab crashes, you don’t have to close the whole browser. And it does this without becoming a RAM-hog. Add to that it’s lightning speed launch times and Glass design (in Vista Aero), it does add up to be a relatively good browser. Google does have work to do to it, I mean it does have problems. My biggest problem is that it just doesn’t render some pages properly, and it claims that some pages are unavailable when they aren’t really.

What about Apple Safari? Well that’s good too. It has its ups and downs. I would only use it on a Mac, since I’m not a fan of the Windows version. It just seems rather pointless in Windows when you could just use Firefox, which is much more reliable and usable.

Opera? No way. I’ve never liked Opera. Again, it comes down to the same thing – why have it when you can have Firefox which is much safer and reliable. I don’t like Opera’s interface, and overall I just think it’s a no-go.

So, if you want an answer. It still remains – there is only one leader – Firefox. It just can’t be beaten for its safety, reliability, speed, and customizability. And those, I think, are the four keys to a web browser. Maybe, one day, a browser may become as good or even better than Firefox, but I think you be safely assured that it’s not going to be anytime soon.

Alphainventions.com – one of the best ways to get traffic to your blog!

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If you have a blog on the internet but don’t really get much traffic to it… or do, but want to get even more, this is the site for you. It’s called Alpha Inventions and all you have to do is go to the site and link your site up to it. When you’ve done it, you can watch your traffic increase and go throught the roof.

How does it work? Well what happens is, when you post up your site, it shows up to everyone else on the site at that time. Straight in front of them. Only for a few seconds, but enough for people to see what it is and be able to actually go to the site. And it will keep showing until someone else posts up their site over yours. But that’s no worry because you can just repost your site as much as you want.

Try it, and then watch your traffic stats. The more referrers you get from http://alphainventions.com, the more people saw it. It’s a simple and free way to boost your blog traffic.

Make Guild Wars work on an older graphics card (or intergrated card)

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Now I’m not really the gaming type, but I do play the occasional games when I’ve got the spare time. Trouble is, my gaming computer isn’t really with me very regularly and most of the time I use a laptop. 

And my laptop, while perfectly powerful (Intel Pentium Dual Core @ 1.73ghz per core, 1GB RAM – which I hope to upgrade, Vista Home Premium) doesn’t really cope with games as it has a SiS Mirage 3+ Intergrated card (SiS M672MX).

The most common game I play is called Guild Wars. It’s a MMORPG that is installed and ran on your computer, rather than playing in a web browser. It’s a great game. You pay a one off fee like any other game you would buy in a shop, and its yours to keep forever. You can buy expansions which unlock new “worlds” but there’s nothing to force you to do so.

Anyhow, if you run an intergrated graphics card or older card, you can run Guild Wars (you can force it to run) but it won’t look particularly good even on the minimal settings. The problem I had was that you got weird diagonal lines coming from non NPCs and that characters did not look correct (almost as if it had corrupted). But if you have these problems or just poor performance, why not try the following.

Find a shortcut that links to the Gw.exe file. There should be one either on the desktop or on the Start Menu. Right click it, and click Properties. Now where it says target change it to:

“E:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe” -dx8 -noshaders

E: ofcourse should be replaced to the letter of the drive Guild Wars is saved to. It’s probably C. Also, if you haven’t installed Guild Wars in the Program Files directory, you’ll need to locate where you installed.

Once you’ve done that, click OK. Those settings you added will force Guild Wars to run in DirectX 8 mode and turn off Pixel Shading. It will improve your frame rate as well as remove any issues with graphics rendering. 

You should notice a reasonable improvement. Some features with graphics will be removed, such as some Resurrection Shrines not looking the same. But it does mean you can run Guild Wars on older graphics cards.

Bare in mind these “mods” will only work on Guild Wars, so don’t try them on any other games. Just thought it may be useful to anyone who plays Guild Wars.