ModifiedLogic

This browser is pretty damn slick. It just feels light. I really am going to try to use it as my main broswer for as long as I can. My main browser of choice on the Mac and PC is Firefox. Hopefully there will be a Mac version in the future. I love having addons like the del.icio.us setup. I like Lifehacker’s greasemonkey scripts Better gmail and Better greader. But, I think I can give up the UI tweaks for a smaller memory hog. 

For now, I can obviously use the del.icio.us bookmarlet still on my bookmark bar in Chrome. I just have to completely leave the “betters” behind. 

Here’s to something new.

When I heard about Muxtape, I thought it was a cool idea. Upload songs and create a mixtape that you can share. I knew I wanted to make one, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted my theme to be. It’s not like you can only make one (one per email address), but I couldn’t think of a good idea.

With all my reminiscing about Nirvana and the 90’s, I decided to make a Muxtape that is comprised of some of the best cover versions of Nirvana songs.

The Muxtape, aptly named, Best Nirvana Cover Songs has a little bit of everything. There sure are plenty of Nirvana covers out there in recorded land, but I truly believe these are the best. Check it out.

One of my top wants/needs for the iPhone is the ability to scrobble audio tracks to last.fm. I recently re-jailbroke my iPhone using ZiPhone and installed Mobilescrobbler. Now, a big piece of the "scrobbling puzzle" is filled in.

Mobilescrobbler is a full featured last.fm client. It allows you to listen to your last.fm radio (loved tracks, person radio, neighborhood), scrobble tracks, check lyrics, friends, artist info, love tracks, ban them, skip them, and more. Seriously, it covers just about everything you can do with the last.fm desktop client. It does all of this over wi-fi OR edge.

Now, every app has to have it’s "cool" feature right? Well, Mobilescrobbler supports iPhone gestures. Swipe and pinch away.

Sometimes, people ask me why I like last.fm so much and why scrobbling is so important to me. There are many reasons, but here are the first few that come to mind:

1. I like many many different kinds of music. Rather than talking about them all, I can say, go look at my last.fm page.

2. It helps me, and others, keep track of what I listen to. If I hear a new band from someone’s share iTunes library or on last.fm radio, there is a record of it. I can go back and see exactly what I was listening to at what time. In a lot of cases, now you can listen to full streaming tracks as well.

3. Finding new artists is a huge part of the equation. You can generate a radio station for say, bands that sound like Coheed and Cambria. For a person like me who likes to constantly discover new music, it’s a no brainer. Mix that with the rest of the social aspects of last.fm and the new music discovery possibilities are near infinite.

Getting back to Mobilescrobbler. The app itself is a big part of the puzzle, but there are still a few missing pieces, for me at least. The big picture to me is, being able to scrobble any and all music from any source. With Mobilescrobbler, it covers me at home, anywhere I have my iPhone including the car and walking. For my particular audio sources, I’m only missing audio played on say, my Xbox 360 or on my Sirius radio. Do we need to go that far? I’m not sure. But I’d like to.

The end result is, I am very happy with what Mobilescrobbler gives me. I’d say that now, at least 75% of the music I listen to will be scrobbled, and that’s just cool.

I recently submitted ModifiedLogic to Blogged.com. There is some kind of review process. The review process, in their own words:

"Editor reviews are provided by professional editors who evaluate a blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style."

So, this blog has been rated 7.3 based on that criteria. 7.3 doesn’t sound too bad, so I posted the score in a widget over in my sidebar.

I recently got into yet another beta. This time it’s Dixero, a web app that allows you to enter whatever rss feeds you want and it reads each blog entry to you using one of three (currently) cool sounding audiobook type voices.

In their own words:

"Dixero is a free and innovative Web-based tool which allows you to listen to your favorite RSS feeds directly online, on your computer as a Podcast, or using a portable device, like an iPod!

At last, with Dixero, you can aggregate your favorite feeds from the most recognized media companies and blogs, transforming posts into audio with different voices."

One of the cool things you can do is create a personalized feed that contains rss feeds of your choice and you can share out the mp3’s of those feeds. This reading of my last mashup post sounds so cool to me. I think Dixero is great if you’re in a situation in which you can’t look at a screen, or you want to take certain feeds with you and listening to them adds a bit of convenience.

So far, the word to audio translation processing works very well. I am impressed with how well the blog posts sound. Dixero is definitely an interesting tool that I will continue to use and test.

Having a native iPhone app for Dixero would be very cool as well.

Currently myself and many others are experiencing an issue with Twitter that is apparently not allowing the display of most friends’ tweets. A few people have suggested that you can unfollow/re-follow a friend to fix it, but if you are following many people, it can become tedious.

According to the following status update now showing on everyone’s home page, tweets are in fact "going through", they just can’t be seen.

With these latest Twitter outage/errors, I realized that I would be willing to pay for Twitter.

I currently pay the $9.00 every 3 months for last.fm to hopefully contribute to service, development, and the "My Radio Station" feature. Another thing I pay for is the $24.99 a year for a premium flickr account. I use both of those services quite a bit, but I use Twitter more.

If it meant more uptime, more features, etc…I would pay a small fee for Twitter in a heartbeat.

In all of this confusion with the current issues, I found this Twitter account that spits out status updates and bugs. Friend it up if you want the latest straight from inner twitter. http://twitter.com/twitter_status

Streamy is a social news splash rss type site. It’s currently in private beta.

Or, in their own words "Streamy consolidates the stories, sites and people you care about into a real-time experience."

I have 5 invite codes to give away. To get one, be one of the first five people to leave a comment stating which you prefer: City life, Suburban life, or other and why.

I have a post coming soon on why I chose Suburban life.