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In all other countries [not United States, United Kingdom or Germany ], listening to Last.fm Radio will soon require a subscription of €3.00 per month. There will be a 30 track free trial, and we hope this will convince people to subscribe and keep listening to the radio.

src: http://blog.last.fm/2009/03/24/lastfm-radio-announcement

It happened. Another company turned away a massive portion of the world. Well, they are making them pay for NOT being where the advertisers are. More countries might be added to that list down the road but for some countries like my own, that is highly unlikely.

So everyone else gets about 2 hours of radio. Per account. I am not seeing people going trough the trouble of making multiple accounts to be able to listen to more but come on.. how about limiting people to listening to the charts ? Or to songs freely given to Last.fm for promotional purposes ? You cannot tell me that Last.fm pays for each and every song that is played on it. With a audience as big as this, I bet there are people who would pay for their music to be played more frequently and I wouldnt blame Last.fm for excepting that money.

One of the reasons I think that is already the case is the inability of someone to ban a certain artist or tag. http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/380227/4 And dont go saying it will ban a artist when you ban enough songs. It is simply imposible to get rid of Bri#### Spea## of the pop radio.

I am a subscriber. I love Last.fm (probably tuning in 90% of the time my workstation is on). There was no real reason for me to subscribe back when I did. I just wanted to give something back. I didn’t care and I don’t care for the little things i get extra for subscribing.
And there is where I think the problem is. How about making people want to be subscribed ?

• Songs on demand
• Official Premiers (you say you work directly with artists ?)
• Tickets to concerts .. official ware from artits..

etc… there is so much that could be done.

And fix the damn song exceleration/flickers after a long time of usage. (only noticed that on Vista trough.)

A new toy to add to my collection, SpaceNavigator.

Put some extensive testing into it the past day, installed it on Ubuntu 8.10, MacOS and Windows Vista 64bit.

My initial reaction is, wow. It really shows they put a lot of effort into making it work where ever one might need it. Ubuntu needed a bit of configuration, as 8.10 has this hotplug Xorg driver that gets in the way. Then just a regular install and it works with a updated Blender.

The configuration tools are the same throughout platforms and usability is also identical. Trough the device depends on the applications use of it for OOTB functionality, it also has some individual program configurations.

The SpaceNavigator itself has absolute positioning, although it registers as a relative positioning device (that makes linux use it wrong without drivers). Phisically its a big heavy metal ring with plastic/rubber controol ends. The metal is there to keep it grouned while you use the up/down axis. Rotating it left/right works to about 5 degrees and about double that for all the other axes.

The thing I disslike about it is really something I fealt before with the graphics tablet but didnt mention. The bright blue circual light. When I leave my pc standing for some time, monitor turns off and the room turns blue. (not as bad as with the pulsating bamtoo tablet but non the less brings alot of unneeded attention to itself)

The best use I found for it is Google Earth and Blender. Worth the 60$ ?

Just a quick reminder that Open Source has to be founded too.

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• FxKeyboard: A Firefox keyboard for touchscreens (rawdev.net)

Ok, lets say you have a terminal that is serving the general public with a touchscreen interface. That particular system might be either on windows, linux or mac (or anything else you might have Firefox running on) and will most probably be run in full screen.

Finding a virtual keyboard that works good on any of those is a hard thing to find. I failed at finding it.So, how about a keyboard that works inside Firefox as a plugin ? Thats exactly what I imagined when i started on this project.

Here is a working plugin in my language and set for my specific needs.
FxKeyboard 1.1 – 3kb
fxkeyboard 1.1 English – Due to demand, a slightly more English version ( same layout as with the last one but English buttons, if someone makes a mockup for a real usable English layout, i will be glad to add it.)

GNU/GPL as usual, but i would like it if you ask for my permission before you use it in public accessible areas. If you are doing a kiosk system, you might also be interested in keeping firefox on the homepage using FxGrounded.

If you need customization, have a idea worth sharing or anything else, write me a email or comment this post.

Its frequent that a webpage needs styles specific to categories, like one background for Store, another for Company info etc… But Magento fails in that area unless you want to make specific designs for each section you are out of luck.

CSS might be the ansver trough. The only thing missing is a class that each section has.
addBodyClass(‘category-’.Mage::getBlockSingleton(‘catalog/navigation’)
->getCurrentCategory()
->getParentCategory()
->getUrlKey()
);
?>
This piece of code adds the urlkey of the current categories parent category inside body’s class tag. And the class added is the same that is present on the parent page of the category. How cool is that

For pages with multiple level childs, it is also possible to loop that untill you get to the top parent.

Yet another plugin I despretely needed so I built myself.

Quite simple this one:
It locks the browser on the homepage + derivates (any page that has the url containing the homepage url). For example, if i had my homepage set to http://somepage.com I would be able to access http://somepage.com/some/dir/something.html. At this moment, subdomains are not supported.

If there are external links, this plugin blocks them, unless the links are displayed in a frame. If  by some chance anyone might be able to get trough this, the page is redirected to the homepage when the top document is somewhere not in scope of the homepage.

Ideas, comments are always wecome.
fxgrouded 2kb – MD5: 501e943b8f174874db077de24c2b1ba9

Marko Zabreznik

Thanks to Phil, who commented my blog from a while ago, I finally caught up on this strange mirror website. It indeed is a spoof as they wanted 10$ for extension and email removal.

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=262&t=357899

Here you can read it yourself.

The site is offline atm and I hope it stays that way for good.
Sites like that show up and die more frequently that one might think. That is why I hope the JED will reconcider its intentions on non-GPL extensions..  Or we might face another JED mirror that will pull it off.

Creating a kiosk environment.
The tools:

• Touchscreen Monitor

The requierments:

• Firefox 3
• Linux
• Non-exit-able
• Onscreen Keyboard

As you might expect, I tried everything.

R-Kiosk. Perfect.

A inline javascript Keyboard. While it did what was needed, it fails on forms that are on the bottom of the screen and in Iframes. Good side: Language was dependant on the page’s language. But Fail.

xvkbd. While I did manage to place it on top of Firefox and lock it so people cant close or edit it, and change their language.. it was annoying to do so. Moving it around the screen more so. Porting it to win32 impossible. Fail.

Ok, lets try a different aproach.
http://stlouis-shopper.com/~jtjsoftware/software/vkeyboard.xpi is a firefox Addon I found. A simple tweak made it work on Fx3. Here is what I made. The first step in porting the app, is thus in bad shape. ~Win.

If there is enough interest in such a plugin for Fx3, I myself and the original author will continue to work on it. A lot of things are already on my mind that I want to do with this project. Suggestions ?

New day, new toy.
All the time lodging around my Dell Inspiron got to me today as I went and bought a Medion E1210 SubNoteBook ( NetBook )

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