Banana Munki

I am now a pleased owner of a Voddler and a Spotify account. My mini-pc is now my ultimate multimedia entertainment toy.

A few weeks ago I decided to search online for invites to these two media streamers. I got lucky as I came in contact with kind people willing to give away invites. I even found myself with an extra Spotify invite and chose to give it to a lucky friend.

If you still don’t have these services but you don’t have an invite, using search engines to try locate an invitation might just get you invited like I did!

Wiki: Spotify is a proprietary peer-to-peer music streaming service that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with almost no buffering delay. Music can be browsed by artists, albums or created playlists as well as by direct searches. Although, due to the system’s DRM, it is not possible to save the streamed music for use outside the application; a link is provided to allow the listener to directly purchase the material via partner retailers.

Wiki: Voddler is a commercial video-on-demand service and accompanying client application distributing movies and television programming using a patented hybrid peer-to-peer distribution system. Voddler‘s concept is similar to those of Amazon Video on Demand, Vudu, Headweb, Spotify, and Grooveshark, but only for video, and with its client software’s 10-foot user interface is primarily designed for the living-room TV instead of a desktop computer interface, much like the graphical user interface of Boxee.

I use Songbird – it is my favorite in music players with all it’s features/add-ons (radio steamers as one example). I like it’s look and it simply ”feels right”. I even dedicated a post to it so it’s unfortunate that I find Songbird be a bit too unacceptably slow.

I decided to do a search on Open Source Music Player and after giving quite a few other music players a chance to enthrall me I am giving the best candidate  i could find one week to get me hooked.

The lucky winner is Media Monkey. Music manager and Media Jukebox for large collections developed by Ventis Media Inc for organizing and playing audio on Microsoft Windows operating systems.  Available in a free version as well as a paid one, called Gold licence. Skinnable, with extension scripts and plug-ins.

I wouldn’t mind Amarok, not at all. I use Windows and isn’t going to switch (back) to Linux over music players so I’ll keep my eyes open for a Windows version.

I’m not ruling out the possibility that there is a way to make (my beloved xD ) Songbird speed up. Songbird is perfection <3. Ha!

I find Speccy (a System Information tool) to be a very useful software for technical support and upgrade or repair of system. Speccy recieves my personal approval

Speccy is an andvanced system information product from Piriform, a privatley owned US software house (Piriforms CCleaner is a hugely popular freeware tool) offering Windows users (win 95 – win 7) free applications.

Speccy can be very useful not only for power users but normal users as well to help in everyday computing life as it will give you detailed statistics of your hardware. Including CPU, Motherboard, RAM, Graphics Cards, Hard Disks, Optical Drivers and Audio support.

Mobile broadband can be slow. For anyone with mobile broadband who also is frequently using the social network Facebook – Fishbowl for Facebook can be a good alternative to web browsers.

I have installed Fishbowl on my laptop, a good solution for me.

I recently received an .xls file through an e-mail from a relative. It is a Microsoft Excel (spreadsheet program used for calculation, graphing, pivot tables and a macro programming) file.

I don’t have Microsoft Office installed and I don’t want it either. It appear to be a feature rich program but I have everything I need at the moment.

So how do I read the file my relative sent to me? Even though I don’t have Microsoft Office, I can still open the Excel file by downloading Microsoft’s free Excel Viewer (DL link) over at Microsoft’s Download Center. Excel Viewer handles opening, viewing and printing of Excel workbooks, even if you don’t have Microsoft Office installed.
Download Excel Viewer

I am a fan of this practical and lightweight (1,4mb) task organizer. I am really shallow about software  and the GUI is very attractive. With a simple and easy to understand and operate interface Doit.im receive high approval from me.

Doit.im as a free and powerful task management system, which has a deep insight of GTD, and aimed at create a pressure-free yet efficient task management.

This is what the creators have to say about their invention, Doit.im AIR, which is and promised to forever be; free:

Under the guidance of the excellent task management principles of GTD, Doit.im conducts you to have your head cleared, to get rid of various pending ideas on your mind, and helps you organize tasks and focus on items in hand, so that you can closely track the process of your work and feel easy when faced with bulks of complicated projects. With no pressure but efficiency, you’ll further enjoy your work and achieve unexpected success.