Last.fm & iPods – a match made in hell… or is it?

I am a big fan of the music social networking site Last.fm (find my profile here), but one thing that I was never able to get working satisfactorily was ’scrobbling’ of my iPod plays.

The first path I tried was taking my (ancient) 3rd Gen. 10GB iPod, and installing the open-source Rockbox firmware. This was a disaster. Rockbox was not originally designed for the iPod, but was ported over – while the programmers that work on it have done an amazing job – and bear in mind that the iPod I was trying this on was very old, and very battered – it wasn’t working well for me. It frequently crashed, forcing me to do a hard reset. When it did eventually play it would hang every 10 seconds, or so, while playing. I found the solution to this to be not having the song info open while listening, but to simply have the display set to the main menu – playback was then flawless (mostly…). The reason for this experiment was that the Rockbox firmware has a built-in option to create a ‘.scrobbler.log’ file which contains all the information of what you played, for how long, when etc. This is then uploaded to Last.fm either by a php script written by Paul Stead (found here), or by a .NET application called LogScrobbler (found here). The scrobbling side of things worked perfectly, and for the adventurous who want to try it, and who may have more success than I did, I wholly recommend it. If you have a DAP that is fully supported by Rockbox then this could be the way for you to scrobble your plays.

Part 2 – The more successful scrobbling attempts to follow later

Web Browsers etc.

At home, I use Firefox on all of my Machines, be it the MacBook Pro I am writing this on, my Desktop Tower, or my very old (and very almost dead…) Ubuntu laptop. The main reason for this is Extensions. Firefox Extensions must be THE killer feature that can make up for the bloatedness and semi-frequent crashes. The secondary reason, is that I really don’t like the default browsers installed on most OSs. Safari has never appealed to me, mainly due to its incompatibility with certain things – the first example that springs to mind is the Google Talk app built into the GMail interface, which doesn’t even appear in the interface in Safari. On the Windows side of things, the primary alternative is Internet Explorer… Until the most recent version, IE7, there was no tabbed browsing which made it pretty much unusable for me, because the multiple instances of IEXPLORE.EXE in the Task Manager drove the system into the ground. I actually don’t mind IE7 too much, and find it works quite well for most things I need to do.

At school, we are still on IE6. This is, to be frank, painful. IE7 is not wonderful, but in almost every way it is better than IE6. Being a self-professed geek I spend a lot of time on the computer, and one feature I never realised quite how much I would miss is tabbed browsing. I await the day eagerly when, at the very least, IE7 is rolled out across the network, or, and this maybe wishful thinking, when Firefox is installed network-wide, and not limited to my tiny corner of computers at school – CompSoc!