One million Spotifers

 

As a big fan who pays a monthly fee to Spotify, I’m really pleased that they now have over a million subscribers. Given that that suggests a monthly revenue of £10m plus whatever they make from advertising, though, I do hope that there’s a plan to revise the rates that they actually pay artists in the near future.

I’d also like to see Spotify develop better tools for discovering and promoting new music. The ‘What’s new’ list always seems to throw up the same Miles Davis albums for me, while ‘Top lists’ is still utterly incomprehensible to my eyes, despite the fact I’ve been using Spotify since it launched.

Normal service resumed

If I realised one thing this week, it’s that website malware is really, really annoying. Google flagged up this site as being infected with something non-specifically bad, which seemed to go away after reinstalling WordPress. Then the warning went away. Then it came back. Then I checked all the little pieces of code WordPress scatterguns  over the server for whatever was being flagged up by Google. Then I found nothing. Then the warning went away again. Then I realised the upgrade had broken the design (such as it is).

Gah.

–updated 7/3: Something is still causing problems, so I’m turning off a lot of the site functions for a while to see if it will help. May just stick the whole lot on Tumblr

 

Why I can’t cancel Facebook

I keep threatening to remove my Facebook profile. I don’t use it, honestly, and it’s just amassing information about me over which I have no control and someone else  is making money from. Then, every once in a while, it becomes the only way I find out about things like Mark Sparrow’s The Truth About Hospital Food. I had no idea an old friend and ex-colleague – with whom I’ve regrettably lost touch – was making a documentary based on his experience of hospital food during 10 weeks of traction. Thanks to Facebook, I caught the whole thing.

And very good it was too.

Ice city

Over at BLDBLG: Project Iceworm, the US army’s cold war bunker built under the arctic icesheet. Nuclear  powered and with twenty-odd giant  caverns, the pictures are amazing. No dates, but according to the original site it was occupied between 1959-1966. Amazing.

Why aren’t you an iPad?

This week I have been mostly testing Android tablets. My thoughts: the on screen keyboards are all awful compared to Apple, the Market is a mess and no access to iPlayer on anything but the Galaxy Tab is just tedious. There are a couple of gems, though, which I’ll reveal later.

In the meantime, it’s amusing that browsing the Independent’s mobile site from a non-Apple device brings this up as the main headline? I guess not enough readers use it to have brought itto the devs’ attention yet.

All that glitters…

Well, you would, wouldn't you?

Had better not be gold. Not a the price it’s currently commanding on the commodities market. $1340 an ounce? I could barely afford to redecorateDavid Cameron’s office in at that rate.

Still, good news for those of us on more modest budgets. There’s plenty of research going on into gold alternatives for the electronics industry (link at embeddedtechnology.com), which rather relies on the shiny stuff for its conductive properties. It’s like costume jewelery for silicon, only better.

Big smackdown in Ironforge

Pile on!

I used to play WoW far too much, but really haven’t had time to do much other than stick my head in occassionally to say hello to friends lately. I am enjoying the pre-Cataclysm expansion events though. The final phase before the in-game world gets changed irrevocably kicked off today and I caught an early part of it by accident. The major cities – Ironforge, Stormwind, Ogrimmar, Thunder Bluff – get overrun by elementals, causing almost every player currently online to pile into the same location and fight them off. It’s quite the experience… probably a hundred or so players in one space when I logged in It’s a guess but we reckon there were around three hundred players on Stormwing docks at one point,  and then four bosses to fight afterwards.

A lot of people on elephants, queuing for the next event.

Seriously, it's a lot of elephants.

Chandra finds 30 year old black hole

It may be fast approaching middle age, but NASA has found the youngest black hole in our galaxy, courtesy of the Chandra telescope. I remember the awkward feeling, 30 years old and still the youngest person in the room. Trust me SN1979C (for that is its name) it’s all downhill from here. In a few years’ time you’ll be looking at other black holes and wondering if you were ever that fresh faced and naive.

The open source journalist’s toolkit pt3: Transcription software

Yeah, it's a Windows screenshot, but it works just as well in Linux, honestly.

If you do a lot of interviews, either you have to get very good at shorthand or you’ll spend a lot of time with a pair of headphones clamped to your ears trying to figure out if the last sentence on the tape was was “ending cheap loans” or “send in the clowns”. Transcription is a necessary, and the part of the job I hate the most. It’s also very important – I find that even when my notetaking is at its finest, there’s almost  always something I catch on a tape which adds something important to a story or angle which I’d missed before.

ExpressScribe isn’t open source, but it is free and the best transcription software I’ve ever used by a long way. There’s  versions for Windows, OSX and Linux which are all identical and simple to install – in fact it’s one of the only Linux programs I know of that has a straightforward Windows style installer rather than a  .deb or .rpm package or required repository. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it does mean that anyone coming to Linux from Windows should be able to set it up without too many problems.

The two issues you may have are that NCH, the developer, has stopped linking to the Linux version from it’s front page – but can download it directly from this link - and that you may need to remind  it where your sound card is occassionally. I find that every now and then hitting a global hotkey for ‘Back 5 seconds’, for example, will jump the audio forward by a random amount. If  this happens, go to Options>Playback and change the sound device from ‘Default’ to the name of your soundcard (it’ll be listed in the drop down menu). A third, minor point is that it’s worth manually clearing the cache of old recording now and then if you’ve archived them somewhere else.

Otherwise, Express Scribe really is great.  You can load just about any kind of audio file (WAV, MP3, AAC, etc, and even some proprietary formats) and setting up hotkeys just  works. It even supports a footpedal, and I’ve been toying with the idea of making one from an old mouse.

For reference, I bind around the ALT key and the number pad or cursors because they’re easy to reach with your little fingers when typing – ALT+0 is pause and rewind five seconds, ALT+left is rewind 5 seconds and ALT+right is forward 5 seconds.

Other posts in The open source journalist’s toolkit: Build a multimedia journalism studio for free.