Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I don’t believe in accidents. We’re here for a reason. The Great Spirit took the gumbo from New Orleans and poured it all over Texas.

Cyril Neville, New Orleans percussionist

Mistyping the groklaw URL got me to a blog that mentioned http://www.magnatune.com/. Wow. They’re an online music store that gives you an unlimited noncommercial license to the music they sell. You can listen to a 128-kbit MP3 stream of any of their songs for free, and you can buy an album at a time to get a CD-quality download for the price you pick between $5 and $18. For some info on what other people liked, look at the best selling and highest valued albums.

If you’re using a Mac, you’re probably using iTunes to play music. As I discovered today, it doesn’t by default play Ogg Vorbis, but there’s this lovely Quicktime plugin which lets it do just that. iTunes, as usual, has some troubles importing lots of songs at once (haven’t they heard of threads?), but the songs play fine.

Also, if you’re using a unix and need to synchronize two directory trees, look at using rsync. Unlike what I thought, it doesn’t need a dedicated server. Instead it can run over a standard remote shell like SSH.