Category Archives: Windows

Record Online Streaming Music

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Back in May, John blogged about Spotify; a desktop application for streaming music via the Internet.

(Spotify – Streaming Music On Your Desktop: http://john-willis.com/2009/05/spotify-streaming-music-on-your-desktop/)

Spotify have struck a deal with the major record labels in a way that it can offer it’s service free of charge. This free service is ad supported, with various banners shown whilst the Spotify browser is open and an audio commercial every 15-30 minutes or so. There is a monthly subscription service to remove the ads, but because of this platform, it didn’t make my recession beating Windows Apps article back in July: (Windows Apps – Beat The Recession: http://john-willis.com/2009/07/windows-apps-beat-the-recession/).

But Spotify is definitely worth a mention. There are artists that have refused to sign up to Spotify, but there is still a wide variety of choice of music in its library. But you can’t download the music, and the cached versions of the files are un-openable. Quite annoying really – since the music has clearly been paid for via the ad service?

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Ghostery – Firefox Add-On

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A lot of websites will track or monitor what you do or where you go online. Basically, so that the authors can get an understanding of their audiences, so that trends can be gathered for additional content, advertising or any other type of profitable gain.

There used to be an Internet Explorer Add-on called EyeDecide, many years ago, which allowed you to stop certain websites loading monitoring cookies or scripts.

Well, for FireFox, here is Ghostery!

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Windows Apps – Beat The Recession

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We’re fans of “Free” and Open Source software here at JW.com. So I thought I’d share a list of software, all of which are free to download, that would allow me to work perfectly fine on a new Windows XP PC, not having to worry about piracy, licenses or costs.

I’m taking the angle of a fresh install of Windows XP (SP3) – so if you are interested in trying some of the listed products you do so at your own risk, as they may conflict with existing software you all ready have installed. (for example, an Anti-Virus).

I’ll try and cover all the usual categories of what “normal” day-to-day computing is (for me at least), so forgive me if your favourite category of computing is not covered. By all means, comment and leave your own suggestions.

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