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Mar5

Share All del.icio.us Hacking

Posted at 7:49 PM • No Comments

The Yahoo owned bookmarking service del.icio.us (also reachable simply by typing the URL delicious.com!) is easily the most popular of many, many similar services. I bookmark hundreds of websites weekly so I try and upload them by exporting from my browser and importing them into del.icio.us.

Uploading is relatively painless for me from Firefox. Bookmarks>Organize>File>Export>Bookmarks, go to your Delicious page and upload.

The most annoying thing about the del.cio.us service is that by default, sharing is actually turned off when you import your bookmarks which means that you have to turn on sharing individually for each bookmark you want to share. Bizarre and annoying and with over 500+ bookmarks just uploaded by me its just not happening.

Luckily some wag has has come up with a handy ‘work-around’ script which I used succesfully to change the settings on over 600 links yesterday.

Greg at Freshblog has wrote the awesome javascript that goes through and automatically changes all your bookmarks to “share”. Copy and paste the code (from the above link) into the address bar of your browser when you have loaded the appropriate delicious page. Hit enter, bosh! An alert box will pop up telling you how many posts are on the page and off it goes automatically turning the “not shared” setting off. Brilliant.

Found at Freshblogs

Jul24

Gnarls Barkley Get Mashed

Posted at 10:00 PM • No Comments

Its been a while since we featured any posts on musical mash-ups here. Since the last mention (the excellent Green Day mash) the word mash up has taken on a slightly different meaning. Now the term is more likely associated with the latest Google Maps Api mash up rather than the latest frankenstein pop remix flying out of some digital DJ’s laptop studio.

Latest renegade remixers to join the fray are the Brooklyn based DJ duo Sound Advice who have ironically (see DJ Dangermouse) chosen to weld the music from the ubiquitous Gnarls Barkley album ‘St Elsewhere’ to the vocals from deceased rapper Biggie Smalls biggest hits.
The result is Gnarls Biggie a hit and miss collection of eleven tracks (all available as MP3′s naturally). ‘Smilie Faces Hypnotize’, ‘Gimme The Online Loot’ and ‘The Last Nasty Boy’ are worth more than one spin but the simple A vs. B formula is not nearly as inspired as the more elaborate examples of the ‘art’ like DJ Dangermouse’s (half of Gnarls Barkley) groundbreaking Beatles vs Jay Z mash up the ‘Grey Album’ or the aformentioned Green Day (or Dean Gray) remix project.

The guys have already got themselves banned from MySpace (though another ‘fan page’ has already sprung up). The cease and desist is in the post.

Jul17

Open Source Skype On The Way?

Posted at 8:41 PM • No Comments

Lots of chatter in the blogosphere these past few days with the news that Chinese programmers have managed to reverse engineer the Skype protocol.

Charlie Paglee at VoipWiki.com seems to be the first off the block with this one with his post revealing how a business contact in China had contacted him on a beta version of the software.

Charlie explains it better than I can in the post thus:

“Right now every computer with Skype installed on it can be used as a relay to carry data between two other computers when both of those computers are only allowed to make outgoing TCP calls. This means that very soon Skype users will have an alternative client which will not hijack their computer. This could eventually have a very negative effect on the Skype network if too many people choose not to act as Skype Super Nodes and the network starts to deteriorate.”

In laymans terms this means that users could access the Skype VOIP network without using the Skype client, calls could be made through third party software directly to and from Skype users. Users would also not have the resource drain that often comes with running Skype.

This will certainly be raising eyebrows at Ebay who paid $2.6bn for the Internet telephony company last September. Though in a Skype PR statement published on TechCrunch the company dont seem unduly concerned.

“Skype is aware of the claim made by a small group of Chinese engineers that they have reverse engineered Skype software. We have no evidence to suggest that this is true. Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100m users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skypeâ€™s cryptographic security or integrity”

Skype’s software lets PC users talk to each other for free and make cut-price calls to mobiles and landlines.
Related Reading

Skypes Been Cracked? (Engadget.com) July 16th
Skype Cracked? (GigaOm.com) July 13th
Skype Protocol Has Been Cracked (Voipwiki.com) July 13th
Ebay to Buy Skype in $2.6bn Deal (BBC News) Sept 12th 2005

Nov29

Turning RSS Feeds into PDFs

Posted at 10:03 AM • No Comments

Here’s another useful little service. An online generator that allows you to convert any RSS feed into a PDF, called, not unsurprisingly RSS2PDF. Useful if you’re wanting to print out stuff I guess.

Here’s how the Buzzsonic RSS feed looks like using RSS2PDF

Nov24

Green Day Get Mashed (Again)

Posted at 10:29 AM • No Comments

We’re big fans of well done mash-ups here at Buzzsonic and one of the better done bootleg DJ mash-ups (or, unofficial remix/bastard pop to give it two of its many names) in the last eighteen months has easily been San Francisco DJ Party Bens ‘remodel’ of Green Days ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ (as Boulevard of Broken Songs) which seemlessly mixes up Green Day and Oasis and throws in a bit of Travis for good measure. There’s even a companion video mashup of the audio mashup here.

Now Australian mashers Team 9 have taken on the whole of Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ album with great effect.

‘American Edit’ grabs the album, shakes out all the crap bits and sprinkles the whole project liberally with cheeky samples from the likes of Johnny Cash, Queen, the KLF and Ashanti, amongst plenty more. Wholely applauded at the ‘bootleg barometer’ GYBO.
Stand out track for us is ‘Novacaine Rhapsody’ a brilliant mixup of ‘Give Me Novacaine’ and Queens ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, pure brilliance. Grab the album while you can here.

Get Your Mash On….

Get Your Bootleg On (GYBO)
NWA As Remixed Illegal Art (Buzzsonic)
Primal Scream Get The Mash-up Treatment (Buzzsonic)
Beatmixed (Beatmixed.com)

May10

Google RSS News Scraper Appears

Posted at 12:17 PM • No Comments

News search experts have long been wishing for Google News search results to be dished out as RSS feeds. For a company usually renown for its forward thinking innovation Google have been slow to usher in any serious useage of RSS feeds, mainly because the search power house has been actively supporting the rival syndication format Atom.

No sooner said than done. ScrappyGoo is an unofficial app that lets you search Google News and generates a unique RSS feed of the results. By default, each feed has sixteen entries and uses standard boolean operators.

ScrappyGoo uses Gnews2RSS, an open source, experimental PHP script developed by British programmer Julian Bond . He’s already run fowl of Google when he was hit with a cease-and-desist order last year.

And then there was two. Just as I was finishing this post another Google RSS news generator came to my attention. The GNewsfeed from Justin Pfister also offers geo targetted results.

Thanks to John Batelle’s Searchblog

Related Links

Google Moves to Block RSS Scraping [Internet News April 2004]
Google News RSS/RDF Feed Generator [XML Mania] now blocked
Google Mulls RSS Support [CNet News]

May9

Beyond Email With Gmail Hacks

Posted at 1:40 PM • No Comments

It wasn’t that long ago that you had to make do with a paltry 2mb (Hotmail) or 4mb (Yahoo) email storage. Google came along and moved the goalposts with GMail and an account rippling with 1GB of space (now up to 2gb and climbing). Going back to use my old Hotmail account recently I was told I had to sign up again as I hadn’t used the account for longer than 30 days. I didn’t bother. There’s no flashing banner adds at GMail either.

I dont care for every Google development though. The ‘Web Clips’ RSS feed at the top of my Gmail account is pretty much redundant for me as is the ‘web accelerator’ introduced recently . What with the Google Toolbar, GMail notifier, Picasa 2 and Google’s desktop search tool the search giant are getting enough stats from me.

Of much more use to me is the tiny 125k freeware app from Dane, Bjarke Viksoe. The GMail Drive shell extension is a little Windows app that lets you access your Gmail account’s 2 Gigs in Windows Explorer, as if it were just another hard drive on your computer. You can drag and drop big or small files to your Gmail drive, and access them from any computer connected to the web via the Gmail email interface.

Somebody else has already produced a ‘Pocket GMail’ app for PDA owners based on the open source libgmailer formatted to fit on Pocket PCs. There’s even a version that enables users to check their accounts using a WAP enabled phone.

Download GMail Drive Shell Extension

Related Google Reading

GMail Drive Shell Extension [Viksoe.dk]
GMail File System [Richard Jones]
Creepy Gmail [Gmail-is-too-creepy.com]
The Controversial Google Web Accelerator [Pandia.com]
Google Software Downloads [Google.com]
GMail Invite Spooler [Isnoop.net]
The GMail Resource [GMailResource.net]
Google Community [GoogleCommunity.com]

Apr11

Google or Yahoo ?

Posted at 1:30 AM • No Comments

There’s seems to be a split amongst the search engine cognoscenti as to wether Google has lost its crown to Yahoo, now that the expanding search giant has pulled up its socks with the purchase (in December 2002) and fine tuning of Inktomi. Here we’re not so sure as we tend to use both and keep an eye on the newly tweaked MSN Search too.

Still, Norwegian Asgeir S. Nilsen started search engine forums gossiping at the beginning of the month with an April fools joke that has taken on a life of its own. YahGooHoo!gle started as a post on geek news bible Slashdot announcing a Yahoo/Google merger.

The search site actually could be the answer to many web researchers prayers, comparing search results between the two market leaders and splitting the results across a framed results page. How long the site stays up without Yahoo and/or Google pulling the plug or setting the legal bulldogs onto the useful comparison site is anybody guess.

Related Search Resources

YaGoohoo!gle Blog [Yagoohoogle.com]
Comparing Google and Yahoo Search Results [Langreiter.com]
Search Wars are About to Get Personal [CNet News]
GoogleGuy [Googleguy.de]
Google vs Yahoo, the War of the Search Engines [MSNBC.com]
Search Engine Watch [SearchEngineWatch.com]