A while back, I purchased a Napster membership. At $14.95 a month I could download all the MP3 files I could find, and listen to them as much as I wanted. No restrictions right? Wrong. Unless you use their proprietary MP3 player to play the music, then you can’t listen it on any other device. IE… the Ipod. I couldn’t believe it. What an utter crock of shit. I didn’t particularly like iTunes soley on the fact, I wanted free reign to all the music I could find. Sound wrong? No, I fucking paid what they wanted, now give me my fucking music!

Much to my dismay, Napster instituted a form of DRM protection on their music. This fucking sucks. What am I supposed to do? I bought this subscription purely on the intention of filling my iPod with lots of music to listen to. /sigh indeed.

So I was on a conquest to figure out how I could get this music to play on my Ipod. One method was using a winamp plugin to record the the soundcards output, and save it to a file. Apparently it took a long time to complete, and was buggy. Great, so what next? The next option, was burning all of the files to a CD, then bringing them back to the computer, thus removing the DRM protection. Wow, that’s not going to take for-fucking ever!

There HAS to be some sort of software to fix this right? At the time (this was about two years ago) there wasn’t much honestly. A few proof of concepts here, and few alphas there. Nothing. - Flash forward 6 months, and I stumbled across FairUse4WM, which worked marvelously. Albeit EVERY song was prefixed with a damn FAIRUSE4WM_ tag, which was… annoying to say the least, I dealt with it. It worked fine, and then stopped working, and I gave up. Meh…

Well apparently there is a new kid on the block, for everyone dealing with DRM issues. This will handle not only music files, but video, and even streaming files!

From the Author:

From the author - After many hours of fighting with WM-DRM protection I decided to create new tool that would allow people to remove it from from files and streams. Of course FairUse4WM is great tool and it works nice but there are few reasons why have decided to create a new one:
1) FairUse4WM is closed source. Everytime MS releases new version of IBX people have to make binary patches or start from scratch.
2) FairUse4WM doesn’t work with video streams since it wasn’t intended to. Of course it is possible to record video stream and then undrm it but this is pointless when we are talking about tv channels.
3) There is no platform independent tool for ms wm-drm. There is no point of running windows every time you want to undrm some file or stream.

FreeMe2 is the program. Based on famous freeme app created by Beale Screamer and based on viodentias (FairUse4WM) findings. It strips wm-drm protection from wmv/asf/wma files as well as video/audio streams.

Download and info at SourceForge
More Instructions and information at Stream-Recorder.com

FootNote: I canceled my Napster subscription long ago. This rendered my music unusable, and my files were removed. They billed me for another year afterwards, after repeated complaints to them, the credit company. Finally it stopped… they gave me $30 back. Fucking morons.

Wow, ran across these just now. Very cool!

StumbleUpon Alerter

StumbleUpon Alerter is a small tool that sits in the system tray. It keeps an eye on all of your discoveries on StumbleUpon and plays a noise whenever someone reviews or gives your sites a thumbs up. Open the main window to view information about each discovery - including a list of people who have reviewed, thumbed up or thumbed down your sites. More details »

Digg Alerter

Used by some of the influential Digg users. Digg Alerter is a program that sits in your system tray and plays a little noise whenever your submissions are “Dugg”. You can also click on a submission to view a list of people who have dugg and commented on your articles. Click here for more details »

Creators:  http://blog.adamant.com.au/

I was going to write a lengthy study on emerging trends in the logo vector I see coming this year, how ever this article seems to have wrapped that up for me. Great article analyzing trends in logo design and branding. I especially like the “ugly 80’s” section. Definitely my style of preference.

GoDaddy is a great registar. They offer a lot of great control over your domain, and offer great prices. They’re quickly passing NetworkSolutions as the premier provider of domain services. Whats better? There are a ton of great coupon codes for them as well!

OYH3 - $3 off / $7.15 any .COM
OYH2 - $5 off a $30 purchase

OYH1 - 10% off whatever

BTPS7 - 20% any order of $50 or more

BTPS4 - 10% off anything

chill2 - $5 off $30

chill1 - 10% off

chill2 - $5 off $30

chill3 - $67.15 .coms

hash1 - 10% off

hash2 - $5 off $30

hash3 - $7.15 .com registration

CJCNOT695 - .com for $6.95

emma1 - 10% off order.

emma3  - $6.95 .com domain, never expires.

Chrisp - Chris Pirillos Coupon Code

I don’t do a lot of posting of my own videos on YouTube (ironic isn’t it?), however a friend of mine sent me an email, with some information on increasing the quality of the videos posted to youtube.

As an avid visitor, and watcher of all things youtube, this is definitely of interest to me.

Apparently, but simply putting: ” &fmt=18 ” at the end of your youtube videos link, it will appear as an .mp4 file, which has a better quality rating than that of Youtubes normal compression.

Original Youtube Quality:

Afterwards with this little trick:

This was emailed to me, if you see this elsewhere, please let me know so I may properly source them. Thanks!

Not sure why you would need this, but BitLet.org allows you to download bit torrented files (Movies, Music, etc…) to your computer, without the need for a client (useful in some network situations at work etc..).

1. First choose your desired torrent file from a torrent site which you want to download
2. Copy its torrent metafile url.
3. Go to www.bitlet.org in your favorite browser and paste the torrent metafile link in the box.
4. Click the download torrent button.

BitLet Features:

Resume feature:
You can resume your torrents again by just clicking save in the same location where you saved the download the first time (the applet will propose it by default), and your download will be resumed.

Upload and seed torrents:
You can upload and seed torrents by keeping the download window opened.

View Upload/download stats:
You can view the upload and download stats of a particular torrent by clicking the arrow buttons.

Generate BitLet links:
You can create a bitlet link of a particular torrent file by going here which will allow the user to directly download the torrent with bitlet. When the user clicks the link, a bitlet download box will open and prompt the user to select the location to save the file.