Am I Famous Now…

Oboe Locker, by MP3 Tunes, is one of the promising free online music storage services. In the standard free version, Oboe offers you 1GB free storage, and with some luck you might get a free upgrade to unlimited free storage space.

Oboe Locker comes with sync software, allowing you to sync and listen to your music on any computer world wide, without the need for a VPN network with your home computer. The music player is web based, plays in your web browser.
So now, even when you’re at $tarbuck$ you can listen to your own music, without having to store it on your notebook.

Synchronizing your music with Oboe Sync is easy. If you use iTunes or Windows Media Player, Oboe Sync will automatically detect in what folder you have stored your music and propose you that folder for the synchronization. Alternatively you can also select your own folders.
The sync process itself is dynamic, using the maximum upload speed as long as nothing else communicates. When bandwith is needed for another service, Oboe Sync frees the upload highway. I can easily Skype while syncing.
Files in your locker benefit album art, unlimited album art is available in the Premium Service.

With Oboe Sync you can also download your Locker easily on any computer. Be careful if your audio files have digital protection such as DRM. Oboe Locker counts as a device.

Some features I’d like to see in a future version of Oboe Locker are a bandwith/upload throttle and certain plugins.
If you are in a network, Oboe can clog the network’s upload if the network isn’t dynamically configured. Yes that is all you home users with 2 or more computers at home.
Support for more media players, especially WinAmp since it is widely spread.
Plugins for fe. last.fm and also versions for portable devices with WiFi, or even 3G phones. Imagine how cool it could be to listen to ALL our music on your 3G phone with unlimited data plan, and not just to the size of your phone’s memory card.

And to exceptionally behave as a cool kid, I have 2 priority codes for Oboe Locker Free Unlimited, giving you immediate access to unlimited storage.
And if all that wasn’t cool enough yet, I also have 2 invites for Joost^TM Beta. More about Joost^TM Beta in another entry.

48 Hours from now on (Comments will not be taken into consideration anymore after Saturday 3th March, 2007 07.00PM GMT).
Earn your invite in the comments. Specify which invite you want… and be creative.

Long have I been thinking about it, long have I put it off, but I finally made my decision : you can now advertize here at AIFN.
There are several options to purchase ad space on this blog.

• You can use Text Link Ads (aff) to get a link at the bottom of each page. The actual price is $60/month, but I will raise the price to $100 on March 15th, 2007. My listing at TLA can be found here
• Direct advertising without go-between.
  Use the contact form to drop me a mail. There will be 4 spots for a graphical ad, sized 125*125 pixel, in the sidebar on every page without comment block (directly under the subscribe block).
  Related¹ advertisers will get a mention in a entry, together with a short review of the service/product (around 100 words).
  Graphical ads cost $75/month, $125 starting March 15th, 2007. If you pursue 3 months ad once you’ll benefit the $75 rate for all 3 months, so $225 all together.
• Request a Review.
  You can request a review of your product, using ReviewMe. Find my listing here ($130). You can also request a review using the contact form for $90.
  Reviews will include a link (at least one), if possible screenshots or pictures and will be minimum 400 words. If I really like your product/service, I might even write several entries about it.
  Reviews will be published within 72 hours after request.
• Grab the Google Adsense spot with a graphical ad, sized 250*250 or larger (max. 340*280 px). Your ad will be featured on 700+ pages for only $75/month.
  Your product/service will also be mentioned in an entry, and briefly reviewed (around 100 words) if related¹.
  Contact me to purchase this spot.

This blog is updated at least 15 times/month.

¹ I will not mention or review any loan services, blackjack casinos and adult sites. Or anything from the same league.

I have had the LG Shine for a month now and my feeling towards the phone are split. Esthetically the phone is great. It is an eye catcher, put it on a table at the bar or at $tarbuck$ and you notice the interest of most people.
Especially if you like nice things, good looking gizmos. And I like nice desing: I use a Sony Vaio, a Logitech diNovo keyboard and mouse set and most of time always have a Canon Ixus digital camera with me.

One month long I have done my best, trying to make sure the LG Shine was always in the same pocket as my keys. I wanted to test the scratch resistancy of the mirror plated screen. After one month I can’t discover any scratches on the mirror. This has positively surprised me.
The rest of the body case has suffered minor scratches, but I guess that is normal with a stainless/metal¹ case.

The design of the LG Shine is splendid

The LCD screen is a pleasure to look at, a real beauty, great colors, marvelous fonts with smooth aliasing and the whole menu is colorful without being an eye sore. Much the opposite of the design here at AIFN.
Although the menu icons miss some in depth detail and drop shadows, they are nice and smooth. The animated icon background one finds through the whole menu is not disturbing and a really nice detail IMHO (even if especially here I miss some shadows for the icons).

The design of the LG Shine is splendid!

When it comes to daily usage I must be more critical, negative even. I could easily say ‘It’s a LG Phone’ and anyone who has some experience with LG phones knows what this means. But it gets worse : it’s a LG phone with 5 buttons.

If I weren’t nuts yet, the LG Shine buttons would have driven me nuts

The button assignment is a catastrophe. After 4 weeks I still can’t use the 5 buttons blindly and correctly at the same time. 5 buttons are a dream. I remember how much I used the buttons on my Clie TH55. Best thing about the Clie was that the buttons totally configurable were. The LG Shine’s aren’t². If I weren’t nuts yet, the LG Shine buttons would have driven me nuts.

The slider behavior is weird to say the least. When closing the slider, within seconds the buttons go into lock mode³. But that is only if you have the menu closed. When the menu is open, LG sticks to its old paradigm to keep the last settings in memory. And forgets to lock the buttons. Not that much of a problem, unless you’re in WAP mode (the pre-release version is only a 2G phone) and have no data flat rate. You can’t call without opening the slider anyway, which I actually would have loved to be able to.

In the 4 weeks with the LG Shine I have realized it actually is possible to live without mobile internet. As where I had hoped to toy with mobile apps, I admit I couldn’t be bothered to look for wap.apps and install them.
The camera takes great pictures, especially for a 2MP phone camera. They surely are good enough for today’s foto browsing flickr.
The flat keypad is good looking with the blue backlight, but surely not ideal for text junkies. Luckily I am not one of those, but I would mail lots if the LG Shine were a 3G phone.

I haven’t really used the mp3 player, but a first test with Run by AIR was satisfying for a phone.

But there are two major problems I haven’t mentioned so far.
First the volume is WAY to quiet, even the maximum volume. I have missed several calls because the phone doesn’t ring loud enough. Also the LG Shine hardly ever managed it to wake me up because of this.
And second the scroll wheel needs to be optimized. The wheel lags and the distance one needs to scroll between 2 menu items is too long IMHO.

All in all I think the LG Shine is a great phone for the targeted group : people who like good looking gizmos.
If you want that special phone with the awesome design, the LG Shine is for you!
If you’re looking for an phone with awesome usability, you’ll have to wait some more.

I want both. And now put my hopes on the LG Prada. And my kingdom⁴ for a great phone which is not called iPhone.

¹ I am still not convinced the casing is 100% metal.
² The possibility to configure the buttons would make the phone a marvelous phone. Firmware? Anyone? LG can freely call me to reassign the buttons as well. :D.
³ I wished this was also configurable.
⁴ I have none, but feel free to take the United Kingdom. :D

Finally back.

I hope now the database connection problems are finally resolved. Also the server performance is supposed to be better. I moved hoster.
And the Tech Support even writes understandable English.

Lets hope this time everything will work better.
Also I already have some entries drafted. Get ready this time. ;-)

Please drop a comment if you find any wonkiness at AIFN.

Some days ago I installed the Global Translator plugin for Wordpress here. I wanted to give it a go.
Lucky as I am Google quickly caught the new links and benefiting an acceptable PR the translated entry links were quickly listed in SERPs. Obviously not yet at their real rank but some very high. And I mean really high, like #4 among 570k results.

I had already noticed that the Google Translator service has been crawling this page for several days non stop now. But I didn’t expect translated pages to show up that fast and certainly not to be ranked this high.
Right at the moment I even consider those SERP listing rather spammy than a genuine aid. I am in doubt what to do.

Obviously if I remove the service this might result in thousands of 404 referrer. I could anticipate this problem with a 301 rule in the .htaccess file, but at the same time sounds hilariously that using a Google service, Google Translator, might set off a spam alert or influence the PR, worse even the Trust Rank, of anyone’s site.
Of course I couldn’t find any resources on this matter and pinging Matt Cutts will probably have exactly the same result as usual : None.
Being a popular man, Matt would even not notice a ping more or less.

Reading some of the translations and seeing where the translated entries are listed in SERPs, among what a quality sites such a crappy translations shows up, I think I might rather prefer not to use this service, than benefit the advantage of some more traffic over Google to this site.
The usage of that plug-in looks more black-hat than anything else (although Google doesn’t consider translations duplicate content).
And if I were a reader, I certainly would not stay long if I landed on an entry translated by Google. Oh boy.

UPDATE : For the time being I will prevent Google from further crawling the translations with some robots.txt rules. This way the plug-in stays a mere service for the reader and can’t have any other influences, or doesn’t do what I want.
Rather not being ranked than having a phony listing.