Pappmaskin.no

Norwegian firm Aspiro is working on a Spotify competitor, due to go into beta in the summer of 2009 according to NRKbeta. But a happy few, including me, has had access for a while, and I wanted to share a few annotated screenshots from the Abobe Air-based client.

PS: To get a betatest login, please send your name and mobile phone number to wimp@aspiro.com, and follow @aspiromusic on Twitter

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

Get personal recommendations based on your last.fm history by authorizing Wimp to access your data. This is what my recommandations look like. A little unusual selection perhaps, but looks interresting.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

I am disappointed!

I have been toiling away ALL WEEK over at Amazons Mechanical Turk, but what do I have to show for it? Not much, I can tell you that!

Here is my weekly pay check statement:

Greetings from Amazon Mechanical Turk,

The following is a summary of activity for your Mechanical Turk account for the week ending Mar 29, 2008.

Your HIT activity for this week:
- Number of HITs accepted: 27
- Number of HITs returned: 5
- Number of HITs abandoned: 0
- Number of HITs submitted: 22

Approvals and payments that occurred this week:
- Number of HITs approved: 15
- Number of HITs rejected: 0
- HIT reward earned: $0.15
- Total Amount earned this week: $0.15

For more information about your account status and activity, sign in to
http://www.mturk.com/, then view your “Dashboard”.

Sincerely,
Amazon Mechanical Turk
http://www.mturk.com/
1200 12TH AVE South, SUITE 1200
SEATTLE, WA 98144-2734 USA

How do you like them apples? $0.15! What can you buy for $0.15! Nothing at all! That’s what!

But seriously: I actually love Mechanical Turk, it is a great and cheap platform for solving problems where machine code can’t help (yet), like describing the content of an image or transcribing audio content. The best use of it that I’ve seen so far is a PHD student who uses mturk workers to transcribe audio interviews she has done for her thesis. The audio is pretty clear, but the subject she interviews talks pretty slurred and fast, it is sometimes difficult to make out what he says. Transscribing a five minute audio segment actually pays pretty “well”, at least compared to a smaller task like tagging images, but you need to be super consentrated and prefferably experienced to complete the task with high enough quality to be approwed.

Uservoice.com delivers what looks to be a very nice service for handling user feedback on your website, but perhaps they should have used their own product on their error handling page?

Got this when trying to create an account:

Oh well, I guess I will have to try again later. Or maybe not.

Update: Refreshed the error page, and now we’re up and running. http://pappmaskin.uservoice.com/

I’m a little down on Apple these days, my magsafe power supply to my macbook stopped working, or actually only works with one side up, so I did a little poking around and found out that this is a quite common problem.

The culprit is a tiny spring inside the magsafe connector, that is supposed to push the pins out again when you disconnect the powersupply, and when this fails: No power to your macbook. I seems that Apple is more than willing to replace the power supply for you, especially if you have an AppleCare agreement, so I will contact them tomorrow, but I also wanted to check what a new powersupply costs. And the price is really steap, NOK 699,- or over a hundre bucks US! Hello!

So that is when I discovered that it is impossible to write a review at the Apple Store. I wrote a short review and gave the powersupply one star, but when I tried to send it, I got a red message that states that “some of the words in the review cant be published. It also states that the review must be under 300 words. So I shortened it, and then I checked the wordcount, and got 70. I even counted the characters in case Apple got words and characters mixed up, and the number is 297. So what’s up? There is nothing in my message that is offensive, or even particularly negative, so why can’t I review it?

Try for yourself, maybe you have better luck.

Magsafekontakten min sluttet plutselig å virke, fant fort ut at det var en av de må pin-ene i kontakten som hadde satt seg fast, dvs den lille fjæren inne i kontakten har falt av eller er utslitt. Laderen min er ennå ikke ett år gammel. Et søk på nettet viser at dette er et ganske vanlig problem. Laderen koster jo 700 kroner, da burde den jo være litt mer solid.

Apple store, Magsafe power supply

More about the MagSafes shortcomings.
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macbookpro/topic2007.html
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/6/29/1719/52365

Two random tools to count words and characters.
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/charcount.shtml
http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/javascript/text/count-words.html

This is a test of the iPhoto2Gmail plugin, I was thinking about using
it for posting pictures to my blog.

Update: Ah, too bad blogger.com doesn’t post the picture I sent :) Over to plan B: Sending the photo to flickr, and setting up flickr to automagically sending it on to blogger.com.

Update: Over to plan C. Flickr is obviously not friends with the new blogger, my pictures arrive at flickr, but the automatic forwarding to blogger not longer works. Darn!