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CitySounds.fm lets you listen to the latest music from cities around the world. At the top are the most active cities and the list constantly changes as new music is being created. The music is being fetched from SoundCloud and the city photos are fetched from Flickr.

The music available through CitySounds.fm seems to be primarily dance music until now and I’m quite happy about that actually. Enjoy listening to the music!

Update (August, 22nd): There’s a new and improved version of CitySounds.fm online in which all cities now have their own page as well, you can register as a listener by tweeting a link to the city page and and cities within the same country are suggested to listen to. CitySounds.fm was already great and it just got better!

In this article I’d like to list some network and internet tools that deserve some attention. Anything from general every-day-use tools to more advanced analysis software goes in here. Here’s some of the better software out there:

• BitMeter II: this free bandwidth meter allows you to visually monitor your internet connection by displaying a scrolling graph that shows your upload and download speed over time. The different colours on the graph represent your upload and download speeds, the display updates every second, and the current speeds are also displayed numerically in the lower part of the window. If you want to see historical data you can use the Statistics window to see what’s been going on over the last few hours, days or weeks. Go to the product page for a detailed overview of features.

• FileZilla FTP Client & Server: the open-source client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. For a list of features, check out the website or, for more information, the wiki. The server software is an open-source FTP server supported by the same project. It supports FTP and FTP over SSL/TLS. If you’re using FTP, this is an application you’ll want to have installed for sure! I’m happily using it for years already now.

• iPig (iOpus Private Internet Gateway): the iOpus Private Internet Gateway (iPIG) creates a secure “tunnel” that protects your inbound and outbound communications at any Wi-Fi hotspot or wired network. It’s extremely easy to setup and the iPig Server Express Edition, which is recommendable to install if you don’t want your traffic to go through their servers, is free for up to 5 users. If you’re the only one using it, that’s more than enough. I especially like how easy it is to setup a server and client.

• Mozilla Firefox: an extremely popular open-source web browser. At the moment, Firefox has a recorded usage share of about 21%, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer (around 68%). The developers of Firefox aimed to produce a browser that “just surfs the web” and delivers the “best possible browsing experience to the widest possible set of people.” Personally, I’m already using it for years and it’s truly great in features, speed, performance, security, flexibility and user-friendliness! I can heartily recommend it!

• Mozilla Thunderbird: open-source e-mail and news client. Thunderbird offers a variety of ways for you to organize and display your folders, whether by favorites, recently viewed or folders containing unread messages. As always, you can also set up RSS and newsgroup folders to stay on top of news and your interests. Check out the website to get a complete overview of all features of this great piece of software. I’m using it for years already and I’m sticking to it. I especially like the junk e-mail handling features.

• PuTTY: open-source client program for the SSH, Telnet and Rlogin network protocols. These protocols are all used to run a remote session on a computer, over a network. PuTTY implements the client end of that session: the end at which the session is displayed, rather than the end at which it runs. In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to another machine. PuTTY opens a window to communicate with the other machine. It’s a small tool and great in many ways. If you’re running Windows and you’d rather want it to sit in the System Tray, check out PuTTYtray as well.

• TCPView: free Windows Sysinternals tool that shows you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On newer Windows versions, TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows.
  
  Update (March, 14th): CurrPorts is a free tool by NirSoft that does exactly the same, but additionally allows for filters to be set: e.g. only show connections of a named process, udp/tcp, remote/local ports, IP addresses, etc. This is a huge advantage over TCPView when you want to inspect a certain application!

• UltraVNC: is a powerful, easy to use and open-source software title that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. If you provide computer support, you can quickly access your customer’s computers from anywhere in the world and resolve helpdesk issues remotely.

• Wireshark: an open-source network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.

• WebBug: a free program that lets you enter a URL, then displays exactly what it sends to the web server and, when the response is received, exactly what the web server sends back. This is a ‘fun’ program if you’re curious about the HTTP protocol, and is a useful debugging tool if you are trying to resolve a problem. It will handle the HTTP/1.1 version of the Web protocol in addition to the older HTTP/1.0 and HTTP 0.9, as well as conditional GETs. It can also be configured to be used with a proxy server. It also allows for the entry of custom headers so that users can test anything they like.

• Xenu’s Link Sleuth: free tool that checks web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time. If you maintain any website, this is a great tool to use. Nobody wants to click on links going places that don’t exist anymore, also not your site’s visitors.

People should inform themselves about existing alternatives and I don’t agree that Microsoft should be forced to ship their product with a range of other browsers. When you buy something with batteries included, do you get 5 batteries of different brands? And what with less-known web browsers such as Maxthon, Flock, etc. Don’t they also deserve a fair chance? The idea to ship Windows without any web browser at all is also a bad one, because some users would have absolutely no idea where to get their “window onto the world” from. In the end they’d blame Windows for not being able to read their daily news website anymore. I think a screen mentioning that Internet Explorer is installed by default, but can be uninstalled and replaced by any web browser of the user’s choice, would already do fine.

The icon used above was designed by Archangel-Daemon over at deviantART.

From today on, their new album Paper Plane is entirely available to download for free (in MP3 format) from the official website. This is the first time a Belgian band releases a new album online for free. The lyrics to all songs can be found on the Kolacny website.

To give you an idea of what they are like: below is the video clip from Raintears, which is also on the album. The song is about holding on to memories of a lost loved one.

Refreshing in this game is the ability to dig around in the landscape and find some bonus items or treasures, which help you getting more money for the next level.

At first the game might seem pretty difficult, but keep trying and you’ll be able to get to the end easily! Money is hard to come by in this game, so spend it wisely! Enjoy the game!

So? What kind of Tamale do you like?

(Credits: Darling and Weebl)

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Het blijkt alsof ik mijn innerlijk midden nog juist op tijd gevonden heb, want ik ben geslaagd!

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For those who don’t know Leuven really well: it’s a maze of one-way streets and as a visitor, you’re probably better off just taking the outer ring around the city if you’re by car. But fortunately, if you feel like walking around, you can ignore all these one-way streets and find the best route thanks to this new feature. It only works for routes under 10 km though.

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Today I also uninstalled mIRC (an IRC client) because I have no need for it anymore. Thanks to Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), I can now hang around on my favorite chat channels and get popup notifications when my nickname gets mentioned without needing an extra program to clutter up my system.

Pidgin is free software (GPL). For more information, visit the official website.