Alpha Core

Ever since Last.fm made the unfortunate decision to become a paid subscription service for all countries except in the US, UK and Germany, I’ve been on the lookout for a good alternative to get to some tunes from somewhere else and I’ve finally found exactly that!

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!

This article is part of a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment. Check the table of contents for the other articles in the series.

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: Read more

Although the basic idea to offer people a choice what software to use for browsing the internet is not bad at all, forcing Microsoft to bundle Mozilla Firefox (as well as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera) with their operating system Windows, which gets shipped with Internet Explorer (IE) right now, is completely over the top. The situation was revealed in Microsoft’s quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Read more

Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! Do you like Tamale? Hot Hot Tamale? I like Tamale Hot Hot! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! You like Tamale? Warm Tamale? No! I like Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! You like Tamale? Tepid Tamale? No! I like Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot Tamale! Hot Tamale! Hot Hot! What kind of Tamale do you like? Read more

Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) program that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. You can talk to your friends using your Live Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, IRC and other accounts without the need to have lots of individual clients installed.

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.

In another bold attempt to make you waste lots of precious time, I present to you Swinging Ball, a game by Kenji Sihan in which you… well, swing a ball around. It’s all pretty self-explanatory actually, but lots of fun!

It starts off easy, but after a while the levels get really tough. For me, the hardest was the insanely difficult ‘Final Fling’ level near the end. You’ll know what I mean when you get there.

For the latest release of Mozilla Firefox 3, there’s an attempt to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

If you want to help in the effort of setting this world record, the only thing you need to do is get over there and download Firefox 3 by 18:16 UTC today (June 18, 2008). That’s 11:16 a.m. in Mountain View, 2:16 p.m. in Toronto, 3:16 p.m. in Rio de Janeiro, 8:16 p.m. in Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome and Warsaw, 10:16 p.m. in Moscow, and June 19, 2008 at 2:16 a.m. in Beijing and 3:16 a.m. in Tokyo. There’s also a map on the website where you can track the number of downloads live on a world map.

Mozilla Firefox is an extremely popular web browser, open source and freely available at no cost whatsoever. As of May 2008, Firefox has a recorded usage share of 18.41%, making it the second-most popular browser in current use worldwide, after Internet Explorer. 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!

For some mysterious reason, I always like a good tower defense game every now and then. They’re so immensely addictive and GemCraft is absolutely no exception here! In this game, you’re a wizard defending the kingdom against hordes of attacking evil creatures. The game is neatly themed and the whole wizardry thing is nicely integrated into the game, but nobody really cares about the story, right?

The general idea of the game is that you build towers along the path where the enemies walk towards their goal and in these towers you put crafted gems (hence the name of the game). These gems can be combined to create even more powerful ones. There’s lots of levels, upgrades and specials to keep you busy for hours with this game. Also very nice in this game is that there’s an overall skill point system so that you can spend these on several special skills that have an effect on all games you play from then on. This combined with a great game-play, makes this game a truly addictive and fun experience! For a more complete review, I would gladly redirect you to the Jay is Games article. Enjoy and let us know how you liked it!

David Scott created a sequel to Vector TD and calls it Vector TDx (here’s an alternative link without commercial). Because I’m so crazy about tower defense games, this game had to be posted on this blog as well. Enjoy! And if you get beyond level 27/50, let me know how you did it, please. These orange ones are so nasty in that level!