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You have to remember, it’s not your software. You’ve bought a license to use it in a way that they specify. Forget this at your peril… Apparently we will only be allowed one reactivation with Vista, and an unknown algorithm will decide when Microsoft think your machine has changed enough to need it. Phear.

…the ‘Doomed’ channel over at SomaFM. Bring on the goth.

Seriously, we’ve already had Valentine by the Sisters and Double Dare by Bauhaus and we’ve only had it on 15 minutes. Listen, and be damned.

Fascinatingly detailed article on improving page load times, and why AJAX is not always the answer…

This time they’re taking on the ISPs – Danish telco forced to block access to allofmp3.com. I can’t help but feel that this is a little like the record industry sticking its finger in the dyke, but if they keep it up it’s going to get very annoying for us committed customers.

Doug and I have been muttering for some time about Amazon’s new approach. It seems to make a lot of sense that “user’s search on price, we’re never going to be the cheapest, so let’s take a cut of everything and host other shops”. But, what it does do is dramatically reduce the quality of your service. Recently I’ve found it impossible to filter out the third party crap that’s filling up Amazon’s ‘shelves’, and have a had a number of unpleasant (and unfulfilled) shopping experiences.

Welcome, then, iSearchBetter (unfortunately only American at the moment) that does exactly what I want (a bit like GMBMG), in that is searches Amazon and filters out the crap. Nice. We need a UK one.

Regardless of whether Starbucks or the NCA initiated the action, neither should have…

US coffee chain Starbucks is denying Ethiopia earnings of �47m ($88m) a year, according to Oxfam.

I’ve been musing about tying Sleevenotez to radio for a while – it seems a fantastic way to increase the depth of a radio show without trying to turn it into TV-lite. Particularly for niche/genre stations it makes “What the hell is this?” a much easier question to answer. We get a step closer with a Yahoo! widget from the BBC Radio R&D team that allows you to listen to a BBC radio station and update your Last.fm profile with the songs you’re listening to. Sweet.

I wondered how long it would take before the major players got pushed into doing something… It’s been a long time since you could use PayPal to pay for tracks from AllOfMp3.com, and now it’s been announced that you won’t be able to use Visa or Mastercard, either. Luckily I just topped up my credit, but I’m worried how I’m going to top it up next time…

My favourite site launches a new service – Free tunes through a custom player. Mint. (I assume the irony of AllOfMp3 using DRM surely hasn’t escaped them)

Yoz Grahame on the heap of cock that is PHP. I’m sure he was being more polite than that in his post, but it supports my feelings entirely (And yes, this site is written in PHP. It was a long time ago. I’m sorry.)