Siu Lun

Direct from the site:

“Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.”

Go onto their site and see their demo, it looks quite good. Very handy for the end user to grab songs on all kinds of sites and play them on your own computer and even record it for your own use.

BUT

What is the legal implications for this. As a concerned web designer, Songbird seems to unrestrictively download all songs that it files from a page in order to “stream” it to the end user straight away. This means a huge server and bandwidth load for the person/site concerned and as a site owner myself, I do not approve of automated downloading and I feel Songbird is treading in dangerous grounds. In this day and age, where even google was sued for caching contents of sites, it is not a good idea.

Maybe I got it wrong, but that’s what it seems like from their screencast anyway. I guess those who want to protect their content on the site would place it behind a php link and link to a directory that cannot be easily guessed.. i.e. using anti-hotlinking.

Anyhow, I admit I did not even try the software, but this is a first impression critic. If it proves true, then it is a critic of them in general, if it isn’t true then it is a critic of the information they’ve conveyed to me.

I spent 5 hours yesterday night scouring through the internet to find how I can make chinese fonts display nicely in Ubuntu. Chinese fonts in Firefox in Edgy is so badly rendered that it is practically impossible to see. (I don’t have a screenshot, I’ll upload a shot on my laptop which I haven’t fixed yet when I get the chance).

While I was at it, I found an article which also improves font rendering on Ubuntu distribution so that it renders font a bit like the MAC OSX. I followed the guide and produced my own version of the local.conf located /etc/fonts/ which sets local font settings. This file does not exist in Ubuntu Edgy out of the box so you’ll have to create it. Here is how you can improve the font rendering of english, chinese and japanese.

Go to:
Systems -> Preferences -> Font

Select:
Details..

Choose – Smoothing:
Subpixel (LCDs)

Choose – Hinting:
None

Click Close twice.

Type in command line
sudo gedit /etc/fonts/local.conf

copy and paste the content of my local.conf

Save and restart X by pressing CTRL-ALT-Backspace

Viola, enjoy.

note: This can also be applied to Korean I suspect and any other character sets that are being rendered badly. Just add the font name of the language you want to the string list, following the format under where it says “Disable font alias for Chinese”

Just thought I’d make a blog entry for this, someone may one day find this useful other than me.

To make your built-in bluetooth work on your Toshiba laptop running any version of Linux, you should find and use the toshset utility.

It’s the control hub of your Toshiba laptop on Linux distributions.