The Jazz is a DAB Jazz radio station broadcasting in the UK. Unfortunately it's plagued by problems, firstly there are adverts on it, a pet hate of mine. Secondly it's DAB the first leap backwards in technology. Maybe monophonic audio steams of low quality MP3 are fine coming out of a 2.4" speaker but when you find yourself needing to hear music in a format that's enjoyable this will not do.

Fortunately I found a solution today. The Jazz broadcast online in a pathetic 32kbps... or do they? It would seem when using Windows Media Player this is indeed the quality you receive. However, using an alternative player in Linux or OS X and I can pick up a much higher quality stream. Unfortunately I can't tell what quality the stream is, only that I can not recognise any encoding artefacts in the stream and I can skip adverts if I let a few minutes buffer first or simply rewind to re-listen to the last song whilst waiting for the adverts to finish. Great stuff

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My car is out of action for this week and possibly Monday too, some problem most likely related too wheel bearings who knows? Anyhow I have been forced to travel on the bus like I did in the "good old days". It's always the case that you never realise how much you like something till it's gone. As humans we have a wonderful tendency to take anything and everything for granted. Well, true to this rule I now find myself realising just how terrible the buses are. Unreliable, annoying stop changes, cold, uncomfortable, no privacy and highly inconvenient. Needless to say I can't wait till my car is fixed.

Whilst travelling on the bus I listen to music for the entire journey. I do this for two reasons, because I enjoy listening to music and because I don't enjoy listening to a commentary of last nights TV programming, football results or general gossip all wrapped up in bountiful swear words and a thick black country accent to further drive one insane. However, two nights ago someone was having a rather different conversation. It must be noted that this is the first time I have ever heard such a conversation on a bus and so I consider it a great rarity.

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Quote:
What we are, that only we can see

- Raplh Waldo Emerson

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What ho? A ping!

Following hot on the heals of the toadstool post where I first talked about the new XML-RPC features and the lagging behind post where I first moaned about not having them. Logicfury the software my blog runs on now supports pingbacks.

Primarily I use the one ping to ping them all service Pingomatic to dish out my pings also coupled up with a few default ones just to be sure.

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Have a Slicehost hosted site? Come and steal this button!

What's this all about then? A couple of weeks ago Summer Daze was stealthily moved to a new VPS server. My previous host, JaguarPC, turned out to be not as wonderful as I had hoped, well less than wonderful and more of poor to be fair. Slicehost however are (currently) amazing me with their service. So what's so special about it? Well, nothing to be perfectly honest. It simply does as it claims for once and does it well. A decent VPS for a fair price that you get to customise and setup to your hearts content. A web developers nirvana in other words, well server wise anyway. My actual vision of nirvana has less servers and more girls

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