Musicovery

Yet another site providing streamed music based on your personal preferences. Musicovery has an excellent interactive interface that let's you select the musical genre, mood and timeline that you want to hear.

Jay Wasco

Jay Wasco has, is his own words, "the strange ability to play the bass guitar and keyboards at the same time." Not only that, he invents and plays some very strange instruments, such as the Egotar and Swiss Army Bass.

Since his homepage is, again in his own words, "Not so slick ........or eazy to navigate", here's a link to some videos of this remarkable musician.

John Martyn - Small Hours

This takes me back! Here's a link to a YouTube video showing John Martyn playing Small Hours live at Reading University in 1978. This song, originally from the One World album, has always been one of my favourite chill-out tracks.

Julian Beever's pavement drawings

Have a look at Julian Beever's pavement drawings. His anamorphic illusions are drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3-D when seen from one particular viewpoint.

popurls

As it announces in its logo, popurls provides popular URLs to the latest web buzz. It's a nicely designed aggregator page showing listings of latest feeds from a number of sites, including digg.com, del.icio.us, flickr.com, youtube.com, +++

This site is a great timesaver and a pleasure to browse.

SearchMash

Google is experimenting with a new search engine interface called SearchMash. It has a clean looking interface and currently provides sidebar tabs for showing results sorted by web pages, images, blogs and Wikipedia.

"SearchMash lets you search the internet in new ways. It is constantly evolving as we come up with ideas and figure out what works and what doesn't. Check back here from time to time to see what has changed, and also to tell us which ones are useful to you."

Thanks to The Red Ferret Journal for this link.

GB-PVR personal video recorder

I thought it would be a nice idea to install a reasonably priced TV tuner card in my PC. On the advice of a colleague at work, I bought a Hauppauge PVR-150 card, then downloaded and installed GB-PVR.

GB-PVR is free software, but never-the-less a fully featured Personal Video Recorder (PVR), allowing you to schedule recordings and view/pause live TV. It's also a media centre supporting FM radio, DVDs, video files, photos, streaming radio stations, CDs, MP3s, etc.

I was pleasantly surprised when everything worked without a hitch after completing a straight-forward setup, including using xmltv as the TV listings "grabber" for the Electronic Programming Guide (EPG).

GB-PVR is very well supported via a comprehensive wiki. This is an amazing hardware/software combination, which I can definitely recommend if you're considering building your own PVR.

Doodle

Here's a web-based tool which can help a group of people find a suitable date for a meeting.

The initiator follows simple instuctions to set up the optional dates & times, then emails the link provided by Doodle to the rest of the group.

The results of the poll are shown in a table. Very simple, useful and free.