Spotify has set aside a number of invitations for celebrities and companies. A simple google search and you can find the links to these exclusive invites. To get your invite click on this link. Choose one of the links in the results and enter your email. Within an hour you should get an invite in your email. Have fun.
Got my Spotify invite in under an hour using the this link. My first impressions are a bit mixed. First of all I ran into problems playing certain tracks. I would say at least 20% of the songs I tried to play just refused to play. I guess there are still bugs that needs to be worked out. Secondly, Spotify Free service is not a viable service because after 6 months of unlimited playback, they will impose a 10 hour a month listening cap and 5 plays per unique track limitation. That means, once you’ve played a song 5 times, you cannot listen to it anymore ever, until you pay for the unlimited service or premium. Unlimited service at 5 bucks a month is decent if you only listen to music on your PC. You see the unlimited plan only allows for PC playback. But that is unrealistic for most users. So most people will need the premium service which allows for offline listening and playback on mobile devices. The premium service is a great service for audiophiles who love music and and love to consume large amounts of new music regularly. It’s practically an all-you-can-eat music buffet for 10 bucks a month. But if you’re like me who has a bunch of oldies you like to listen to and maybe consume a few new mp3s a month, this service isn’t for you.
For example. I think I have 500-1000 songs in my iTunes library. And that library does not grow much at all. In fact I think I’ve added 5 new American songs into my library in the last year. This may have something to do with the fact that I listen to Kpop . And for Kpop, nothing beats Soribada and paying 6 cents a song for DRM free music. But that’s another story. Anyways, so for someone like me, there comes a point where Spotify becomes financially unjustifiable. I currently am a subscriber to the eMusic Plus Annual plan. This allows me to buy DRM free music for on average 50 cents a track. So my library would cost me anywhere between 250-500 dollars. And I would actually own this music for life. Spotify on the other hand, after 2-4 years, I would start bleeding money and if I stopped my subscription, I am left with nothing and can no longer listen to the music. For me, to justify Spotify, I would need to consume more than 20 new or different tracks a month for the rest of my life for it to become justifiable. So while this service is great for people who frequently consume a large amount of new music or desire a limitless library, for someone like me who has a small library of music they listen to frequently and add only a few songs a year, It’s just not for me.
While attempting to create my own cydia repo, I’ve ran into many many bumps in the road. Jay Freeman aka Saurik, the father of Cydia, is a genius and all his work is greatly appreciated, but very little can be said about his documentation skills or his affinity to respond to support requests for repository issues. Especially for novices in developing like myself. So while his tutorial greatly assisted me in getting started, I had to gather little bits and pieces of information from all over to get a comprehensive understanding of how Cydia repositories work. The following is a list of key features that most tutorials neglect to cover that I will cover in my tutorial:
1. How do I give my repository an icon?
2. How do I give my sections an icon?
3. How do I give my apps dependencies?
4. How do I setup conflicts?
5. How do I setup firmware requirements?
Future Topics I will discuss that are not covered right now due to me being tired:
6. What are depictions and how do I use them?
7. How do I force a respring or reboot after installation?
8. How to give an individual app an icon?
First off I will show you show you how to create a very basic repository. There are a lot of MAC OSX tutorials out there, but since I do not own a Mac at the moment (saving up for my 15” i7 Macbook Pro), I will show you how to do it on a linux machine. If you do not own a linux machine, I strongly recommend you look into Virtualbox. It is a very useful application that runs on Windows/OSX/Linux that allows you to run an operating system inside an operating system. So currently I am using Windows 7, but this allows me to run Ubuntu in windows. So anyone can have a linux box. Also if a MAC is a must you can refer to many tutorials on the web. And you can refer to my tutorial for some of the advanced stuff that most tutorials do not answer.
Prerequisites for this tutorial: Continue reading »
1. A computer or Virtualbox running Ubuntu.
2. Internet access.
3. This software package.
4. Your apps or themes
5. A website to host your repo on.
6. Patience.
While Chrome is a great browser, I feel it still falls short of Firefox and is inferior in almost every way. First, what it does right.
Faster than Firefox. Yes faster, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. I will gladly go back to Firefox.
Separates processes for each tab. So if 1 Tab craps out, your entire browser does not. This is one that is a clear winner for Chrome.
No restart require for extensions. Again not a deal breaker.
Now for my gripes:
No clearing of cache on exit. This is a crucial shortcoming that I don’t understand why google hasn’t implemented this to begin with. Maybe it has something to do with their data-mining methods through chrome. Or maybe it was just a clear oversight.
Still does not have the extensions to back it up. Things I missed were youtube downloader, fireftp, and logmein plugin. It reminds me of iOS vs Android. While I like Android as a platform, I still feel the App support behind iOS makes a jailbroken iOS device better than android. This is a whole new blog entry that I will probably cover someday.
Shares some settings with IE such as proxy. I guess this really isn’t a problem, but I would like the ability to have separate proxy for each browser.
Still does not render pages properly for less standardized sites. My work uses a bunch of proprietary web apps that do not render/work properly in Chrome. I found myself using IETab for ever tab in Chrome. Which completely defeats the purpose.
Direct opening of downloads for certain file types were poorly implemented. Sometimes I want to download an excel file and just view it. I don’t want it to dl it somewhere and then I’ll have to click it on the download bar.
So why use this Chronus instead of PkgBackup? Well the answer is, you shouldn’t. Chronus should not replace PkgBackup but it should supplement it. PkgBackup is a great utility that will reinstall all Cydia apps that were installed at the point a backup was made. This is useful as iTune can not restore cydia apps. However Chronus does something completely different. Chronus will save application data such as saved games, bookmarks, settings, high scores, and etc. So basically, you will want to use PkgBackup to get all your Cydia Apps back after a restore, and you would use Chronus to get all your settings and save files back.
Prerequisites
1. A jailbroken iPhone running 2.x-4.x (Yes, chronus is confirmed to be working with iOS4)
2. Chronus 2.2
3. WinSCP
Backup Instructions
1. Install Chronus 2.2 from Cydia.
2. Go into each app you want backed up and set the “Backup All Mode” to ON.
3. Press “Backup All”
4. You can email your back up to yourself one package at a time or you can just SCP into the phone via WINSCP and copied the TimeCapsule Folder at var/mobile/library/preferences to my desktop
5. Done.
Restore Instructions
1. WinSCP to SCP into your iPhone.
2. Navigate to the /var/mobile/library/preferences/
3. Copy the TimeCapsule folder you had backed up before to the directory in step 2.
4. Open Chronus
5. Restore each app one at a time. (Unfortunately I do not know a way to do a restore all.)
