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I've been slack in so many ways recently that sometimes it's hard to know where to start. I've let the blog slide, I've not really developed much (publicly) of note for a while (with the possible exception of my Eve Online CPAN gubbins, which I really need to spruce up a bit now I mention it), and my music collection has really stagnated in recent times.
There are a number of things to blame for this. Firstly, and this is probably the biggest reason, is my recent move from Luton to Huntingdon. Moving house takes a lot longer than I possibly imagined. Getting Internet connectivity set up, for instance, took a month (thanks to the spectacular antipathy of BT). Unpacking things from boxes, getting things set up just how I like them... all adds up. Of course, moving from a train-commute into London to a car-commute into Cambridge has also taken its toll. I used to listed to a half-dozen podcasts, but now I listen to the radio. Such is the vintage of my car, there are limited options as regards plugging external audio sources into it. It's just easier to listen to the radio.
But every now and again, I am blindsided by a track and fall in love with music once again.
This happened again quite recently, which is why I've chosen to mention it now.
Now, I've been a bit of a fan of the Dresden Dolls for quite a while (thanks to Steve for that), as can probably be seen by my last.fm profile (http://www.last.fm/user/chrimble/) -- more on that in a moment.
But the thing is, I've been wandering over to Amanda Palmer's myspace page to track progress on her solo album, "Who Killed Amanda Palmer". It was meant to be out around now, but my guess is that her recent vocal-node surgery induced muteness has delayed things a bit until September.
So I've been listening to her songs on myspace, whilst I wait. Right here: http://www.myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer
One of the songs she's posted is a cover of Death Cab For Cutie's song, "I Will Follow You Into The Dark". It's a song I'd not heard before, but one which I've fallen head over heels for. It's stunningly beautiful, whoever sings it.
Amanda's version is slightly slower than the original, and set to piano rather than guitar, which meant that listening to the original was slightly jarring. Of course, the original is on youtube. I like the video with the book slightly better than the one with the hole, but that's probably just me. It's just a youtube search away. Go do it now.
Anyway. It's great. I love it, and it makes me all blubbery.
Picking up on the last.fm thing, one of the best apps available for a jailbroken iPhone is MobileScrobbler (http://dev.c99.org/MobileScrobbler/). It's a genius program that sits on your jailbroken iPhone/iPod touch and 'scrobbles' your music as if you were on your desktop. It makes use of your wireless connection to send what you're listening to directly to the last.fm site, so you keep up to date without having to sync or anything. This is remarkably convenient. Better yet, you can also stream music directly, and love/ban to your heart's content. It's magical, and a damned-sight better than the 'official' last.fm client by several orders of magnitude. If you have an iPhone/iPod touch then jailbreak it immediately and install this; bear in mind that because it runs in the background, it's highly unlikely it'll ever make it to official iphone-application status (a great shame, it's the best iphone app by a million miles, a work of art).
So, in conclusion, my interest in music has been given a recent shot in the arm. This is a good thing. A good thing, indeed.
No hoop-jumping, it's scarily easy now (by comparison with how it used to be, it's amazingly straightforward).
No impact on your phone other than new-application goodness.
Of course, YMMV and your phone might explode -- don't hold me responsible if that happens... ;-)
Although googling for 'hackintosh' will get you pointed in the right direction if you want to take the risk...