Nexus Radio - My new favourite

Nexus Radio - Free Internet Radio

I was amazed at finding this pice of software, it's surprising that so few actually listen to the thousands of Webcasts out there. I strongly recommend you try this program out since it is not just one of the best ways of finding new Internet radio stations it also contains several very useful features such as:

• Recording either everything the station broadcasts or only certain songs or artists etc. (TiVo Style)
  
• A full database with several thousands of radio stations
  
• A neat little effects editor to trim away annoying starts and ends in the songs
• A very sweet little equalizer

I've been looking for a good companion when dealing with web radio, but Winamp, although a good player all in it self doesn't contain the features I wanted. Nexus contain all of them and several others.

So if you want to check it out, just click the link on top of this post, I seriously doubt you are going to be disappointed.

OpenOffice.org Base

If you haven't tried out the free officesuite http://www.OpenOffice.org I would strongly recomend you to do so. But is it capable of replacing the MS Office or Star Office suite? Short answer, No, not yet. Several things need to be adressed before it can be conciderd a serious contender in the office market.

One of the most recent additions to the OOo suite is extending the database of OOo and making it a standalone application called Base. This is what I'm going to discuss in this post. I've been a casual SQL student for a while now, trying my best to find uses for pure text based database front ends but never finding anything that would allow me to make much use of it. Thanks to my busy schedule i don't have the time it would take to learn a dynamic page language such as PHP to build fun applications with.

Well that all changed when I accidentally clicked the unknown Base icon in my OOo installation, Databases. Fun fun fun.


Base is a very recent addition to the OOo suite, and suffers from a great deal of problems (among other things smoothing out the integration with the other OOo components, general stability issues etc.) that needs to be adressed before it becomes a real alternative to the Access database. But besides that the whole thing is amazing to work with for somone who might not be a hardcore SQL hacker.

Everything is visual, more or less, you can hack the code if you want but for all the different ways of doing things there is bound to be a visual way of doing it as well.

Anyway I digress, because it is so new, there aren't much written about it, but I did find a good place with some decent tutorials for the Base application.

http://sheepdogguides.com/fdb/fdb1main.htm

This place is very simplistic in it's layout but it covers all the basics you need to know to start using Base to play with.

Due to the still unreliable nature of Base I would suggest not to make it the main database for your business just yet. It still has a lot of kinks and problems that needs to be smoothed out, but aside from that it is a great application for building your own databases over your home library, record collection etc.