The selection isn’t the biggest yet, but I have to say what is available is a decent selection. Poking around, I noticed among the HD movies available for download, the largest I spotted seemed to be just over 6 gb. I’ll be curious to see how long that takes to download and if it gets throttled by Comcast. I think I’ll need to look into upgrading the storage for the PS3 as well. Is this easy to do on the PS3? I haven’t looked into it yet.

Oh, and the episodes I watched were the first two episodes from season six. Wacky and weird as usual, but still hilarious. And Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad don’t even show up yet.

1. Pandora

You go to http://www.pandora.com and enter a band or song that you like. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to figure out similar artists and streams those songs for you to listen to. You then train Pandora by giving those songs a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. After a while, it’s pretty amazing how well it gets at recommending music you like. It all works through a web browser, no downloads necessary. Here’s my profile page.

2. Last.fm

Last.fm has lots of great features; if you enable the scrobbler, it will track what you listen to on itunes and windows media player, and import that into your profile online. Then, it shows your friends what you’ve been listening too. And they just recently opened up on-demand streaming of any song up to 3 times a day. I like last.fm, even if I feel a bit overwhelmed by the site. There are so many things to click on and so many links, but that’s ok. It makes me feel like I still have lots to discover on the site, so it keeps me interested. If you choose not to download the last.fm client, you can still use the browser to stream songs.

3. Seeqpod

Seeqpod.com is basically a music file search engine. You search for songs or artists, and it returns locations on the web, and lets you stream that file through the browser. It’s great; I’m constantly using it to get a quick listen of a song or artist, especially when I’m with friends and we’re talking music.

4. Amie Street

At Amie Street, you can purchase songs based on how popular they are. The newer a song, the cheaper it is. As it gains popularity and purchases, it climbs in price. A pretty cool idea, it’s starting to gain some following and getting more artists.

5. Songbird

Songbird is a web browser which has been modified to play music, and make it much easier to locate and download music files on web pages. When it finds mp3s on a web page, for example, it will provide download links in a special section below the browser. Songbird is a great idea, something I’ll be using more and more. It’s also open source.

Feel free to mention one of your favorite music services in the comments.

It seems really cool. Some of it’s features that separate it from other electric/hybrid cars:

• It’s called an Extended Range Electric Vehicle (EREV?) because technically it’s always using batteries.
• It has a charge range of about 40 miles. If you drive more than 40 miles, a gas-powered generator begins to charge the batteries.
• You can plug it in when it’s not being driven to recharge the batteries.
• Most commuters driver 40 miles or less to and from work, so theoretically you could almost always use the batteries, rarely needing to use gas.
• It’s capable of running on electricy, gasoline, ethanol, or biodiesel.

I believe it’s on schedule to hit production in 2010, with a target price of around $30,000. I was really impressed with the appearance of the car, too. And I got a free t-shirt.

Initially, I didn’t really want one. I had my Treo, and it was a great phone. It had a good network, I could watch movies, stream audio/video, all kinds of good stuff. Oh, and it made phone calls. All was fine in cellphoneland for Nate.

Then one day, one of my managers who had recently got one was walking by, so we asked him to give us a quick demo. 20 seconds later, all I could think about was how I could convince my wife to let me buy one. If She wasn’t going to let me spend the money on it, then I figured the only logical way to get the phone was to come up with the money some other way. I decided to search around the house for some of my things that I just don’t use and see what I could sell.

I sold my Nintendo DS lite, an old cell phone, and a used router. I also counted up all the loose change I’d been adding up for the last few years. These sold items, plus the change, gave me a total of $230. Next, I dipped into my poker stash for $200, and estimated the future sell of my treo at around $200, which gave me enough to get the phone.

I can say with confidence that it’s the best phone out there(should be for that price). I’ll probably make a few posts in the near future about some of my favorite features, etc.

As I restarted the system and it began to reboot, I hit the delete button to boot from the CD. Things were going along fine until I got an error: Processor temperature warning! Uh-oh. This is the first time I’ve seen this on my computer, but it doesn’t completely shock me, since I built it myself about 2 years ago.

I then went into BIOS to see if there was a temp gauge, which there was. 256 degrees F!!!!!!! Now, I don’t remember what the recommended temp range was when I first put the computer together and did some benchmarking, but I’m fairly certain 256 F is out of that range. Before I sat down to investigate, some possible theories came to mind:

• The room temperature has increased with the weather(not that much, though)
• I recently added an additional hard drive and stick of RAM, putting too much stress on the system and driving up the temp.
• one or more of the fans have busted
• it was too dirty

Looking inside, I noticed things were pretty darn filthy, so I walked down to Fry’s and picked up an air dusting can for electronics, took the computer outside, and went to town. After that, I re-booted and started up a motherboard monitoring program to see what the temp was. As soon as the computer booted, the processor temp immediately shot up to 256, while the case temp hovered at around 80 or so. I think the large discrepancy between core and case temp tells me there’s something up with the actual processor and it’s fan, so I think I’m going to replace the heatsink and fan for my processor and see what happens.

I was turned on to Pandora about a year ago. I love most things about it; simple interface, suggestions for new music it thinks I might like, the profile layout, etc. Because of Pandora, I’ve learned about dozens of new artists I probably never would have known about. That’s impressive.

Recently, royalty rates for webcasters(e.g. Pandora) were hiked way up, to the point where most of them will go bankrupt. This hike goes into effect on May 15th and is retroactive to January 1st, 2006. To help prevent this from happening, go here.

Want to see my Pandora profile? Check it out here.