I’m a great believer in having strong visual cues in user interfaces to help a user orient themselves. To this end I think manufacturers of devices like Kingson, LaCie, Sandisk, etc. should step up to the plate more and offer the user quality icons for their devices. LaCie are actually fairly good at this, although some of their icons leave a little to be desired. Sandisk and Kingston AFAIK don’t provide any icons for their devices which is a great pity....
I’m a dabbler, I like to dabble. While most people are happily using Google Talk, Facebook chat, Skype and the like I’m busy playing around with my own chat server, writing plugins for it and seeing if I can get things like Single Sign On (SSO), DNS Service Records and Federation working. It’s time consuming, frustrating at times but ultimately rewarding. One particularly frustrating problem I recently tackled was single sign on with Openfire (a Jabber/XMPP messaging server)....
The loudness war has been going on for some time with musicians, producers and record companies over the past few decades mastering and releasing their records with ever increasing volume and compression. In the days of vinyl there was a physical limit to how loud you could press a record before the needle would be unable to play it – the advent of Compact Discs however changed that. Whilst they boasted a greater dynamic range than vinyl they also defined a maximum peak ampltitude....