Zune 30s Stopped Working

Posted by admin on December 31, 2008  |  No Comments

Updated – December 31, 2008 | 12:00 PM | Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
Currently, Microsoft has not issued a statement on why their Zune music player is crashing. Nor has the company issued a fix to correct the problem.

Has your 30GB Zune stopped working, too?

Just wondering. It’s either a hoax or a serious Microsoft faux-pas. WebGyver is voting for the latter. The Zune online forums are completely slammed and overloaded with requests at the moment.

If you happen to have a Zune 30, check out the following news sources:

Entertainmant Weekly: Zune 30s all freezing up at once. Ack! Aliens!

The reports that all of the world’s 30 GB Zune MP3 players have at once suddenly frozen up seem to be true.

http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2008/12/zune-30s-all-fr.html

DailyTech: Hundreds of 30GB Zune Players Fail Around the Country

Microsoft has yet to comment on what is causing massive numbers of its 30GB Zune to fail virtually simultaneously

http://www.dailytech.com/Hundreds+of+30GB+Zune+Players+Fail+Around+the+Country/article13824c.htm

GIZMODO: 30GB Zunes Failing Everywhere, All At Once

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and… freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them…

http://gizmodo.com/5121311/30gb-zunes-failing-everywhere-all-at-once

Zune doesn’t work anymore; Zune 30 stopped working; Zune stopped working; Zune freezes; Y2K9

Dropbox :: Free online file storage, sync & share

Posted by admin on December 30, 2008  |  No Comments

This may be old news to some of you, but I had totally forgotten about my nifty Dropbox account.

The free account allows me to store 2GB’s worth of files on the web. The Dropbox desktop interface handles all the uploading and synchronizing and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The premise is simple:

Have you ever wished that you could access your files from anywhere? We made Dropbox because we were tired of e-mailing files to ourselves or carrying around a USB key.

Your Dropbox account can be accessed from multiple computers. Obviously, that means that you can have access to your project files at work, at home at a client’s site, etc.

Is it secure? According to the folks at Dropbox, “All files are transported over SSL and encrypted using AES-256 (banks use this too).”

All in all, the dozen or so people at Dropbox have done a great job at providing on-the-go file backup & access. What surprised me was to learn that at least three of the Dropbox team members are MIT drop-outs who thought that starting their own company would be more meaningful than finishing their degree (and at least two of the guys only had a year or less to go).

Free PSD Logos at LogoInstant

Posted by admin on December 29, 2008  |  2 Comments

Thanks to LifeHacker for this tip.

LogoInstant is a design service that creates a new logo almost every day.

According to their web site, they create logos when they’re bored and share them freely with the rest of the world.

You can use all the logo design accessed from this website as inspirations, using it on your website or your project or even using them for your clients. You don’t have to spend big bucks anymore for designer, because this service is 100% free.

So basically, the logos are completely free for both personal and commercial use. Best of all, they come in a layered Adobe Photoshop source file (PSD) so you can edit the name or make more advanced changes.

So whether you want to use their service as inspiration or if you don’t mind having the same logo as several other companies, check out some of their logo designs.

SONGBEAT

Posted by admin on December 1, 2008  |  No Comments

If you’re like me, you like to have some background music while you’re programming, designing, invoicing, etc. In my case, background music helps me tune out distractions — whether I’m in a cubicle at work or in my basement office at home.

That’s why I’m always interested in fidning out about new ways to a) find and b) listen to music. My music, that is. The latest tool to help me find suitable music at a moment‘s notice is called SONGBEAT.

The free download (currently for Windows only) is a search tool and a player all in one. Download and install SONGBEAT, and the rest is quite intuitive. You can search for music by song title, author, album, etc. The search was quite impressive. Searching for tunes from one of my 60’s idols, Donovan (as in Donovan Leitch),  returned a variety of results, including Terri Reid, who did a cover version of Superlungs My Supergirl.

Additionally, you can download songs that SONGBEAT finds for you.

With Songbeat, its not only possible to listen to the results of your search directly from the internet (no need to download before listening) – its also possible, after downloading, to organize and play them in the integrated media player in the Library.

Not bad, eh? Other gems that are hidden in this seemingly simple and quite user-friendly tool are the Mixtape function, the Station (or cassette recorder) function and several other tools (such as transferring to your iPod with one click).

The one thing that wasn’t entirely clear to me — but I’m sure I will find out as time progresses — was the benefit of the $29.99 upgrade. There is some talk about “unlimited downloads” and being able to “download 25 times for free,” but other than that, there was very little persuasive upgrade information available on the web site.

Addendum: Perhaps it’s just me and my Windows XP OS, but after a while, I encountered a bunch of errors when I tried to search for stations.

After dismissing all the debug information and shutting down SONGBEAT, the music was still playing, and only closing the SONGBEAT process, by way of Task Manager, finally made it all go away.