PureSolo is Karaoke 2.0, and great for learning instruments, too

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PureSolo is a new application designed for people to sing, or play, along with backing tracks. It’s great for drunken Karaoke after lunch on Christmas day, but it’s also good for any aspiring musicians – classical or rock & pop – to play along as if they were in a real band.

Each song offered by the service is missing a particular track, be that vocals, guitar, or even oboe or alto sax. When you join you get one free download, but beyond that, each track costs £1 to £2. You can record your efforts with a microphone, and use headphones, too.

'Pirates of the Amazon' Firefox extension will worry online retailers

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An enterprising group of young coders have developed a Firefox add-on which does something rather worrying – adds ‘Download 4 Free’ buttons to Amazon pages. When you click the button, it’ll work out what product you’re looking for, and take you to a page on the Pirate Bay that’ll let you download it for free.

It works for CDs, DVDs, games, books and any other product that can be converted to a digital format. The team behind it claim they want the extension to “be a counterpart to the current models of media distribution”, and to “redistribute the wealth”. I’m not sure that’ll wash before a judge, to be honest.

Songbird hits version 1.0

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Plenty of GOOD NEWS this morning in the world of digital music. First Amazon MP3 launches in the UK, and now awesome media player Songbird hits version 1.0.

Songbird, as I’ve said before, is one of my favourite music clients. Although it’s currently being neglected in favour of Spotify, it remains my player of choice for actual MP3 files. Why? Because it’s so wonderfully intuitive and feature-packed, as well as being open-source.

The new version brings massive performance improvements, loads of UI tweaks, better search and sorting, and better ability to cope with big libraries (full of completely legally-acquired MP3s, I’m sure). If you’re still using iTunes to play music, then I strongly recommend you give this a try. You won’t be disappointed.

Songbird

Related posts: 5 good reasons to try Songbird | Try Spotify, too

New Doctor Who hitting iTunes – one series a week popping up during December

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Doctor Who, a show which chronicles the increasingly camp adventures of a time travelling man who gets his clothes from a Help The Aged sale rack and solves everything from interplanetary war to tooth decay by shouting while pointing a screwdriver at a broken numeric keypad, is coming to iTunes.

BBC worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC that’s allowed to sell things for money, is dumping every episode of the new Who on Apple’s shopping system. Episodes from the first series of the modern Who should be ready for buying and downloading today…

Good OS launches gOS Cloud – a tiny cloud operating system

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Good OS, or gOS, is a company that makes custom Linux distributions, and it’s just released gOS Cloud – a very stripped-down distro that promises to load a web browser (which looks suspiciously like Chrome) in a matter of seconds. You get an OS X-style dock launcher for opening web apps, and Skype’s being mentioned too – which seems to indicate that it can load non-browser-based applications, too.

The OS is designed to boot alongside Windows, and the company is working with netbook makers to produce an ultraportable which runs both this and XP. Look out for that early next year, and perhaps a release of the OS in the meantime.

Good OS (via DownloadSquad)

Related posts: Apple exec unintentially leaks new OS X ‘Snow Leopard’ release date | What the hell is Microsoft Azure?

The Mintpass Mintpad internet, notepad, writing, watching, digital camera, media THING

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The global gadget development arms race to see who can fit the most stuff into the smallest, whitest box has taken a dramatic turn today, thanks to this clever little everything-in-one miniature… digital… wi-fi… thing.

You can write on it, browse the internet on it, listen to music on it, take photos on it, watch films on it and, most importantly of all, get it out of your very smallest pocket and impress people with it by showing them all of the above. It all happens on a fairly minuscule 2.86″ touch screen, mind…

Decide if it's worth getting out of bed or not today with the Oregon Scientific Weather Box

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The Oregon Scientific Weather Box claims to be the thinnest-ever weather station, which will be a LIFESAVER, if, by some trillion-to-one chance, you’ve always been frustrated by the thickness of existing weather station options.

It is in contact with the outside world via radio, so you’ll always know what the weather is out there in the world – plus it regularly checks…

Google launches SearchWiki – you may now customise your search results

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Hot from giving up on Lively, Google’s now invented another thing we’re not sure we’ll ever need or use – SearchWiki.

It’s designed to let browsers customise their Google search results, so if you’re currently logged into your Gmail/Google account you’ll be able to organise findings as you wish. Which means shuffling about entries and moving lower results higher up the rankings, helping you use Google like more of an extension of your fat and lazy old brain than ever before…

MSI has the same idea as Asus, a little bit after Asus – reveals its Neton "all-in-one" Intel Atom desktop

MSI’s been doing a bit of tech blog espionage again, launching three “all in one” PCs with touch screen powers that appear extremely similar to the ones Asus showed off recently.

Three alternate MSI Neton models have been revealed – the M16, M19 and M22. I’ll now give you a bit more information about all three, as you can’t work much out about them from those boring model names.

All three run XP Home and have touch screens so you can get fingerprints over the bit you look at all the time. Touch screens on desktops are a terrible idea. The M16 is the smallest model, with its Intel Atom processor stuck into the case of a 15.6″ 1366 x 768 monitor. The M19 features…

Microsoft to launch free antivirus product in the middle of next year

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Hoorah! Another sign that Microsoft still knows what it’s doing, and ‘gets’ it, despite evidence to the contrary. Microsoft will, as of the second half of next year, stop selling its ill-fated and unpopular OneCare security software, and instead offer a completely free security suite.

The package will support XP, Vista and Windows 7, and will be ‘suited to smaller and less powerful computers’. It’s unlikely that it’ll come installed by default on computers – Microsoft has learnt that lesson – but it should prove popular with technophobes worldwide, who normally struggle with security software and lapsed subscriptions.