Jens of Sweden is taking on the iPod shuffle, launching the MP-120, a 1GB player with an OLED display that retails for one krona less than Apple's flash player. As is typical for JoS players, the MP-120 can play a variety of formats, including OGG Vorbis and WMA. The players all have an excellent battery life of 22 hours, and a built-in USB 2.0 plug. Essentially, if you can get your hands on one for less than the price of the shuffle, you should buy one—as long as you don't need to play music from the iTunes Music Store.

Unfortunately, Jens players don't get a lot of traffic here in the US, plus Apple tends to really hike up the price of their products in Europe, meaning the likelihood of we Americans finding an MP-120 for less than $150 is probably pretty slim.

Product Page [JensOfSweden]

8:02:41 PM    

In what is hopefully my last iPod post of the morning, I have to note that the Shuffle Art Archives are great. I don't know who sent me the link—I woke up this morning and it was on my desktop, which happens more often than I'm comfortable with—but thanks.

What is it? It's remixed iPod shuffles, both in real life and the Republic of Photoshop.

Shuffle Art Archives [ServePics]

8:01:33 PM    

It automatically recognizes and lists the medical images stored on the iPod. Now, iin much the same manner that people scroll through a playlist, radiologists can scroll through a list of patients or view their records through iPod's iPhoto application....

But it's not just a novelty, a one-time joyride for medical hackers. Thirty-seven percent of the respondents say they use it every day, and 24 percent say they are likely to develop plug-ins or other upgrades to better serve their needs.

While critics have leveled criticism about the iPod application, Ratib says that the patient's personal data is stripped out and assigned an anonymous identification during transport.

7:55:56 PM    

Los Angeles premiere of the new documentary film, Mission Against Terror, on the Cuban Five, Feb 26, 2005.

Speakers:

Ian Thompson - Committee to Free the Five.

Father Geoff Bottoms: Awarded Cuban Friendship Medal, Cuba solidarity organizer in England

Bernie Dwyer: Co-director of film, Reporter with Radio Havana

The film features interviews with former CIA agent Phillip Agee, Cuban Five attorney Leonard Weinglass, Cuban National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, family members of the Cuban Five, Miami Cuban progressive activist Andres Gomez and others.

MP3 (9.5 MB, 27:09 min.)

7:24:52 PM    

The latest Daily Podcast feed is up.  It contains a poem, discussion on jumping the shark, information about NY Hotel Bars, Podcast safe music from Jersey and more.  So go over to my new audioblog experiment, "The Daily Podcast Feed" and listen to some of the podcasts in it!

All of the tools (GigaDial, Blogger, FeedBurner, WebJay, Smoothouse Webjay wizard, Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer ) I am using in my latest audioblog experiment are free and available right now on the web.  That fact opens the potential for a group of pioneer podcast feed producers to evolve using a set of open free tools. 

Below is a list of descriptions of some of the tools I use to create "The Daily Podcast Feed":

GigaDial 

GigaDial.net is a new approach to radio programming. You can use it to create and subscribe to podcast-powered stations composed of individual episodes from your favorite podcasters. Outputs RSS 2.0 XML feeds.

Blogger 

Free blogging authoring software.  Enables  the distribution of Podcast feeds through the embeding of audio players and links to RSS 2.0 feeds using the weblog platformy.  Outputs an ATOM XML feed that can be inputted to other services such as FeedBurner.

FeedBurner 

Can converts a ATOM feed to RSS 2.0 XML file.  Using it's SmartCast feature, FeedBurner will take the first anchor (<a>) tag that it finds in your posting content and convert the linked URL into an RSS 2.0 <enclosure>.  Is the case of Audioblogging 2.0, the RSS 2.0 enclosure file type is also a RSS 2.0 file. 

Feedburner turns the feed item into content that future audioblogging 2.0/podcasting clients can potentially use to produce "show channels".

WebJay 

Mother of all music playlist generators.  It allows you to take a RSS 2.0 file with mp3 enclosures and convert it to a XSPF playlist to feed into Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer.

Smoothouse Webjay wizard 

Assists in the generation of the correct HTML for linking/embedding a Webjay playlist in Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer.

Fabricio's XSPF MusicPlayer

XSPF Web Music Player is a flash-based web application that uses xspf playlist format to play mp3 songs. XSPF is the XML Shareable Playlist Format. The software is written in Actionscript 2. Player can be embedded into a weblog post using weblog authoring software like Blogger.

Many of the tools above contain other features that do a lot more then the features I described.  My explanations  focus on the features used for creating "The Daily Podcast Feed" and what I call Audioblogging 2.0.

1:16:41 AM