The Migration from FM to Digital

Over the past few weeks, many of our favourite radio deejays have left their home radio stations to pursue other opportunities. Paul Rotherham left 94.7 for WorldTunes, Darren Scott left Jacaranda to start Ballz, and Bailey Schneider left 94.7 for 2oceansvibe, to name a few.

I have a Media Centre PC in our lounge, running XMBC on top of Ubuntu Desktop. A couple weeks ago, I installed the TuneIn add-on for XBMC on my media centre. It allows me to listen to loads of online and traditional radio stations over the Internet, and it works beautifully.

The thing is, we listen to the radio in our car, and I listen to the radio all day while at work. I tried installing the TuneIn app on my Android phone. It also works great, but for two problems:

1. It's really expensive to audio stream over GPRS in South Africa, and
2. It really chews my cellphone's battery.

We're not allowed to audio stream at work, so unless I pay the exorbitant data charges, there's no listening to my favourite deejays there, either.

I did loads of Googling today, and it amazes me that no-one has yet to come up with a dedicated online radio listening device. I would think if anyone would invent such a device, it would be someone like TuneIn! Come on, guys, come to the party! Then of course it's up to the cellphone providers (MTN, I'm looking at you!) to come up with flat rated data plans for audio streaming. It can't be that difficult.

When I can have a dedicated device in my car (replacing my car radio), and a dedicated device on my desk at work (to replace my traditional radio), the migration from FM to Digital will truly be complete!

2011 South African ISP of the Year

MyBroadband just announced a poll to decide the 2011 South African Internet Service Provider of the year. The nominees are: Afrihost, Axxess, MWEB, Openweb and Web Africa.

If you are with any of these ISPs (or would like to be with any of these ISPs), then I would urge you to go here and vote. You do need an account to vote, but it's really easy (and free) to create one. MyBroadband don't ever send spam, and there are other cool incentives to keeping an account there.

My vote went to Afrihost. I guess I'm really biased, because the only other one of those ISPs I've ever belonged to was MWEB, and that was back when I was still on dial-up! Still, I have been thoroughly satisfied with Afrihost for the two years or so that I've been with them. I can't remember a time when they've experienced any downtime. I've had to deal with their call centre maybe three times (via e-mail), and each time--even over a weekend--my query was resolved in an absolute minimum of time! Plus, their CEO, Gian Visser (Follow him on Twitter here) is a great guy! He always responds to his mentions, and occasionally throws out Twitter competitions where you can win great prizes. He's always engaging with his followers.

I hope I've convinced South African ADSL users to go and vote, and I hope that I've given you some idea of who to vote for if you haven't already!

National Lottery Scraper can send to Gmail addresses again

This is an update to my post last week: Gmail blocks my mail as Spam.

I figured it out, and changed the application accordingly. These are the changes I made:

• The e-mail sent out now clearly indicates in the body the address of the person it was sent to.
• The e-mail body states that recipients should e-mail me to unsubscribe.
• Added "List-Unsubscribe " to the header of the message.
• Added "Precedence: bulk" header in the e-mail.

It seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for a simple little app like mine, but I guess the spammers ruin it for all of us, don't they?

You can download the application from here, or view the change log here.

Gmail blocks my mail as Spam

So Gmail as decided to block e-mails sent by National Lottery Scraper as spam (send from me, to me). It's not even as if they just move the mail into my spam folder. No, their server actually blocks it! Here's what my mail log said about it this morning:

9D4FD5EB2C: to=<graham@***********.**.***>, relay=ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM[74.125.79.27]:25, delay=14, delays=0.17/0.22/11/2.4, dsn=5.7.1, status=bounced (host ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM[74.125.79.27] said:
550-5.7.1 [***.***.***.*** 7] Our system has detected that this message is
550-5.7.1 likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail,
550-5.7.1 this message has been blocked. Please visit
550-5.7.1 http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for
550 5.7.1 more information. v45si7647979eeh.40 (in reply to end of DATA command))

The information at the URL they give gives me basically buggerall recourse. Or am I reading this wrong? Does anybody know how to get around this?