Simon Fredsted

The easy way to create YouTube playlists.

Everybody is online nowadays. Nobody uses CDs anymore. So at parties it’s common to see a laptop hooked up to a stereo where people go up and select songs on YouTube during the night. It kinda sucks though:

Music starts and stops randomly as people get drunk and start searching for songs while another is playing.

You need to get up and change the track when it stops.

It’s too hard to make a playlist on YouTube. You can’t really make one on the fly.

What’s more, you have to be logged in with your Google ID to make playlists. I don’t want random people to mess with my account (e.g. Gmail), especially drunk people.

Sure, there’s Grooveshark. But people who aren’t nerds can’t figure out how to use Grooveshark and will just go to YouTube instead. It’s too easy to interrupt a playlist, especially when you’re drunk. The add to playlist button is easily missed.

Grooveshark is also missing many songs due to silly record companies.

Other sites exist, I know. But no matter which one you use, people will inevitably go to YouTube because it’s got all the content and it’s what people know and love.

Even other “Youtube DJ” sites exist. I’ve been through a few. They either a) require login, b) are hard to use, c) can’t autoplay, d) don’t work.

So I got fed up with all this and made InstaDJ. It’s a dead-simple Web site where you can add YouTube videos to a playlist on the fly. Even drunk people get it.

InstaDJ allows you to search and queue YouTube videos, using a simple interface everybody understands, in a way which doesn’t interrupt the music.

What it does

• Search YouTube videos
• View user uploads and favorites
• Queue YouTube videos
• Auto-selects HD video if available
• Generate URL to playlists
• Share playlist
• It’s free and there’s no ads
• Easy to use, minimalist interface

I even find myself just using InstaDJ instead of playing music from my iTunes library.

Don’t you want to try it out? Just click here to go to InstaDJ.com.

For the technically interested, it’s built with the YouTube API, Twitter Bootstrap and jQuery. I’ll probably put it out on GitHub soon. Enjoy!

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Many people complain about Lion’s full screen feature on dual monitors. Essentially, the full screen button removes some window chrome, along with the Dock and Menu bar, so there’s more room for you to work.

This is really practical on small notebooks like the 13″ MacBook Pro and the 11″ Air where the screen resolution is very low as is the ratio of chrome-to-content.

When you fullscreen a window in Lion with multiple screen(s), the secondary screen is covered in the linen texture and you’re unable to use it, except in a few programs like Pages where you  drag toolbars over to the linen-covered screen.

Example of Mail.app in Full Screen mode

Many people think it’s a bug, waiting for Apple to fix it. It’s not.

People expect the full-screen feature to be somewhat analogous to the Windows maximize button, but it’s not. Full Screen was intended for small screens, like the 11″ and 13″ MacBooks.

Typically, when you have a dual screen setup, you have lots of pixels to work with. 100 pixels for window chrome doesn’t matter when you’ve got 2 1920×1200 screens. Quick access to the dock and menus is more important than saving a few pixels.

There’s no real shortage of space on a dual-screen setup, so you don’t have to make a compromise like you can do on low-res screens.

You don’t need full screen on dual-screen setup. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just another example of Apple saying, for better or worse, “No.”

This picture shows the development of the iPod over 10 years. Things like these make me hopeful about the future.

If only I could lose weight like that!  :-)

Are you one of the people who complain when Facebook changes their layout? This book is for you.

I got this little book from a friend. The English version is from 1998, but the Danish version (“Hvem har taget min ost”), which I read, just recently got published.

Basically, the book is about 4 different people, metaphorically mice in the book, who react to change in the daily lives in different ways.

1. The front-runner which finds new cheese (a metaphor for changes, opportunities, general wishes in life)
2. The follower, which quickly sees that the front-runner is on to something, and follows quickly
3. The blocker, which is in denial about new changes and wants it to stay the way it’s always been
4. The overrider, which is influenced by the denial of the blocker, but still proceeds

The general message of the book is that by accepting, noticing and embracing change, you will end up happier, richer and in general have a better life.

And I agree. More people should read this, stop denying change and start anticipating it in their life. Life changes constantly, and change is always there for a reason, whether it be politics, a Web site, physical product, opinions. I can name countless examples of change that initially spawned a huge outcry, but later people realized it was actually a good idea.

Let’s take Apple as an example. They are notorious for forcing change in their products when they know the change is for the better. A couple of examples:

• Selling turnkey computers in the 80′s
• Removing the floppy drive from the iMac
• Later, removing the disk drive from the MacBook Air
• Not supporting Flash on the iPhone (Flash development recently got dropped by Adobe)
• Making a tablet with the iOS operating system and not Mac OS X

With iOS 5, an Emoji keyboard is included per default (which you can add in Settings – Keyboard), enabling you to send small graphic smilies and icons over SMS, iMessage, email, etc. Here’s a screenshot of Emoji in my
iPhone’s status bar.

The website for Syddansk Filmværksted (A south danish filmworkshop) is almost done.

We are trying to get a film workshop running in the southern part of Denmark. We feel like there might be some talent in this part of the country, and we expect to host meetings, screenings and much more at the office in Kongensgade 8 in Esbjerg.

For now, we are in the pre-production phase of our first short, VIGILANTE. I’m very excited to get this project up and running! You can view the new website, and get more info, by clicking here.

From the blog post over at mozilla.org:

Mozilla and Bing are pleased to make available Firefox with Bing, a customized version of Firefox that sets Bing as the default search engine in the search box and AwesomeBar and makes Bing.com the default home page.

This is pretty interesting. Did Mozilla receive a lot of money from Microsoft?

In this article I’ll be reviewing the Zotac ZBOX ID41, which is an inexpensive mini PC from Zotac that particularly appeals to media center owners and budget-constrained customers.

It doesn’t have a built-in tuner, but ships with the ION 2 chipset that allows it to play Full-HD video, rendering it a great PC for HTPC.

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Recently I’ve had some trouble with a few applications — mostly Premiere CS5.5 and After Effects CS5.5 — crashing on startup, others not. Sometimes it worked after a reboot, but mainly it didn’t.

But now I’ve found the solution: You (probably) have bad RAM.

You can try downloading the Memtest boot cd, burn it with Disk Utility and launch it on boot by holding down the alt key. Memtest is a very sophisticated tool which checks your RAM for errors. As it turned out, it reported that I had over 300.000 errors. I’m not a RAM expert, so I don’t know if that’s a lot (probably is though), but I quickly took them out and replaced them with some old sticks, which Memtest didn’t report any errors with. After that, the programs worked fine.

I didn’t find relevant results on Google for EXC_BAD_ACCESS, so now people can hopefully solve this issue quickly.

When I got my MacBook Pro 5,5 in 2009, it only came with 2 GB ram and a 120 GB harddrive. By todays standards, that’s painfully little for a professional laptop. So I decided to upgrade it to 8 GB ram, a 1TB HDD for storage and a 60 GB Vertex 2 SSD for OS X and applications.

An optibay

So how do you fit two disk drives in a 13″ laptop? More after the jump.

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