If you are a musician, specially a keyboard player, there’s an emphasis these days on “the gear”; having the newest gear, what’s the new gear like, what does it give you? You would think from the way people talk in music technology magazines that the instruments play themselves. I think most people believe that.

To get a real perspective you should visit this really wonderful web resource, a kind of electronic music wakeup call. 120 Years of Electronic Music covers the years 1870 to 1990 and shows you lush pictures and gives you a detailed history of every worthwhile cutting edge instrument made in the last 120 years. Makes you wonder why people don’t just play them rather than looking for new stuff all the time.

Well, okay maybe that’s too simple. Perhaps you should remind your muso friends that people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. If they don’t get that then maybe you should get smarter friends.

Despite the serious sounding name, Democracy Player is actually a very good video player. But it’s so much more too. Aside from the fact it claims to play virtually all video formats (Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more), you can also search for videos from inside it!

Your chosen video or videos then downloads to your computer where they are kept for a default of 5 days before being deleted, but you can choose to save them forever too. It even allows you to search YouTube, Yahoo Video, Google Video, and more, right from inside it!

I was a little confused by the interface at first until i realised how simple it was, the “My Collection” link to the left is everything you downloaded, “New Videos” is downloaded videos you haven’t watched yet, and “Downloading” is videos currently being downloaded. So it’s all pretty easy to use!

It has lots of channels built in and feeds from video sites, so you’ll never be lost for something to watch!

I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more about this cool program! You can download it for free and find out more info by checking out the homepage here.

Feed validation doesn’t sound very sexy, does it? I bet you keep yourself awake at night, don’t you, worrying if your RSS feed is perfectly formed? No okay you probably don’t, but if you are podcaster or a blogger then you will at least be interested to know there IS an online resource which can totally debug your RSS feed code.

Just type the address for your feed into the Feed Validator and it will go off, load your XML file and debug it for any obvious code bloopers. Usually if it gets through Feed Validator it will pass muster with browsers, feed collectors, iTunes, you name it. Also a good thing to check if your code is not working for some reason. FV will usually get to the bottom of the problem.

If you love the game Need For Speed, then you are surely going to love this; Need For Extreme. Need For Extreme is a great Free Car Game. With a breathtaking variety of arcade races you get to enjoy the world of racing like never before. Thirst for speed and danger makes the car game more captivating.

You are expected to breeze through the obstacles in each level in a limited period of time. With the obstacles reducing your speed, causing your car to skid and if possible crash, you’ve got a real challenge on your hands. The opponents’ cars will stand in your way. The speed of your car reduces if you take an earth road. You also get to pick up bonuses like life, scores, speed, and a gun.

One really cool thing about this game is you get to compete with people all over the world. If your score is among the Top 10, you can upload it to the website and thousands of other players all over the world will be able to see your high score!

Ready for this kind of challenge! Click HERE!

If you’ve had it with spam and you are looking for the final solution, you might want to check out Spam Blocker.

Spam Blocker is an application for filtering incoming correspondence. This is a very simple, convenient and fast protection tool for prior analysis, blocking and deleting incoming advertising letters (spam) immediately on mail servers.

What really makes this a cool tool is that it helps to get rid of annoying email advertising by analyzing correspondence before it is loaded from server. Spam Blocker checks all mail and receives the headings of all messages from the user’s mailbox (email addresses, addressee names, message subject, etc.) and analyzes the messages for spam content.

One other thing that I love about this tool is that you, the user, get to define the criteria it which it will sort your message, thus eliminating the risk of losing important mails that you are expecting.

Want to check it out? Click Here!

No that’s guitar TUNER. And having one of these online is a total boon. If you play guitar there is one thing that’s the bane of your life. Staying in tune. Say you went to someone’s house and he hasn’t got a guitar tuner and you forgot yours? Or worse still you go to play a concert and your tuner gets mislaid on the way, or falls out in the van, the guy can’t remember where he parked it and… okay, you get the idea.

This online guitar tuner at Guitar For Beginners plays you the right notes in the right order. The recordings of the guitar notes are beautiful, and ring on for long enough for you to sound your own note and tune it in with the recording. Genius. Really lovely site, really well done. Lots of open tunings too, so you can sound really good and pose a lot without having to concentrate so much on being able to play.

Have you been searching for a good and easy to use playlist creator? If yes, you are in luck. I present to you, The Filter!

The Filter (which is formerly known as iCueMix) creates perfect playlists from your iTunes library. It lets you rediscover your music collection in just a few clicks. Just highlight a couple of tracks and let The Filter give you the playlist. You can also create auto-refreshable lists for your commute to work, your gym visits or any other activity.

A new updated version, version 1.3.2.4 was released recently with these changes:

• Fixed registration problem resulting from attempting to login with unknown user credentials.
• Added shortcut to store recommendation on main player window.
• Corrected problem with offline usage. In previous versions the ‘optimize for offline use’ did not always result in recommendation information being downloaded from The Filter’s community server to the user’s PC.
• Fixed a bug that caused the application to fail under some circumstances when trying to perform an ‘instant playlist’ using played most songs.
• Setting the playlist prefix to contain the ‘)’ or ‘(‘ character no longer crashes the player
  Other minor bug fixes.
• Modified filtering algorithm to remove recommendations with low relevance.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO AND DOWNLOAD!

Ever thought those ASCII artpictures from the Internet’s history were really cool? You know, those pictures that hackers typed painstakingly into computer terminals? Photocopy the picture onto graph paper, then type it it pixel by pixel, each letter or number given a different shade rating… tedious and long work, but the results were stunning. If you printed it out and stood back you could see the original picture rendered in TEXT! Amazing.

So amazing in fact that ASCII art is still alive and people still think it’s a pretty neat idea. Well it is. But TEXT-IMAGE.com have taken all the hard work out of it and made it fun. On this site you can make original ASCII art, really cool 21st Century HTML colour ASCII art, or ACSII art made with Matrix text. That’s not just cool that’s SUPER cool. And no tedious typing.

If you are Tetris fan, you will love this game. ColorTetris.

ColorTetris is a cool game that is not a little more than your ordinary Tetris. It includes a popular variation of Tetris that’s more complicated and more interesting, Pentix. There are also many block sets to play. You can use your own sound effects if you like, but the preset sounds will not disturb you while you play. Its great background music and nice graphics makes it a Tetris-fan delight.

ColorTetris works well with all Windows Operating Systems but it requires at least Direct X 7.0 to work effectively.

The only downside to this game is that you have be a tetris fan to appreciate the game. If you are not a tetris fan, you may not enjoy the game despite the nice graphics and background music.

Want to give it a try? Click Here! It’s Free!

No longer is it just talk-talk-talk! The first phase of the release of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 has just been implemented. At an event held on Thursday, Microsoft’s Steve Balmer announced the business availability of Windows Vista, Microsoft 2007 and over 30 other applications that are targeted for the business world.

The event was held at the NASDAQ Marketsite in New York City. 11 years ago Microsoft pulled this kind of double release stunt [Windows 95 and Office 95] and had a record breaking success. Will history repeat itself for Vista and Office 2007? Let’s wait and see.

Microsoft said it plans to spend “hundreds of millions” of dollars to market the Windows upgrade. The marketing budget will eclipse the $500 million Microsoft spent to market Windows XP, the predecessor to Windows Vista.

Now that Microsoft has stayed true to their promise of releasing the first version for businesses, we can rest assured that we all will be able to get the “everybody version” [consumer version] early next year as promised.

Click here for the full gist of the launch.

Click here for more info on Office 2007 and free test drive of Office 2007.