Open Pandora's box in the UK

Pandora is a great on-line music station. You type in a favourite artist and along comes a stream of tracks that are either by that artist or of a simlar genre. Yes, there are lots of on-line streams like Grooveshark and Spotify which are good too but what I like about Pandora is the variety and they do seem to have got things right.

The problem has been that if you go to Pandora.com outside the US then you get some boring apology stuff and that's not exactly what you need to cheer a rainy day. So I followed the advice of someone who really knows what he's talking about and comes up with a whole load of tips like this. Amit Argawal hasn't got the simplest of names to pronounce but his Digital Inspiration blog is cram full of things that I wish I knew. Well, I do now but he's the sort that thinks of them first. The best I can do is tell you all about them.

Rather than trying to get through using some awkward proxy server there's a really simple solution thanks to Google Chrome and Firefox. Now you really should be using one of these anyway but if you are still in the steam age and using Internet Explorer and don't want to change this post won't help you. In Chrome install the HTTP Enforcer Extension which sounds cool as well. In Firefox it's called HTTPS Everywhere which isn't so cool but does the job as well, if not slightly better.

Enable the extension or add-on. Go to pandora.com and, with a bit of luck, you'll get redirected to a working site.

I typed in Beach Boys and have been listening ever since. Brilliant! I even get The Beatles. You try finding them elsewhere.

Big thanks to Amit and whoever else is busy checking things out at Digital Inspiration. 

Another on-line photo editing tool

It's been a long time since Microsoft Word crashed on me. Thereagain, it's been a while since I did much with the Edit Wrap Points feature that has been in Word for as long as I can remember but hardly ever used by any students or colleagues I know.

But that's not the point I intended to write about. That's another entry in the on-line photo editing tools that are getting better and better and with more and more features. This one is called FotoFlexer and seems pretty effortless to use. The image above was grabbed from another blog, edited and downloaded in about 3 minutes with no log-in required.

One cautionary note - there's a big 'Download' button staring at you on the main page after you've done your editing. I should have known better but it isn't the 'download my image' button or 'download a local version of the application' button but, annoyingly, something quite different that I only caught a quick glimpse of but looked like one of those tools like Vuze that search for on-line stuff and control the downloads. Probably nothing bad, just very unnecessary and it certainly should be displayed with some accompanying description.

Fotoflexer claim to have more features than any other on-line application. That I doubt, although this does have a lot, including layers management and quite a few resources that some others I've recommended before lack. So it is worth a look but just beware the green button. I'll update all the editors that I am happy to recommend shortly on the webtools site.

Creating a blog and using it for an on-line portfolio