You should be used to being told not to use Internet Explorer anymore - it may be the default for the majority of users, but the existence of three better competing browsers means there are no excuses anymore. We all get used to programs, and don’t always notice if our traditional choice has stopped being the sensible one. Is it time iTunes went the same way as Microsoft’s mess of a browsing application?

But what, I hear you say, could possibly be wrong with iTunes? Aren’t we supposed to love Apple? Well, maybe we are, but I for one feel iTunes is turning into a behemoth - excess feature fat without functionality. Take the Genius Bar - it slows down iTunes a ton, and it’s rubbish. Cover flow may be pretty, but it’s hardly the easiest way to browse your library.

This year saw the first proper release of the open source media player Songbird, which is starting to look like it could be to iTunes what Firefox is to IE. Like Firefox, songbird is highly customizable with lots of add-ons available, so you can make it work the way you want it to.

A bunch of add-ons are bundled with the installation, giving you iPod support, a concert search tool, a Last.fm scrobbler and more. Adding more is easy and can be done from within Songbird - it has a browser (and any time you visit a page that has MP3s, they’ll be listed in a pane at the bottom so you can easily listen to or download them). From the add-ons page you’ll find a host of interesting tools. Here are a few cool ones:

The Exorcist is something iTunes is seriously missing. Anyone with a big library is likely to have listings which no longer exist and duplicate files. As your library grows, sorting out this mess can become an insurmountable task of epic proportions. Luckily, The Exorcist will just list both for you, making cleaning your library a breeze.

Last.fm is a great resource for music info, so why not take advantage? Music Recommendations lifts similar artist ideas based on what you’re listening to, and if like me you don’t have much album art saved with your music, Last.fm Album Art will find the artwork for your albums as you play them and display them where you’d see them in iTunes. Incidentally, if you really do miss iTunes, you can download an iTunes style skin. Feel better?

You can integrate a lyrics bar with LyricMaster, which will find lyrics from the web and show them in the right-hand side bar. Now there’s no excuse not to entertain your workmates with your vocal talents. There is also a seeqpod add-on so you can easily search for tunes to download if you’re not too worried about the legal side of things…

There are some reasons to keep iTunes - it does integrate better with your iPod for instance, but give Songbird a try and you might find you migrate there for everyday listening purposes.

I used to love making tapes for friends, but the onset of mp3s has made it a lost art form. Playlists just aren’t the same to me. I’m going to show you how to make an mp3 “mixtape” using a freeware audio editing program called Audacity. I used Audacity 1.3.6, which is a beta release, although using the older 1.2 version is the same as far as I can tell.

First, choose the mp3s you want on your mix. I recommend copying them all into a special folder, just to make sure you don’t mess up your originals! The next thing is choosing the order of play. You could do this in Audacity, but I find it easier to play about with the order in an iTunes playlist. Once you think your playlist looks good, it’s time to stick it together.

Open Audacity, close the welcome message, then from your special folder, drag and drop your first two tracks into Audacity. Choose the time shift tool, and drag the second track to around the end of the first. It should look something like this.

With my tracks, usefully, the first track faded out, and the next faded in, so I experimented with it until it sounded good. Usually you can get a nice effect just by choosing the right point to start the following track, but if it doesn’t work, you can create fade ins and outs by highlighting part of the track then going to ‘Effects’, ‘Utilities’ then choosing your fade.

Once you’re happy with the join between tracks, highlight both with the selection tool, go to ‘Tracks’, then click ‘Mix and Render’, which will blend the two tracks as you decided.

Now you have your first mix, you can continue to add more tracks repeating the above method. For my mix, the next track I chose was a much quieter recording than the first two, so it needed amplifying. To do this, simply highlight the whole track, go to ‘Effect’ again, then choose amplify. This tool isn’t great, as you can’t preview your results, but from experience, you’re unlikely to want to amplify more than 3.0db. Check the ‘allow clipping’ box, if you can’t then click the ‘OK’ button. You might need to experiment a bit to get the loudness of your tracks the same.

Eventually, you’ll be left with one long track (see left picture). Now you can export the mix as an MP3, which requires a tiny add-on to be downloaded, but Audacity will prompt you and take you through it. Unfortunately you can’t burn to CD with Audacity, though you can easily do that in iTunes and most media players, assuming your mix isn’t over 80 minutes long.

Using this cut and past method to stitch tracks together is surprisingly easy once you’re used to it, and there are some interesting effects you can add, and you could also add snippets of spoke word from films and TV easily, or even your own voice, as Audacity will record any external sound source you plug into your computer (like a microphone), and once recorded you can treat the snippet like any other file.

Unity is a cool plugin for playing online games.  I’ve never seen 3D graphics this good in my browser before, so here are a few games and toys that will undoubtedly impress.

For relaxation purposes, point yourself towards Jetpack Brontosaurus.  This is pretty abstract and really attractive: who hasn’t dreamed of flying a brontosaurus around with a jetpack? There are five levels to play, each with a series of missions to complete, like collecting fruit and flying through rings. It reminds me of Thrust, but much slower, in 3D, and with a Brontosaurus, rather than a spaceship. PilotWings, the old SuperNintendo game, is probably a better reference point for this, as both games share a similar pace.

Also gentle and fun, and even cuter than a brontosaurus, is the 20 level TumbleDrop. This is a 2d physics based puzzle game, where you have to remove objects under your star carefully so it lands on a platform instead of tumbling into the sea.  Don’t try this at work; you won’t be able to stop!

There are a few cool action games too. My favorite at the moment is Downhill Bowling. Why in the world no one thought of this before is incredible, because this is a really great idea with a ton of of replay value, as you’ll want to keep improving your strike rate down the courses. If you register, you can leave your score on the online scoreboards, making this a very competitive game.

For a dose of mindless violence,  try another game I feel I’ve been waiting to play my whole life - Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. Take control of a velociraptor driving a 4×4, then chase down other raptors and run them over. It’s a silly concept but very satisfying, with excellent physics, nice graphics and good crunchy sound effects.

I also found a very retro-futuristic 3d Tron-like game called Traces of Illumination, and a space shooter called Manta, so it looks like Unity is taking browser games to the next level

Email is essential for most of us today, but like the phone and snail mail before, it comes with its own set of drawbacks. Luckily, developers never sit still, and there are a number of interesting and free email solutions around.

If you’re unlucky enough to use Outlook, I can sympathize. It’s search is awful, it looks cluttered and losing important messages is easy if you’re not careful. A great way to vastly improve Outlook so it’s almost enjoyable, is to install xobni. With no effort from you, you’ll have a fantastic, intuitive and helpful search, instantly find your contacts in LinkedIn or Facebook and get fun statistics (I know that sounds unlikely, just try it out!).

One way we fill up our inboxes with rubbish is by giving out our email address to sign up for stuff like activation codes, posting occasional comments in forums etc. For this we get unwanted newsletters, updates and ads sent to us. A great way to beat this is to use a service like Melt Mail. This gives you a temporary email address, which will melt after 3, 6, 12 or 24 hours, during which time any messages to the address will be forwarded to your ‘real’ address. I used to use an old Hotmail address for this purpose (Hotmail’s not much use for anything else), but temporary addresses feel like a safer solution.

Another trend with apps, online and off is aggregating your web-life in one place. Two cool examples of this recently are the Firefox add-on Yoono, and web app Zenbe. Yoono brings your Yahoo and Gmail together in a sidebar, and also syncs with Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. If you constantly have your web-life opened in Firefox tabs, this can be a real space saver, and the pop up notices are cool too. ZenBe does a similar thing, but online. You can set up multiple POP emails to be forwarded into it, and read everything there. With a calendar and Facebook and Twitter integration, this is another neat way to streamline your internet use. I should add that ZenBe seem a bit overwhelmed with registrations at the moment, and took a few days to get back to me, but I do think it was worth the wait.

 This week Google announced the release of Ancient Rome in 3D for Google Earth. This new layer loads a 3D model of Emperor Constantine’s Rome, 1688 years ago.

Switching the layer on is relatively straight forward, just open the ‘Layers’ tag in the side panel of Google maps, open ‘Gallery’ then tick Ancient Rome in 3D. Then, when you zoom into Rome (the Google Earth zoom in from space is still one of the coolest things about this)  there will be a tone of yellow building icons floating above the city. From here, click on any building, then the Ancient Terrain link, followed by the Ancient Roman Landmarks and buildings links. After a little loading time, the 3D model will start to pop up on your screen. Then, you’re free to explore. My PC slowed down considerably for this, I think you´ll need a really high spec machine to look around smoothly, but regardless, the effect is pretty good.

Another nice Google Earth add-on I found was the animated political boundaries. I know, it sounds thrilling, but it’s an interesting way to see the way borders change over history. Borders are superimposed onto the Earth, and as you move the time bar along, the borders move, so you’ll see empires flowering and disappearing, countries expanding and contracting until you reach 2008. All you have to do is download the .KML file, and it will automatically open in Google Earth. It looks reasonably accurate to me, but I’m sure there are things missing that people could get very angry about! Check it out and see!

The last Google Earth toy I found is less likely to educate or offend - it’s the Geogreeting site. Someone, or some people with far too much time on their hands, have scoured Google Earth and found buildings with the shapes of all the letters of the alphabet, and with Geogreeting, you can enter a message and send it to your friends and family, who’ll receive an animated e-card with your message.

Alongside fighting piracy, games companies are widening their targets to include the rental, and second-hand game markets.

In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, Epic Games’ (makers of Gears of War)President Michael Caps complains that piracy has stopped them making PC games altogether, and the second hand market is pushing developers towards solutions that stop it. Recently, and organization representing the games industry in Belguim managed to change the law to make game rental there illegal.

I can totally understand companies being worried about piracy, although their response has often been to punish the consumer, but stopping rental and second hand purchases is ridiculous. I’m yet to hear the motor industry make similar complaints about second hand cars, and video rental has been the norm for years.

It is especially painful to hear this kind of mean spirited stuff from an industry that is in such good health - still growing quickly, and predicted to outsell video and music this year in Britain alone. With a generally young demographic, this is impressive. The idea that sales will improve if gamers can’t try out games, as people often do with rental, or sell their old games to buy new ones, is pretty bad.

I like to think I’m pretty web-savvy; I have blogs, exist on Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm and so on, but have never really understood what the big deal about Twitter was. I imagined it was like Facebook status updates, without the rest of Facebook, and mostly used by people for whom the next big thing is already out of fashion

This is the first of a series of posts where we’ll write about the techy things that for some reason or another we’ve never done.

So, after signing up I let Twitter search through my Gmail address book (I never feel comfortable doing this, but it’s so easy!) and it found a whole one of my contacts there! Still, you have to start somewhere…

While one friend is better than none, it isn’t enough to get a feel for what Twitter can do. The annoyingly twee introduction video told me I could stay close to my friends and family by telling them ‘I was having a coffee’. As my family and friends weren’t there, and invites could take a while to come to fruition, I headed back out into the internet for some advice.

On makeuseof.com, I found an article recommending some sites to improve your Twitter experience. The first ones to catch my eye were Twitter search and monitter. These are nice ways to keep up with what’s happening on Twitter. Stick in a search word, and you’ll see what people are Twittering about that subject. Some of the Twitters aren’t interesting, some have links to cool stuff I hadn’t seen. Monitter is much better in this respect (and you don’t even have to join Twitter), as it feeds you live results, on three simultaneous search terms, it’s like an online internet ticker.

There are lots of Firefox add-ons for Twitter, to allow you to post and receive messages without opening it in the browser. One of them is called Twitbin, and I can’t bring myself to use something called that!

I really wasn’t expecting to like Twitter, but I quickly found myself being drawn in. I can see how you’d get addicted to it (’Confessions of a Twitter addict’ will be written soon), and was really surprised to discover it might even be useful. But I guess I’ve come too late to Twitter to be cool.

Today is International Caps Lock Day, a celebration of what is, according to Lifehacker, “the most useless key on your keyboard”.

Did you know there is a group dedicated to eradicating the Caps Lock key? I had no idea, but their site, CAPSoff.org offers a fairly comprehensive arguement for the removal of this oft accidentaLLY PRESSED KEY. Oops.

They argue that the Caps Lock key is badly positioned, and also performs a function no one really uses UNLESS THEY WANT TO SHOUT. CAPSoff are campaigning for more choice in keyboard design for consumers: For example, better ergonomic designs for the left of the keyboard, a left enter key, a programmable key and so on. There are other suggestions for redesigning the keyboard too, the one I was attracted to the most was a detachable number pad, usually found to the right of the keyboard. This would perhaps be preferable for left-handed people, or for the bored ambidextrous among us.

While I do occasionally hit it without meaning to, I am so used to this layout, it hadn’t occurred to me it might be time to rethink things.
Lifehacker offers a few technical ways to change the function of caps lock, or disable it completely; all very useful if you find it infuriating. For a less subtle approach, there’s this video on YouTube.

As a MacBook owner, I would miss it just because it has a little green light on it, and you can sell me anything with lights on. So remapping it would be acceptable, but if it was removed on a future keyboard I’d want another lit key to replace it!

I recently started using Beatport SYNC on my MacBook, as I like the basic DJ features (I am the DJ king of my living room!), and find it a more enjoyable way to listen to music than using iTunes. I was completely happy until I tried to play the tracks I had bought through the iTunes store; they are protected with Apple’s FairPlay DRM (Digital Rights Management) system and won’t work outside iTunes.That irritated me.

I could have downloaded these tracks illegally and been free to listen to the music as I wanted, but because I had actually bought the tracks I couldn’t. Rob Fayer at gamesindustry.biz, makes a similar complaint, calling DRM “hated and broken”. The point of DRM is to curb piracy but it punishes the paying customer while having no discernible effect on piracy.

Of course, there are programs to convert DRM protected files to MP3, but that also puts you in a legal grey area (more likely an illegal area). Fayer argues that as long as paid-for products are more annoying to use than the pirated versions, customers are almost being driven towards piracy. I think people would be more likely to download music legally if it was DRM free.

The recent legal fight between RealNetworks and movie studios highlights how out of touch the “creative industry” is; a world without RealDVD is not one without people ripping DVDs or downloading illegal BitTorrents. Copy protection doesn’t stop people copying, so it should be obvious another solution is needed.

iTunes does now offer some of its music DRM free, at a premium, and Napster also offers unprotected files. I hope this is the beginning of the end: shouldn’t we be trusted to use the things we buy legally? For now, I’ll stick to buying CDs and DRM free music.