Tim Bray just posted an entry about including a comment count in his atom feed. He said that he soon disabled it as people complained that it meant they saw the entry again as an updated entry. As I've recently done the same for my atom feed, I'm confused as to why this is happening. In my case I don't update either <published> or <updated>, just the <content> element. As the guid never changes, readers shouldn't consider it updated. Do readers really take a hash of the contents and consider it updated if it changes? Why do readers ignore the date fields. Is this affecting anyone? Certainly, it doesn't seem to affect Planet or the few readers I've tried it on.

After my last post on music players capable of Ogg Vorbis playback, I was recommended:

• Anything by Cowan (iAudio)
• iRiver t10
• iRiver iHP 120
• Samsung's YP-U2
• Kingston K-PEX

I can discount the iHP120 straight away as it's a HD based player and will be too large for what I want.

Update: I'm intentional avoiding any Apple products.

iRiver t10

iRiver T10

90GBP will get me a 2GB device. Several people have claimed it works as USB mass storage, although I've seen someone say American versions wouldn't work. iRiver have a firmware updater to convert it to UMS, so I might need to find a Windows installation. It has good battery life of around 45-50 hours from a single AA battery, which is good. It's got good reviews for its sound quality and its rugged construction might make it good in the gym.

Kingston K-PEX100

Kingston K-PEX100

A 2GB model will set me back around 65GBP. It's a touch larger, but thinner than the T10. Looks like a UMS device. It can be expanded with miniSD cards, which seems a nice feature. It only has a 17 hour battery time using the internal rechargable, which seems a bit low, considering my CD player will do 120 hours off two AA. Reviews have mentioned that the build quality is a little budget and a couple of firmware bugs, but hopefully these have been fixed now.

Samsung's YP-U2

Samsung YP-U2

Can only find a 1GB unit for 60GBP, although there is a 2GB unit available. Battery life is only 14 hours from the internal rechargable battery. It's smaller than the iRiver T10 and is a UMS device. I've seen reviews complain about the audio quality of this device. I think the lack of battery life and audio problems will rule this one out.

Cowon iAudio U3 and T2

I wasn't recommended any particular models, but the two I'm considering is the T2 and U3.

iAudio T2

The T2 is a necklace style player, which is rather unusual, but I can pick up a 2GB model for around 100GBP. Battery is around 12 hours using the internal rechargable battery. Looking at the reviews, the supplied headphones make up the actual necklace part and you have to remove that to use your own headphones, which is what I'll be doing, having just bought some Shure E2Cs. They also say the controls are a little confusing.

iAudio U3

This is the most expensive of the products I've looked at at 115GBP for the 2GB model. Battery life is around 20 hours. Reviews have been very positive. Not sure if it's worth the extra price though.

Update: Apparently the 2GB model can only be charged via USB, where as the 1GB model comes with a charger too, Also, I read in a review that it has doesn't do gapless playback, which is very annoying. Why don't players do gapless playback?

Summary

I think my top choice is the iRiver T10, although each of the others have their plus points. The K-PEX is expandable, the T2 is small and the U3 gets good reviews. I think I've discounted the Samsung. I will try and find each of the players in a local shop to have a play before I go out and buy one. If you have any comments on any of these players, or you have another product to recommend I'd be very interested.

Oh, and continuing my trend of discovering bands that have split up, I've been getting into At The Drive-In. :S

Firefox 2 is an improvement on previous versions, but one thing annoys me is the new tab style. I don't like having a close button on each tab and I don't like it hiding tabs after you have a certain number open. Fortunately you can fix this. Go to about:config in the URL and then set browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 and browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 and now you should have a close button on the right and all tabs displayed.

Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
        boundary="----=25532899_4522_4927_1140_664401643181"

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
------=25532899_4522_4927_1140_664401643181
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not
understand =
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
------=25532899_4522_4927_1140_664401643181
Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

No, my mail reader understands it perfectly. It's your crappy mail client that sends out multipart/alternative mails which don't contain alternatives. Fuckers.

If you use Last.fm, you may have got around to using their events feature where you can search for events near you and mark yourself attending those events. I was manually entering the information into my google calendar, which was a pain.

Fortunately, being one of those hip, friendly web2.0 websites, Last.fm allows you to get your data out in all sorts of useful ways, including you event calendar as an iCal file. Google being useful, allow you to display external iCal files in your calendar. Can you see where I'm going with this? To get this up, log into you Google calendar, go to "Manage Calendars", then "Add Calendar", then "Public Calendar Address". Finally type in the url of your last.fm iCal file, which will be http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/dpash/events.ics, although obviously you need to change dpash to your particular last.fm username. Now, you only need to mark yourself attending a gig to have it show up in your Google calendar.

You can use something like this to get it into your Evolution calendar.