Check Mii Out: Bordem In Ten Minutes Or Less GUARANTEED!

I just downloaded the brand spankin' new Check Mii Out channel for the good 'ol Wii. If you don't know about this new little channel, just have a seat on the rug and grandpa T will tell you a story.

Check Mii Out is a new WiiWare channel by Nintendo that allows you to vote on and trade your and other people's miis. You can also enter mii look-alike contests. Yup, that's about it.

After downloading, I started it up and was immediately sickened by the annoying music. I thought
the Wii Shop Channel was bad. Anyway, I posted Dick Cheney mii, voted on a couple of Miis that 
looked kinda cool, then turned it off and played bowling. It was a pretty pathetic experience, to say
the least. It's free, so you don't have an excuse not to download it, but you'll have a million reasons not to use it. 

Amazon MP3 Downloads: THE Music Store For Linux

I just now delved deeper into Amazon's new music store, which I mentioned a few days ago, and I was quite impressed with my experience.

I made my first purchase One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head. Yes, I'm an 80's kind of guy. I'm probably the only man under the age of 18 in Cooke County, Texas who has Fleetwood Mac, The Pretenders, AND Haddaway on my iPod. C'mon, I challenge you.

Anyway, buying was simple and quick. I just clicked on the buy button, passed up the MP3 downloader software offer, and then was taken to a screen where I could download my song. Once I downloaded it, I loaded it to my iPod and listened to it in all of it's high-bitrate, non-DRM, sickeningly-over-the-top synthesizer goodness.

Oh, and did I mention that I did all of this in Linux?

Uh-huh. Because of the lack of DRM, and the help of some special applications, I was able to take the downlaoded song and sync it to my iPod with no fuss.

What do you think I paid for this little gem of a song? $1.99? Nope. Unlike iTunes Plus, this song only cost me 89 cents. Pretty sweet, huh?

The only downside to using Amazon MP3 with Linux is that if you want to buy a whole album, you're out of luck, as you'll have to download the Windows/Mac OS X compatible downloader client. I'm sure you could get it running in Wine, but I haven't had the chance to try. For now, I'll just have to download my music singularly.

So for anyone looking for a new music store, especially the Linux crowd, you need to take a look at this place. iTunes might want to keep an eye out for these guys.

Amazon MP3 Will Be A Winner...If It Has Songs

I haven't had the chance to actually download a song from them yet, but the Amazon MP3 store looks pretty promising.

Released to the public just a few days ago, Amazon has made quite a contender for the iTunes Store.

The number one selling point with Amazon is its DRM-free music. That's right. When you download it, it's yours. No strings attached. Sure, Apple has DRM-free songs with EMI, but that's the problem. It's from EMI.

The interface looks pretty good. It's pretty much typical Amazon fashion, and I've heard both good and bad reviews of their Music Downloader software that's required to download from the service. I'll try it out and give my two cents on it soon.

Amazon's done a great job so far, but the big thing that needs to be done is what will make or break the service. Selection. There isn't much of it now, but soon they should grab the attention of the big labels.

No BitTorrent? No Problem! BitLet To The Rescue!

Too lazy to download a 2MB BitTorrent client? Or maybe wanting to download a file onto a friends computer without installing crap he/she will probably never use again? Well BitLet, a new startup, allows you to download any torrent via web-based java client. Just paste the torrent's URL and select a download destination, and BitLet does the rest. A very spiffy-looking page, as well.

[BitLet: A Cute Web-Based BitTorrent Client] TorrentFreak