Band of the Day iOS app

I love music, but since I’ve started a family and been working full time (as opposed to doing mostly nothing and playing in a band years ago) its become harder and harder to discover new music. It’s hard to find the time to sit around and listen to music, and most of the time I was getting recommendations from friends that I lived with, which obviously doesn’t happen anymore. I used to use last.fm as a sort of crude music discovery tool, as they will try to play music that matches your tastes based on your listening habits. That mostly never really worked for me as it was rare that I actually heard a band that I wanted to listen to repeatedly.
Today however I was introduced to a new iOS app called Band of the Day, and I loved it instantly! Each day a band is highlighted and you can read a review, check their bio, see messages from other users of the app, and stream whole songs from recent releases. You can also purchase songs or albums directly through the iTunes store. In a word, for me, it’s perfect. I have a train commute to work each day and now I have a super simple, beautiful music discovery app to help me find new bands. I’m going back now to browse trough past Bands of the Day!

iPhone app Waze updated

I had tried using Waze earlier this year, and while free turn by turn directions were really nice, my issue was with the voice guides navigation. Gladly, with the latest update the voice navigation in Waze has become much more robust! Previously the only voice input from the app was highly generic like, “turn left”, “bear right”. Now however the app tells you specifically the name of the road you are to turn onto, which greatly improves usability and obviate the need to look at the screen.
The other thing I like about Waze is the social aspect of the app. You can easily and quickly add an alert if you happen upon an accident or construction or some other delay. If enough people use this it could be very useful. Since the app is completely free, why not download it and give it a try?

iCacti for iPhone ties into running cacti instances

I recently started setting up all kinds of different monitoring and alerting systems on my own Linux box I keep at home for media storage and as a playground/lab. About a week ago I installed cacti and started setting up all kinds of graphs and pollers to hit my localhost as well as the router which spans our internal and external networks. It was simple, and I started to think about how great it is going to be to have all this data logged so I can refer to the data at a later date. Of course, being the iPhone app junkie that I am, I went out looking for an iPhone app that ties into my running cacti instance, and that is exactly what I found.
iCacti only requires that you can supply a URL, username, and password to log into your own instance of cacti running somewhere either in your internal network or over the internet. Setting things up took about 10 seconds. I ran into a problem where the data wasn’t being read from my cacti server, but I worked with the developer Várkonyi Balázs through email and we were able to get everything working. To reward me for helping him get it working with my older version of cacti, he sent me a pre-release copy of the hotfix he sent to Apple. Now, some screenshots.

List of currently configured graphs for my cacti instance

LocalHost Load Average in landscape

You can also change the length of time that the graph displays, or refresh the graph you are currently viewing. The thing I like the most about this is that it uses existing technologies rather than making you have to run another open port in order to feed the app. It even supports SSL connections to your webserver of choice.

The app runs smoothly and provides the data I need in a beautiful little app. Well worth the $1.99!

Check it out: iCacti iTunes Link