Being able to remotely control my AirPlay setup from the comfort of my couch has been at the top of my feature request list forever, so I’m very excited to say that it’s now a feature in Porthole!

I’ve added Porthole to the collection of apps that work with the remarkable Unified Remote. Unified Remote is an app made by Unified Intents that allows you to remotely control many features of your Mac and a whole bunch of third-party apps, now including Porthole.

The remote lets you turn AirPlay speakers on and off, toggle the computer speaker and adjust the main volume from any iOS, Android and Windows phone or tablet that’s on the same wireless network as your Mac.

I’m super proud to say that Denied is featured on Spotify’s Developer Showcast. Which means there’s this cool page that lists a few apps that use Spotify’s developer interface and DENIED IS ON IT!

The developer showcast highlights apps that use one or more of Spotify’s methods to control the desktop app or retrieve information from their immense song database. Denied uses AppleScript to control the OS X desktop app and uses the database to check for songs that contain explicit lyrics.

Spotify version 1.0.3 is being rolled out and AppleScript seems to be working as it should again! Well, almost. Everything works, except the album artwork. So while Denied will once again save your ears from the scum music of the earth, you can’t see what the album cover looks like.

While the black hole of despair is actually looking quite fitting in Denied, I’ve contacted Spotify once more to go in and fix the AppleScript stuff for good this time.

Spotify released a pretty major update a little while ago. While they introduced all kinds of interesting new features, they also broke some old ones, like support for remote controlling the desktop client using ‘AppleScript’.

Denied uses AppleScript to retrieve information from Spotify and tell it to skip to the next song. Needless to say without AppleScript Denied is pretty bad at saving your ears in Spotify. Note that Rdio and iTunes are unaffected by the way.

Luckily the bug is pretty simple to solve and Spotify has said they’re planning to release a definitive fix pretty soon. Until then, you can use this little patch I wrote that will re-enable AppleScript with the click of a button. Super simple.

So, if you’re experiencing any trouble using Denied with Spotify, download the patch and start saving your ears from crappy music again!

Instead of focusing on songs I detest, let’s talk about some that I love; totally compensating for all the negativity on this site.

I’ve made my starred playlist public so you can browse through tracks I’ve saved. I also religiously ‘scrobble plays’ to my Last.fm profile. Do you guys still do that? If not, I highly recommend it. Browsing through the 90.000+ tracks I’ve listened to over the years feels like an incredible trip down memory lane. Plus it allows me to compare my musical taste to Japie.

Upon analyzing my Starred playlist, it seems to be a combination of all-time favorites and spur of the moment stuff that sounded perfect at the right time. An example from the first category would be Glycerine by Bush. It’s become sort of a ritual to put it on when I’m testing one of my other apps, called Porthole. Your Love by The Outfield I also never get tired of hearing.

Last.fm indicates that I also listen to an ungodly amount of Punk.

More recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Chiptune and Synth Pop. I tend to alternate between periods of listening to guitar music and electronic tunes. Computerized songs seem to be winning at the moment — although I thoroughly enjoyed that Black Label Society concert last Saturday!

I’m always on the lookout for new awesome music to listen to, so I’d love to hear about your Starred playlists on Twitter.