Pandora.. Great selection of music, stays on topic and all that. But seriously..is there a way to prevent the computer inactivity timeout? Stops playing, starts giving me whiny messages of “Are we playing to an empty room? It costs us to play these songs so we don’t want to be playing to nobody.”

However, I’ve got my computer set up with a Kensington FM transmitter so I can listen upstairs (bad laptop won’t support hardly anything streaming, bad sound card, etc.). So no, Pandora, you’re NOT playing to an empty room. You’re playing IN an empty room. But yes we are all still listening.

Running a short test right now to see if that notification is based on website or computer inactivity. If computer inactivity (mouse movement, screensaver, etc.), I’ll just keep mouse jiggler running when I want to run Pandora, and that should keep it live. If not, I’m screwed. Either that or I’ll just by a Wi-Fi media player one day. When I have actual money that is.

Initially I had hoped that they might have something like an open API which would allow me to develop (with more effort than I’m willing to put into it), an application which would let me control playback from a remote machine. But alas. No… However I did find a plugin hack to play Pandora in Winamp. I’ll look into that. Hopefully if that works, I can set up a few Winamp tools to work with it and be able to control it remotely from there. However, this hack uses Pandora Mini, which I believe is a scaled down, no controls version. Well, maybe it’s like mobile with Like, Dislike and Fastforward. We’ll see. I’ll have to try it out later, but right now I’m blogging. Come on!!