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I cannot speak for the ReplayTV but the Rio500 didn't hold up anywhere near as well as I had hoped. If I shake my Rio500 a little, it loses an internal connection and reboots. Furthermore, the customer service for the Rio500 is god-awful. I went looking for drivers one day after I reformatted my machine. That day, they had 'temporarily disabled' access to the drivers, not even posting the old ones on their site. They didn't correct this for almost a week, during which my Rio was useless.

Also, there was always a hassle getting the Rio Audio Manager (the _worst_ designed user-interface for managing large collections of MP3s I have ever seen) to reenable the MP3-ripping functionality I should have had. In the end, I went out and bought a copy of another piece of software to rip MP3s and to transfer to the Rio (I forget its name at the moment, it's the popular Windows one).

Still, I suppose I still use my Rio500. I use it to listen to audible.com audio content and it does a great job of that. For my MP3s, though, I have since upgraded to the Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. I cannot get it to hook up to Linux yet but apart from that, it is great.

Ok, I'm a putz to reply to myself, but you can also get By His Bootstraps

• Jonathan Lethem: best known so far for Motherless Brooklyn, he goes off the deep end with As She Climbed Across The Table.. Girl in Landscape is also pretty good imho. He kinda strikes me as a bit Vonnegutian, and I like to support NYC writers, particularly those in the outer boroughs ;)
  
• John Case: Thrillers with some techy edge to them, particularly The Genesis Code. I just finished The Eighth Day, not bad..
  
• Iain Banks: The Business is pretty sweet. Not as 'provocative' about globalization as some might say, but fun just the same, with strange life moments that felt pretty real.
  
• Neil Gaiman: American Gods feels a bit like Small Gods whipped up with a bit of Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, but naughtier and better.
  
• Terry Pratchett: the newest (Night Watch) is darker than usual, but I think it actually works well that way.
  
• Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad is a favorite
  
• Donald Westlake: The Ax is recommended to those of you fellow overqualified unemployed folks out there, but only if you have a black sense of humor.
  
• James Morrow's Towing Jehovah is a real trip: imagine that God is dead, falls from heaven, and needs to be towed to His final resting place in the Arctic..
  
• Vernor Vinge for old-skool space opera: A Fire Upon The Deep and (what I'm currently reading) A Deepness In The Sky
  
• Michael Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the story of two Jewish kids revolutionizing pulp comics.
  
• Eric Flint's 1632. If you're looking for good pulp SF, I'd also recommend checking Baen titles, and perusing their free library.
  

The Metaverse was a VR experience described in the excellent cyberpunk comedy

Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson, the same guy who wrote Cryptonomicon.

In the described virtual world, there was a virtual bar that was highly exclusive, and everyone wanted to hang out there. It was named the Black Sun.[*]

Just as 2001 served as an inspiration for developing communication satellites, Snowcrash's "metaverse" served as the inspiration for the development of VRML. The first company to try and make a VRML world into a commercial venture was, not surprisingly, named "Blaxxun Interactive" in honor of the bar in Stephanson's book.

[*] The protagonist of the story, Hiro Protagonist, was a pizza delivery guy/hacker who wrote the code for much of the metaverse, including the Black Sun bar.

audible.com's web-site annoys the hell out of me - every link on the site is a java command, basically meaning you can't open a link in a new window - you're stuck on a linear surf-path. So what happens when you want to compare two products? You need to open another window and renavigate to what you're looking for from the front of the site.

Interestingly, the only part of the site that DOESN'T do this is the customer service portion? Why? Chances are because that part of the site is outsourced to a third-party customer service company. Smooth guys, real smooth.

Triv

Let's not forget that the iPod includes DRM too.

How about you download audio books for just two bucks from this place? Or get some Stephen Hawking stuff for the same price.

You can, however, burn the files to a cd (according to the site), and then you should be able to rip it back to mp3.

You can, however, burn the files to a cd (according to the site), and then you should be able to rip it back to mp3.

This is WRONG

Apple SUPPORTS digital rights management in it's latest iPod devices.

It supports audible audiobooks, which are DRM-style audio books.

You "enable" an audible device (and you can enable only so many), and they your watermarked/locked content only can play on that device.

See the ipod page for a little info.

The broadcast is available for purchase at Audible.com

They don't a direct link available yet but you can find it through Catalog->New Titles->New Daily Subcription

Personally, I listen to "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" on my 45 minute commute, with an occasional does of Tom Leykis for a change...

Balam

audible is the best source of audio. The monthly fee gives you 2 downloads a month. Some of the books are 36 hours of audio. I need a longer commute.

After all, iTunes rips audio into MP3 formats instead of some "protected" format. QuickTime does not (IIRC) support DRM, except for (weak) protections on streamed movies to prevent a person from saving the movie.

Apple, with iTunes has dabbled with DRM though. iTunes 3 supports Audible.com for audio books. I've used it and it's quite sweet.

Check out audible.com you can buy a subscription that lets you download a book on MP3 every month and have a subscription to NPR news or the wall street journel on MP3 for about $15(us). You can also buy subscriptions or books individually, I've been thinking about subscribing.

Check out audible.com. It looks like it has most of the features you need. It's a pay service, but the content is excellent.

My thought is with an MP3 CD player I can have music, plus with a subscription to Audible.com I can have audio books and magazines.

No, it's not as fresh as a live call-in talk show, but I find them to be mostly banal and annoying. An Audible subscription is not much more expensive than XM's monthly fee ($12.95 for one book per month), and I've gotten to listen to some pretty cool stuff like God's Equation, Moby Dick (unabridged) and the Bible (no, I haven't listened to the whole thing...). Great Scott! I seem to be a puritan... ;-)

As has been mentioned in other posts, I still have my car radio for news and the all important traffic update.

YES! This is the one and only way I would like to see Jar-Jar added to "A New Home."

Burn the &(*$ to a crisp. YES! DIE JAR-JAR DIE!

www.audible.com has an interview with Lucas (Robin Williams conducts the interview) in the "free" section where he talks about why Jar-Jar is so hated. He snorts and says "Fans don't like comic side kicks. They hated C3PO and they hated Yoda." He makes it pretty clear that he sees the Jar-Jar haters as being low life scum unworthy of licking the bantha dung off his shoe.

Me too, but I'm living it large with 64 megs. And all because of Audible.com.

This is exactly what Total Recorder does (in Windows) for audio. It adds itself as the primary audio driver for the system. All audio directs to it, then it forwards it to the driver for your sound card.

The upshot to this is that you can get Total Recorder to record this stream in just about any format at whatever rate you want.

I use this for the audio books I get from Audible. The books come down in some encrypted format that requires a special plugin for Windows media player or RealPlayer, or you can push them to an Audible enabled device (like the Rio).

Before going to bed, I start the book playing in media player with total recorder saving it out as an mp3 as it goes. The next morning I convert the mp3 to wav and burn it to a standard audio cd.

This type of circumvention is very easy as long as the stream has to be decrypted somewhere on the motherboard. Having the stream sent encoded to the card and having it decrypt it is another matter. I'm sure that someone will come up with a way to decrypt it.

Good site for downloadable books-on-mp3. Down right now because their servers are in manhattan:

audible.com

When I signed up, it was $12.95/month for 2 books a month with diamond rio mp3 player with cassette adapter for $49. Now, I believe the rio is free.

Lots of the books to download are very long. For instance, I believe "Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman" was something like 12 hours. There's quite a large selection of books.

However, the audio isn't really mp3. It's encrypted. But with total recorder you could theoretically create mp3's or cd's.

huh? You mean product activation? I wasn't aware
that was a bad thing. I mean all you guys keep
toting that you buy software and music, so this
isn't a problem, right? Unless of course you've
been lying. (sorry, not intended towards you
Polo). I think that it's a good move, helps to
cut down on the rampant piracy. Since apparently
> 1/2 the piracy is casual "hey, can I borrow
that CD?" this helps to significantly reduce the
amount of casual piracy.

huh? You mean product activation? I wasn't aware
that was a bad thing. I mean all you guys keep
toting that you buy software and music, so this
isn't a problem, right? Unless of course you've
been lying. (sorry, not intended towards you
Polo). I think that it's a good move, helps to
cut down on the rampant piracy. Since apparently
> 1/2 the piracy is casual "hey, can I borrow
that CD?" this helps to significantly reduce the
amount of casual piracy.

But yeah, having a gig to play with would be real sweet. Five foot shelf of ebooks, and a nice chunk of space for Audible books, if they ever get with the program and add a cellphone earbud jack compatible with a Jabra.

Then we can all start lusting for heads-up displays.

--

As long as we have Total Recorder, it's all good.

I know a guy (ahem) who subscribes to audible for audio books. But he wanted to burn them to CD and listen to them on his MP3-CD player in the car, but they required an authentication plugin for Windows Media Player to play.

Now I hear he just starts up Total Recorder and has it capture the audio to an mp3 before he goes to bed each night.

If you can access, or step between, the content management system and the audio driver, there's really no way of creating a foolproof content management system.

Editing documents/spreadsheets on a PDA is really fairly easy--I'd never write a 10 page report on one, but for proofreading/editing pre-existing documents it's great. I've also used it for some quick spreadsheet calculations in about 5 minutes that my graphing calculator would take a good 15-20 minutes to program. These were generally done at times where I wouldn't be hauling around a laptop.

About the "saving memory" part: since the PocketPC OS has software such as a word processor/spreadsheet built into the ROM, it takes up no additional storage space. The money aspect was another issue for me, though. By the time I had bought the software to get a lower priced Palm up to the level I wanted, I would have paid just as much as I did for my Cassiopeia.

Finally, for the faster processor, it helps:

• Programming: I have Pocket Scheme installed, and have occasionally written programs for certain tasks that I can then quickly access away from my desktop.
• Audio decoding: During my current half hour commute every morning, I listen to Audible's audio version of the Wall Street Journal, which (presumably, as Audible has yet to release software for it) I couldn't do with a Palm.
• Playing games: definitely not a factor for many people, but I love being able to emulate some of the older gaming systems, while also playing some fairly impressive games.

For people that actually want the power of a real PC without carrying around a laptop, Pocket PCs are great. For people that just want a PDA at a more reasonable price, Palm is the way to go.

~=Keelor

This one is good too. Not too scientific, but it definitally makes one think.

_14k4 (webmaster_at_860.org /poorheart.com)

The problems with Audible, from your perspective, are that they distribute content electronically and the services that you see on their Web Site are aimed at individuals. In addition, they use security on some formats of their audio programs that is supposed to restrict your ability to use it on many different players.

However, this company has changed its offerings several times since it began, and it has a loyal following among people who appreciate spoken word audio. I would recommend that your company contact Audible by phone or email and ask them if they have ever made a distribution deal with a corporate library.
--

Dave Aiello

They are also downloads available at Audible.com
Amazon links
The Lord of the Rings : Audio CD Box Set and also The Hobbit : A Dramatization of J.R.R. Tolkien's Classic [ABRIDGED]

Baldur's Gate 2, that is pretty much a given.

Rio 500 MP3 player, which you can pick up for cheap at Audible.com, last time I checked.

A subscription to Wired.

VMWare for the geek in all of us.

A new video card, though I don't know specifics.

I keep hearing that company x is releasing an electronic book that you can fill up via the Internet. I have yet to see such a device. What I have dealt with is PeanutPress, which is a nice service. They let you buy books online, and download them to your Palm or WinCE device. I've read quite a few books this way. Also there's Audible, which does the books on tape thing for WinCE devices.

There are two big problems with PDA's today, battery power and input. Most of the color devices that chew through batteries use rechargeables, but that still means you need to dock it daily. And I've never seen a great input method for palm-sized devices (though, some good ones, like calligrapher).

Fix those two things and I think you'll see the market change rapidly.

Audible makes a mobile audio device which supports up to 2 hours of RealAudio content. See them at www.audible.com.

- Tim tim@dierks.org