- Installation would have been worse (dos screens) - synaptic solves the installing new software issues (debian based distros are better for this) - most of the distros they tested were KDE based. I believe GNOME is significantly easier for newbies. - Gnome has a bit better documentation and wizards than kde.
That said I like kde a lot - I just think gnome is now to a point it is easier for new users.
Just get an account with a hosting company located outside of China that has ssh access and use links to browse anything you want from there. mutt or pine could take care of the mail.
Alternatively you could use something like tor + ssh + port forwarding.
Most stuff isn't blocked anyway - I think it mostly to supress the falun gong and similar pro-democracy movements.
have included: - the great banana and steel trade war Canadian cattle ban and softwood lumber war - Freedom Fries vs french fries Well perhaps poutine:-) - the EU vs Microsoft Haven't seen anything here - but it could happen. - Germany and France vs the US over Iraq (although that may have had something to do with sanity vs idiocy too) Canada as well didn't join. - the Euro vs the Dollar, especially in major oil and currency markets Canadian dollar is up 40% - snooty French people vs loutish American tourists tourists everywhere are annoying. Just wait for the Chinese hoards. - everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto Canada as well - the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East ditto - increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland) Guy marriages in Canada were supported by our supreme court.
Honestly I think under Bush the US has been polarizing itself against the whole of the rest of the developed world/OECD.
An interesting book on this topic is "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada..." which explores the growing differences between Canada and the US. Canada is probably the country the closest to the US in shared culture, history, and geography (perhaps with the exception of P.R.)
The have reguritated a goldman sachs report
on
In the Year 2020
·
· Score: 1
Here is the original report from the investment firm gs:
# Better printing support # Save as.pdf or.chm (popular for users) so web pages are portable.
After that I think the most important features are to make mozilla better and more productive for application developers.
eg # xulrunner/xulrunner.exe, so you can write '#!/usr/bin/xulrunner' at the top of a.xul file and get busy. # better customization for applications: pref directories, splash screens, etc # XUL 2 and XBL 2 -- standardized specifications, greater binding language power, more scripting languages, more widgets, and working remote XUL/XBL. # SVG support to a useful level, not necessarily the whole 1.1 spec. # Web Forms 2.0. # XForms # JavaScript 2.0 support, including ECMAScript for XML support. # Python support # backwards compatibility for xul/xbl/js/etc between point releases. # libxul.so/libxul.dll, a versioned shared library with minimal, frozen, documented API exports, and fast intra-library calling convention code # real inheritance in xbl and the ability to call on parent methods without hacking and ugly code
Scanning the list - the majority of the items were available before 1980 - in which case the it should be really called the best "mass market technological products".
Some are products "HDTV", which are improvements of what came before, and others are categories of research "Nanotechnology".
What about anti-cancer, HIV treatments, Fertilization, gene therapy?
Watched a tv show where they had automated a toyota plant in the uk. One of the employees said...
"Well they are ok but they keep breaking down a lot"..
Sounds like the automation that happened at banks. Less tellers, but lots of people who ensure that the the systems are working ok.And then a ton of money on redundancy because computers fail over less easily than humans.
Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio streams on your Linux box
I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.
First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command
1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmv (thi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)
2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores (this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)
3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3 (this will convert the file from wav to mp3)
However this process core dumped on realplayer recordings over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.
Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.
First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.
Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable... it allows you to record the output audio stream of... and line out jacks on the sound card.
I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html.
Got the error: Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0:/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in/usr/lib when it was in/usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.
Also I tried out streamripper http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/ , which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the.m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC, NPR, CBC, ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.
Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox Basically it does this: (sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s/dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 - | lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &
Thanks, Streamripper will break the shows into different files, add the IDV3 comments to the files and allow you to specify a specific number of seconds to record.
As I mentioned in the post - mplayer (latest) was core dumping on realplayer files over 10 min. I'm guessing mencoder might do the same. Searching forums, other users experience the same issue.
I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.
First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command
1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmv (thi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)
2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores (this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)
3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3 (this will convert the file from wav to mp3)
However this process core dumped on realplayer recorder over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.
Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.
First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.
After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable... it allows you to record the output audio stream of... and line out jacks on the sound card.
Got the error: Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0:/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in/usr/lib when it was in/usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.
Also I tried out streamripper http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/, which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the.m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC and CBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.
Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox Basically it does this: (sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s/dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 - | lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &
Things to get working... 1) streaming directly to ogg with no intermediary wav step. 2) see if I can get this running from a cron job...
If your country does not like the way it is getting shafted by the US trade restrictions(eg softwood lumber in Canada - or a million other examples), it could allow full protection of torrents until the US changes its trade laws.
Thus torrents could move from a copyright annoyance to a tool for trade negotiations.
You can use a hard drive (not ntfs) or usb stick. Check out klik for an easy way to install apps into your user directory(katonix has the client preinstalled). APT-GET doesn't necessarily install into your persistent user dir.
for more features check out kanotix
on
Knoppix 3.7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Developed by Joerg Schirottke, KANOTIX is a surprisingly powerful distribution that has managed to improve on its famous parent by including new features and adding several interesting tricks."
I ran into quite a strange bug on a website where an image map worked fine in ie windows and mozilla, but wasn't working in safari on mac and konqueror in linux. Which makes sense since they both use the same html rendering engine. Apparently IE for mac has exactly the same issue (I tested it to make sure). Is it possible that Microsoft used a bit of linux in their browser for mac?
Librie EBR-1000EP made by Sony in Japan, using an E Ink display, is an e-book reader. No one has yet hacked into it. Although one user has opened the case and is trying to connect to the internal serial port. He can't figure out the pin mappings as of yet.
Due to some XML hacks you can now read any text on the device, such as project gutenburg books.
In theory that might be true - but due to all the government subsidies from developed countries around the world that isn't necessarily true. For example BSE comes from feeding cows - cow meat. Farmers have limited this process - but still pump cows up with steroids and protein pellets.
Get a decent QA environment which is similar to production. Give the person an implementation plan for moving it to the other box. If it is a small environment in terms of people (which sounds like it is) and you want to put in many code changes - ensure they are scheduled for Friday or Saturday nights - no point in allowing him to still have a social life. In my experience in smaller environments eventually the sysadmin will capitulate and say - "OK - you do it yourself".
In larger systems (eg banks) typically this is the way it works. Generally you also need sign off from the sys admins and each change goes through a change committee where they validate the change. Another group often audits the code to ensure there will be no bad impact and the code is ok (no security concerns).
OpenOffice 2 has better support for stuff like the text boxes and the wordart. Other than that I use oOO instead of Word/Excel.I use wine for Lotus Notes.
Mind you OpenOffice 2 is still beta - but I haven't had any corruption or major issues yet.
Magic School Bus - we like most of the original series by Joanna Cole. Leapster Multimedia Learning System - Daughter has as severe addiction to this. But hey its eductional. We got the K and GR 1 cartridges Math Mat Challenge Game - active learning 6" Disney Princess Scooter with Lights - Scooter. Learn to balance - call it a pre bike riding tool. Schoolhouse Rock! (Special 30th Anniversary Edition) DVD (DVD) - Fun Classic Tinkertoy Construction Set - Jumbo - Classic toy - favorite of several nobel prize winners. The New Way Things Work - Classic - save it for later. Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? - Gives kids an idea of how big the universe really is Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do! - Well done series of books that teach math concepts - check out all of them. Cardinal Chess & Checker Cabinet - Checkers is a lot of fun after dinner The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in Tibet is her all time favorite. Tintin teaches you about friendship, travel, and other cultures. Encyclopedia of the Human Body by Richard Walker - Amazing illustrations What Makes a Magnet? - Nice description of electricity and magnets. She loved the experiments. Check out the other books by Franklyn M. Branley or read a loud science books. A Street Through Time by Anne Millard The Penny Pot by Stuart J. Murphy - Stuart Murphy has several books that are great - they teach math. My daughter loves money and loves this book. The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus by Aliki (Paperback) - Aliki does a great job of bringing history to life - check out her other wonderful books as well.
iriver has what you want. except for the memory sticks/hd.
Supports up to 1 GIG of recording. For voice that is a heck of a lot. I bought one for similar purpose and so far have been very happy.
The advantage of the no HD models are that they are better for sports - running, biking etc. You can listen to your conferences again while on the treadmill.
Slashdot Mirror
All they have to do is integrate the search into IE and they will control the market.
For example they could have a feature that displays the msn search results every time you search any search engine such as google (in a side iframe).
Alternative they could have common search results precached on the browser level so it appears faster.
Even better, Microsoft could use its clout with the media (NBC), Libraries (where Gates donated lots of PCs), and Encarta to integrate their content.
- Installation would have been worse (dos screens)
- synaptic solves the installing new software issues
(debian based distros are better for this)
- most of the distros they tested were KDE based. I believe GNOME is significantly easier for newbies.
- Gnome has a bit better documentation and wizards than kde.
That said I like kde a lot - I just think gnome is now to a point it is easier for new users.
why not just use mplayer/vsound + sched?
Oh and make sure you read this article about the history of Taiwan before you head over there:
"Well, Taiwan has always been a part of China.
Just get an account with a hosting company located outside of China that has ssh access and use links to browse anything you want from there. mutt or pine could take care of the mail.
Alternatively you could use something like tor + ssh + port forwarding.
Most stuff isn't blocked anyway - I think it mostly to supress the falun gong and similar pro-democracy movements.
Works for the whole world eg canada
:-)
..." which explores the growing differences between Canada and the US. Canada is probably the country the closest to the US in shared culture, history, and geography (perhaps with the exception of P.R.)
have included:
- the great banana and steel trade war
Canadian cattle ban and softwood lumber war
- Freedom Fries vs french fries
Well perhaps poutine
- the EU vs Microsoft
Haven't seen anything here - but it could happen.
- Germany and France vs the US over Iraq (although that may have had something to do with sanity vs idiocy too)
Canada as well didn't join.
- the Euro vs the Dollar, especially in major oil and currency markets
Canadian dollar is up 40%
- snooty French people vs loutish American tourists
tourists everywhere are annoying. Just wait for the Chinese hoards.
- everyone on Earth lead by the EU vs the US over Kyoto
Canada as well
- the european vs US approach to Israel and the Middle East
ditto
- increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland)
Guy marriages in Canada were supported by our supreme court.
Honestly I think under Bush the US has been polarizing itself against the whole of the rest of the developed world/OECD.
An interesting book on this topic is "Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada
Here is the original report from the investment firm gs:
6 .html
http://www.gs.com/insight/research/reports/report
Most of the stuff on aging and energy is from public institutions as well. Not much new or interesting here.
# Better printing support .pdf or .chm (popular for users) so web pages are portable.
/usr/bin/xulrunner' at the top of a .xul file and get busy.
# Save as
After that I think the most important features are to make mozilla better and more productive for application developers.
eg
# xulrunner/xulrunner.exe, so you can write '#!
# better customization for applications: pref directories, splash screens, etc
# XUL 2 and XBL 2 -- standardized specifications, greater binding language power, more scripting languages, more widgets, and working remote XUL/XBL.
# SVG support to a useful level, not necessarily the whole 1.1 spec.
# Web Forms 2.0.
# XForms
# JavaScript 2.0 support, including ECMAScript for XML support.
# Python support
# backwards compatibility for xul/xbl/js/etc between point releases.
# libxul.so/libxul.dll, a versioned shared library with minimal, frozen, documented API exports, and fast intra-library calling convention code
# real inheritance in xbl and the ability to call on parent methods without hacking and ugly code
Scanning the list - the majority of the items were available before 1980 - in which case the it should be really called the best "mass market technological products".
Some are products "HDTV", which are improvements of what came before, and others are categories of research "Nanotechnology".
What about anti-cancer, HIV treatments, Fertilization, gene therapy?
Watched a tv show where they had automated a toyota plant in the uk. One of the employees said...
"Well they are ok but they keep breaking down a lot"..
Sounds like the automation that happened at banks. Less tellers, but lots of people who ensure that the the systems are working ok.And then a ton of money on redundancy because computers fail over less easily than humans.
a post from my weblog:
_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmvi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)
... it allows you to record the output audio stream of ... and line out jacks on the sound card.
/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/usr/lib when it was in /usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.
/ , which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the .m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC, NPR, CBC, ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.
/dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 -
Recording Realaudio, WMF, OGG & MP3 Radio streams on your Linux box
I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.
First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command
1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer
(th
2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores
(this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)
3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3
(this will convert the file from wav to mp3)
However this process core dumped on realplayer recordings over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.
Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.
First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.
Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers
http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable
vsound --timing -f myfile.wav realplay http://www.radio.org/ra/show.ram
oggenc myfile.wav
xmms myfile.ogg
I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html.
Got the error:
Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0:
Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in
Also I tried out streamripper
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net
Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox
Basically it does this:
(sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s
| lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &
Thanks, Streamripper will break the shows into different files, add the IDV3 comments to the files and allow you to specify a specific number of seconds to record.
As I mentioned in the post - mplayer (latest) was core dumping on realplayer files over 10 min. I'm guessing mencoder might do the same. Searching forums, other users experience the same issue.
From a blog entry I wrote a few weeks ago:
_ sunshine/video/Summer_Sunshine_video_458.wmvi s will give you a file called "cores" in your home-directory)
... it allows you to record the output audio stream of ... and line out jacks on the sound card.
/usr/lib/RealPlayer8/Common/rmacore.so.6.0: Cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
/usr/lib when it was in /usr/local/ so I copied the directories over to where it wanted to find them and everything worked ok.
.m3u file so I had to download the m3u file with wget and look at it and then use streamripper http://url.ogg for it to work. Cool - now I can listen to the BBC and CBC and ABC (Australian Broadcasting) and Netherlands Broadcasting when I want to and where I want to.
/dev/dsp -t raw -c 2 -
I wanted to record a couple of radio shows so that I can listen to them later on my linux machine. Basically I would like to listen to a mix of realplayer, Windows Media, Ogg and MP3 streams and save them as mp3 or ogg files so I can listen to them later on my computer or iriver ogg/mp3 player.
First I tried mplayer's dumpstream command
1) mplayer -dumpfile cores -dumpstream http://wm.warnermusic.com/France/the_corrs/summer
(th
2) mplayer -vo null -vc null -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav cores
(this will convert the videofile to a wav audiofile)
3) lame audio.wav cores.mp3
(this will convert the file from wav to mp3)
However this process core dumped on realplayer recorder over 10 minutes. Also it doesn't know about ram files so you have to download them first (wget filename) and then open them to file the real link to the rm file. So I went on to look for some other tools.
Most of the tools seem to be wrappers around vsound and/or sox and lame/oggenc. Another tool I looked at is streamripper, which works for mp3 or ogg streams.
First I grabbed realcap which is a shell script front end to those tools. Downloaded, compiled and installed vsound.
Trick one - you have to ensure that realplayer is using OSS drivers
http://www.osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/radio/
After that seemed to work I tried directly with vsound. vsound acts as a kind of virtual audio loopback cable
vsound --timing -f myfile.wav realplay http://www.radio.org/ra/show.ram
oggenc myfile.wav
I also checked out the trplayer - which is a command line wrapper to realplayer. http://www.linux-speakup.org/trplayer.html
Got the error:
Failed to load rmacore.so.6.0:
Well I figured out that they must be looking for the real player in
Also I tried out streamripper
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/, which seemed to work fine ripping various streams. It didn't seem to be able to read the
Finally I had a look at mp3record - a bash shell wrapper for lame and sox
Basically it does this:
(sox -r $strFreqRate -t ossdsp -w -s
| lame -s 44.1 -x -b $strBitRate -m s - $strFileName) &
Things to get working...
1) streaming directly to ogg with no intermediary wav step.
2) see if I can get this running from a cron job...
If your country does not like the way it is getting shafted by the US trade restrictions(eg softwood lumber in Canada - or a million other examples), it could allow full protection of torrents until the US changes its trade laws.
Thus torrents could move from a copyright annoyance to a tool for trade negotiations.
You can use a hard drive (not ntfs) or usb stick. Check out klik for an easy way to install apps into your user directory(katonix has the client preinstalled). APT-GET doesn't necessarily install into your persistent user dir.
Here is a nice review.
"Developed by Joerg Schirottke, KANOTIX is a surprisingly powerful distribution that has managed to improve on its famous parent by including new features and adding several interesting tricks."
website
I ran into quite a strange bug on a website where an image map worked fine in ie windows and mozilla, but wasn't working in safari on mac and konqueror in linux. Which makes sense since they both use the same html rendering engine. Apparently IE for mac has exactly the same issue (I tested it to make sure). Is it possible that Microsoft used a bit of linux in their browser for mac?
The program is available here and the abstracts are available here
Librie EBR-1000EP made by Sony in Japan, using an E Ink display, is an e-book reader. No one has yet hacked into it. Although one user has opened the case and is trying to connect to the internal serial port. He can't figure out the pin mappings as of yet.
Due to some XML hacks you can now read any text on the device, such as project gutenburg books.
more info, the yahoo group and my weblog entry on this.
In theory that might be true - but due to all the government subsidies from developed countries around the world that isn't necessarily true. For example BSE comes from feeding cows - cow meat. Farmers have limited this process - but still pump cows up with steroids and protein pellets.
Get a decent QA environment which is similar to production. Give the person an implementation plan for moving it to the other box. If it is a small environment in terms of people (which sounds like it is) and you want to put in many code changes - ensure they are scheduled for Friday or Saturday nights - no point in allowing him to still have a social life. In my experience in smaller environments eventually the sysadmin will capitulate and say - "OK - you do it yourself".
In larger systems (eg banks) typically this is the way it works. Generally you also need sign off from the sys admins and each change goes through a change committee where they validate the change. Another group often audits the code to ensure there will be no bad impact and the code is ok (no security concerns).
OpenOffice 2 has better support for stuff like the text boxes and the wordart. Other than that I use oOO instead of Word/Excel.I use wine for Lotus Notes.
Mind you OpenOffice 2 is still beta - but I haven't had any corruption or major issues yet.
The complete list
Magic School Bus - we like most of the original series by Joanna Cole.
Leapster Multimedia Learning System - Daughter has as severe addiction to this. But hey its eductional. We got the K and GR 1 cartridges
Math Mat Challenge Game - active learning
6" Disney Princess Scooter with Lights - Scooter. Learn to balance - call it a pre bike riding tool.
Schoolhouse Rock! (Special 30th Anniversary Edition) DVD (DVD) - Fun
Classic Tinkertoy Construction Set - Jumbo - Classic toy - favorite of several nobel prize winners.
The New Way Things Work - Classic - save it for later.
Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? - Gives kids an idea of how big the universe really is
Too Many Kangaroo Things to Do! - Well done series of books that teach math concepts - check out all of them.
Cardinal Chess & Checker Cabinet - Checkers is a lot of fun after dinner
The Adventures of Tintin - Tintin in Tibet is her all time favorite. Tintin teaches you about friendship, travel, and other cultures.
Encyclopedia of the Human Body by Richard Walker - Amazing illustrations
What Makes a Magnet? - Nice description of electricity and magnets. She loved the experiments. Check out the other books by Franklyn M. Branley or read a loud science books.
A Street Through Time by Anne Millard
The Penny Pot by Stuart J. Murphy - Stuart Murphy has several books that are great - they teach math. My daughter loves money and loves this book.
The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus by Aliki (Paperback) - Aliki does a great job of bringing history to life - check out her other wonderful books as well.
CBC's science show - Quirks and Quarks has had ogg support for a few years. They also have an audio archive of old shows.
iriver has what you want. except for the memory sticks/hd.
Supports up to 1 GIG of recording. For voice that is a heck of a lot. I bought one for similar purpose and so far have been very happy.
The advantage of the no HD models are that they are better for sports - running, biking etc. You can listen to your conferences again while on the treadmill.