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alexpgpI don't mind listening to audio books, and the people at audible.com have a fairly nice selection and good sales from time to time, but their devotion to DRM makes it difficult to enjoy the product without a number of concessions.
First of all, if you want to listen to their stuff on an iPod, you have to use iTunes. If you have some other player, it must be one of the advanced models that support their digital restrictions (so my Sansa e260 is useless). The only alternative is to use something like Total Recorder to "play" the audio in such a way that it goes direct-to-disk, but even if your typical file is played at 4x speed, that will eat up about 2 hours for a typical book. (I hear audible.com has been sold. Maybe I'll write a letter...)
Anyway, I had started this process with a book I bought yesterday, but it turns out that I can't work very effectively in Word while this process is ongoing, so I sat down with proust (in Linux) and did a bit more work with a chess utility I found called "jose", which combines the features of a chess playing program (with the ability to plug in various "engines") and a chess database. While I was waiting, I downloaded and installed a database of about 1.7 million games, which weighed in at 130 MB for the archive file and put a serious dent in my /usr partition.
With 4 real-time minutes left in the conversion, I noodled around with the search function and called up games played with my favorite opening, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit. In the list of games were names that I recognized of people that I had played, so on a whim, I stuck my own name in the search function and... four of my games popped up!
These were games that actually had been published (which is not a big deal for games played after 1980 or so), and while they have a certain charm (that's parental pride speaking), they are certainly not of the highest level. Still...
* * * Yesterday's progress was reasonable. I have somewhere between 3000 and 4000 words to do today to finish the assignment.
Daylight is burning, and the snow from late last night is melting.
Cheers...
First of all, if you want to listen to their stuff on an iPod, you have to use iTunes. If you have some other player, it must be one of the advanced models that support their digital restrictions (so my Sansa e260 is useless). The only alternative is to use something like Total Recorder to "play" the audio in such a way that it goes direct-to-disk, but even if your typical file is played at 4x speed, that will eat up about 2 hours for a typical book. (I hear audible.com has been sold. Maybe I'll write a letter...)
Anyway, I had started this process with a book I bought yesterday, but it turns out that I can't work very effectively in Word while this process is ongoing, so I sat down with proust (in Linux) and did a bit more work with a chess utility I found called "jose", which combines the features of a chess playing program (with the ability to plug in various "engines") and a chess database. While I was waiting, I downloaded and installed a database of about 1.7 million games, which weighed in at 130 MB for the archive file and put a serious dent in my /usr partition.
With 4 real-time minutes left in the conversion, I noodled around with the search function and called up games played with my favorite opening, the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit. In the list of games were names that I recognized of people that I had played, so on a whim, I stuck my own name in the search function and... four of my games popped up!
These were games that actually had been published (which is not a big deal for games played after 1980 or so), and while they have a certain charm (that's parental pride speaking), they are certainly not of the highest level. Still...
Daylight is burning, and the snow from late last night is melting.
Cheers...
