I’ve moved all the posts that I have here over to blogger.com (good thing there aren’t many of them, yet). What a pain that was, since blogger.com does not have an import feature. Keep that in mind, folks, next time you decide to migrate your blog.

Good thing I was using Windows Live Writer, which allowed me to pull the posts off of this site and republish it on my Blogger.com blog (albeit, still one at a time, and I had to edit the post date to original dates).

See you on the other side!

I was feeling a little adventurous so I figured maybe I should give Amazon Unbox a try. Unbox is Amazon’s online video download/rental service. For $1.99, I ‘purchased’ the first episode of Season 2. It’s a high-quality video file (DVD quality), approximately 1 GB for a ~50 minute episode. It won’t let you burn to a DVD and won’t let you transfer to an ipod. It will only let you transfer to a PlaysForSure device, of which there are few.

Woe to my poor DSL connection, it took me about 40 minutes to even buffer enough video for me to start playing. Not a good way to start to make up to my wife.

Eventually, I tell my wife that we’re ready to watch. I press play and … hmm…why is everything have this grey wash? I fiddle with contrast, brightness, nothing. Uh oh. Weird. I restarted my computer. Nothing. I look guiltily at my wife and said, “Let’s just try Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature, instead“.

I still have not figured out why the video was like that. I deleted the video file and redownloaded it but no luck. I’m running Vista right now and I don’t know if that’s an issue. Unbox says that it’s compatible with Vista.

When the new Zune came out, I really wanted to buy it, but further inspection of the features reveal that it doesn’t play Audible audiobooks, too (I’m sure it will in the future but who knows). I didn’t have the money, anyway.

Along came audible with their $100 deal with Amazon. The condition: be an Audible subscriber for a year. So I called Audible and asked if even current subscribers are eligible and … YES, THEY ARE!

Long story short, that’s how I got a 4GB iPod nano 4g for $40.

I’ll post my thoughts on the new nano in another post.

Happy Turkey Day!!

Read up on One Red Paperclip

, it’s so cool. That Kyle has street smarts.

In there, there was a link to a certain Jody Gnant. It turns out that Jody Gnant is an indie musician in Phoenix, AZ, who decided, this July 2007, to broadcast her life 24/7 on the internet. And they weren’t kidding about the 24/7 part. I just saw her get pulled over by a highway cop when I was watching.

A “self-styled Bohemian Geek Soul”, I thought this was a very creative way of promoting one’s self and also double as a running documentary of an independent musician.

Her Flickr photos. <link>

Notably, her in-car webcam setup. <link>

Samples of her music. <link> I really like the first song on her new album, Pivot.

Anyhoo, The update is detailed in KB941649. Among the fixes are:

• extends the battery life for mobile devices. Yey! I think I only have a 6-cell battery on this notebook but it seems to last no longer than 2 hours on just casual surfing, even on power saver mode.
• improves the stability of wireless network devices. I hope so. I’ve had weird issues with this laptop dropping my home wireless network.
• shortens the startup time of Windows Vista. I really have no complaints about the startup time, but the shorter, the better, is the rule of thumb.

I will let you know how things go.

So, now I’m relegated to using my Sandisk Sansa e200 series MP3 player. I mostly listen to podcasts and audiobooks, so capacity isn’t really an issue. I’ve gotten so used to itunes and ipod and how it natively supports podcasting, that it took me a while to get a system going for the sansa.

I’ve tried different podcast catching software but nothing was easier than itunes. To get my podcasts in itunes synced with my Sansa, I use Itunes Agent. It’s an extra step, but it works.

The only problem now is that the Sansa is not audible-ready. The new version of the Sansa is, though, which I think is just a firmware improvement as I don’t see any difference in the hardware.

Sandisk! Why can’t you just release a firmware update for us early Sansa buyers!? I miss my audiobooks.