I wanted to be able to play audio books from Audible.com in my car.  I don't have an iPod in this car, but my car stereo does have an audio input jack.  I have a cheap MP3 player.  So I thought I'd load an audio book to the MP3 player, to listen to in the car.

I tried using the DirectShow filter for .aa files, with multiple applications such as dbPowerAmp and GoldWave.  It sorta worked, but some books got cut off a few minutes before the end.  Consistently.

I'm taking a fresh look at iPod-enabled music players.  Current candidates include:

• iTunes
• Songbird + its iPod-enabling add-on
• Floola
• Yamipod

Yeah, I'm Windows, so Mac-only and Linux-only players are out.  I don't want to be further locking myself into Windows, so Windows-only players like Winamp are out.  I'm not a glutton for punishment, so WINE+Linux doesn't count as being able to run a Windows-only player in Linux.

I've been using My Life Organized (MLO) for Getting Things Done.  Since it is really just an outliner that can synch with Outlook Tasks, I thought I'd take a look at the general category of outliners.

Things I want from an outliner:

There are some bugs in the VirtualBox "Shared Folders" feature.  It can be convenient to work-around this in a secure way by using the Microsoft Loopback Adapter.   Here's how I set it up for a Windows XP guest running on an XP host.

Running the Windows edition of Unison has a problem.  Synchronizing small sets of files works nicely.  Synchronizing large file sets (hundreds of thousands of files and about 30 GB) will just stop sometimes.  The client says that it is waiting for updates from the server.  The server side isn't doing any I/O or burning any CPU (per task manager).  It just sits.

Astonishingly, some sites reject Internet Explorer 7 as out-of-date, but they accept IE 6.  (Lazy coding, I suppose.)  Microsoft has a utility to make IE lie about its version, but it runs as a wrapper around IE, setting the UA in the registry, running IE, and then setting it back when IE exits.

There is a spiffy browser extension that lets you change the user agent on the fly.  See http://www.enhanceie.com/ietoys/uapick.asp

While you're there, he's got other good tools, like SlickRun.

The Language of the Request

The only important thing is to know that if one works well in a potato field, the potatoes will grow. If one works well among men, they will grow- That's reality. The rest is smoke. It's important to know that words don't move mountains. Work, exacting work, moves mountains.. -Danilo Dolci

If you create a virtual disk, using Vmware's vmware-vdiskmanager, SOMETIMES after you use the disk in a VirtualBox VM, vmware-vdiskmanager will refuse to mount the disk. VirtualBox (version 1.6.2) adds entries to the disk header file that "VMware DiskMount Utility version 5.5.0 b­uild-18463" is not prepared to accept.