Digital Talking Books and Player Some Thoughts and useful links

Back in the day I can remember TalkingBooks coming in largeish black boxes with buckles and straps. Inside were large blue books and upon opening the book you found several sleeves holding large black record disks.

To play these I had a brown record player with a built in speaker in the lid. The lid could detach or could snap on and you coul d take the recordplayer along with you, given that the place you were headed had electric power.

I used to sit for hours and hours on end listening to these records. I can remember falling asleep to them, then when the side of the record was over I'd be woken up by a loud gravely sound. This was the player arm of the player going round and round and round accross the braille lable that was on the first side of every record. I'd have to get my mom, often times out of bed to fix it. The last record I remember getting was "NightMares and Dream Scapes" by Stephen King. This book was on flexible record disk and didn't play very well on my then older than dirt record player.

Some of the books I remember listening to are Pinoacho, the call of the wild, all the wizard of oz books, Tom Soyar and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Oh how I wanted suc h a car! Along with these one books about a cat who went into space... I wish I could remember what they were called. And The Pippi Long Stocking Book Oh and Black Beauty which I listened to so much my mother was totally sick to death of it.

For the past 25 or so years the TalkingBook program have used tapes and a big giant clunkey talkingbook player (tape player). Tapes had the advantage over records in that they didn't get scratched up and they played longer per side. A record I think had maybe 45 minutes to maybe an hour. The tapes have about 85 minutes per side. 1 4 track tape has about six hours of play time... So you got longer play times and you could get more book on less physical media. The tape containers AKA little green boxes of joy, took up less room than all the records and so it has been for almost as long as I can remember.

Tapes have several drawbacks.
They are not toddler or kitten proof. If you leave a tape out and have a toddler and or kitten, the next time you see your tape it will have all it's innerds pulled out into a shiny slithery brown rats nest of tape. Pitty if it is the first or last or only tape to a book.

Also the toddler and or kitten aren't the only threts to the ongoing workings of a given tape. Sometimes for some reason your tape player will just pick a tape and eat it. The tape ribben will become hopelessly emeshed in the player and you quite honestly have to cut your losses.

Or.

The tape will be so old and clapped out that just at the most interesting bit, or half way through the first side a ear splitting squigy little screetch will take up rendering the tape useless! Completely useless.

Or the stupid things's sound is so bad you can't hear it.

Well take heart! There is hope!

For the past several years the NLS has been moving ever so slowly twords "The Next Big Thing"!

Skipping totally over CDs which other TalkingBook like services world wide have been using, the NLS is going digital!

First there was the RD (recorded disk) and then the FD (flexible disk( and the TB (TalkingBook format unknown)
and then RC (Recorded Cassette) Now just in time for the second decade of the 21st centuary, several years behind Audible and Overdrive we have...
Drumb roll please...

DTB! or just DB for *fan fair here* Digital talking Book!

Which is a talkingbook who is digitally recorded.

These books will be on little cartrages, glorified memory cards and plug in, I'm thinking like the old school Nintendo/Sega/Vic 20 cartrages plugged into their respective players... A whole book can fit onto one cartrage for most titles. The annoying falts of the tapes are gone. Even the digital talkingbooks players are solid state. NO MOVING PARTS INSIDE! Which is grand because no moving parts means less stuff to conk out.

And.

If you have an exturnal hd you can download and play the books directly from the internet thus giving you straight away access to a book. Cutting out the postman!!!

I am very pleased about this.

I learned yesterday that they will start handing out the players within one to three months, laborday has been touted as a possible starting date. I am excited... All the digital yummyness of "Audible" without the price. All the instent gradification of overdrive books without the frustration of A. being wait listed for a book and B. finding the book you want only to find it doesn't work on Mac for some stupid DRM reason... For more information and pictures. Visit the links provided in the end of this post.

I've waited for years to get my grubby little mits on these tap er digital books... and it is almost here! Yaahoooo!

NLS/BPH: Player Description: ""

(Via .)

A Very Interesting Feature: MarsEdit Bookmarklet

I think I have found possibly the best feature in MarsEdit.
I can not tell you how many times I've been on a page, like an article on Wikipedia, or a random news story or somebody's YouTube and I'll of wished... "I wish I could blog this and have my readers, assuming I've got readers out here in blogger/blogspot land, would say.

Well the Tech Gods have answered my prayers.

Enter the Blog This Bookmarklet.

You are on a page. You want to blog about the page. Easy. Just go up 'til you hit your bookmarks bar.

If you've this hidden away you'll need to unhide it and really it doesn't take up a whole load of room at the top of your screen.

VO around until you hear "Blog This button". Press it and booomp! There it is! A shiny new MarsEdit blog window. Simly fill in the Title if you want it to be different, add tags and blog away. Publish it and there ya go. A whole blog on that page detailing the strange things found in the stomachs of people rushed to hospital, or whatever it is...

It will show some of the webpage and any highlighted text you may have. For this first "blog this" thing I didn't highlight any text. However there are a bunch of HTML looking bits and bobs down under the text, linkage I'd assume or some such to the "Blog THis" spot on MarsEdit's webpage. I accidently blundered accross it late last night. When I went looking for it a while ago I could not find it anywhere! Thankfully Safari has a detailed history page and after a few fals starts I found it and thus share it with you.

The only problem VO users may have s draging the link up to the bookmarks bar. I employed the use of system zoom having shut VO off for a moment. I'm really not quite sure what to tell you prhaps clicking on the link? Because when I dragged it to the bookmarks bar it had a "Add to bookmarks" message box come up soyou may want to give that a go, or contact the Red-Swetter software people as I think I've heard they are keen on helping out with accessibility. Unless hey are the weird software company who gives no response. No this can't be right as their softwar is quite useable by VoiceOver. Well enjoy!

MarsEdit Bookmarklet: ""

(Via .)

MarsEdit -- A Review Of Sorts

Earlier this week I signed up for a blogger account. God only knows why. I mean I've so many options open to me. They include the OpenDiary.com diary I've had for six years. I stay with this one off and on as I've developed a small community of friends and it's been my main blog when I get tired of all the hype from all the others. Will still use it eventhough I may not use it much at times. Then we had a livejournal account for a short time. I just didn't like it just because I was silly and didn't totally get the whole "BLOGGING" thing. Then I think my next one was MySpace. And I liked that one until I started getting reports of people, friends and family, not being able to access the blog and MySpace got too junked up. I still have a MySpace account but haven't updated it in quite a long time. Then we have FaceBook's "Notes" feature. I like this but it has the drawback of having a limit on how much one can rant about in a given note and anyone who knows me or has read me I can go on and on and on and on.

ONe problem I've had with all these services is they are web based and you have to be online to use them. One thing I hate is I work really hard on an entry and hit the post button and sit and wait and wait and wait and all I get back from VO is "Busy" and then the stomach dropping notice that Safari quit unexpectedily... And unless I was using OpenDiary that autosaves your last sesson, there a well crafted, or at least wordy document has gone to that trash basket in the sky.

I'd love OpenDiary even more than I do now if they designed a OSX platform for an off-line blog editing program. And who knows this MarsEdit that I *AM* going to get around to talking about may be able to handle Open Diary.

So. I had been hearing on things like Screenless Switchers and the Mac-cessibility podcast and on a few webpages people talking about this MarsEdit thing.

I had thought early on it was a website publishing tool, but when I found out it was just a blog publishing tool I was thinking forget it. And passed it by.

However, as I've this new blogspot account, and I remember hearing about blogspot on the little website for MarsEdit I figured what the hell. Once I found out it had a 30 day free go I downloaded and installed it.

The only problem was it came to me in the form of a zip file and I still, after having switched to mac over a year ago haven't the slight where zip files go when they become unzipped files.
But this was solved when I first tried searching for any new files downloded that day, and then for the keywords "MarsEdit". This second one paid off and it looks as if the things unzip in the same folder the zip files are downloaded to. I recently changed where my download files go but am thinking of changing it back.

Once installed I went to my Macintosh HD and to applications and then made a little icon pop up on my desktop. Could of stuck it in the doc and this I may still do, I'm just lazy and have yet to drag it to the doc.

As I remember it, other than finding the MarsEdit program after unzipping the program was more or less straight forward to get running.

I'm sorry. I hadn't intended on reviewing a software so early on in my blogspot life and didn't exactly pay strict attention to how easy the install was. Installing stuff is still an area on the mac that slightly confuses me. Perhaps as it isn't as big a dramatic pain in the ass as installing things on Windows. Ya tend to really remember the painful things in life...

Well obviously I've got it up and running and I don't remember having to employ my government issued "sightling in a box" (TM).

Okay well when you first run MarsEdit it walks you through connecting it with a blog. It asks you if you've one already and if you haven't any it will help you set one up. After this you can connect other social networking things like Twitter to it and there ya go.

I really haven't fooled around with it a whole lot outside of filling the internet with even more crap than it otherwise would have.

I haven't clearly sorted out how to envoke and make use of the spelling checker. It seems a bit strange so might in future copy my finished blogs to TextEdit or Mail to spell check. For now though, you get my stunningly misspelled blatherings right from my slightly wonky brain to the world.

For the most part I've not run into too many problems using voiceover with the program. All the toolbar menus are nice nad labled although there is a bit down at the lower right that says "B" and makes a beepy noise at me. Not sure what that is about. Also you have to make sure the publish to thing isn't set to drafts otherwise when you hit publish to blog it jst publishes locally and will not show up on blog spot. This has got me the last two times I've gone to publish. I set it like this in settings so I could be sure to have a copy even though there is a save draft option. All you have to do is go down and change from draft to published in the pop up button and it should publish your blog in moments.

Another feature I really love that has been around for ages that I'm late to the party with are tags. I love tags! You can sort your posts into tag groups so if you blather on and on about Ben Folds and say the nice young men in the clean white coats want to see how obsessed you are, they can poke around your blog and see you've 493857203437584921 entries where in you've talked about Ben Folds. Or Macs, or blogging or whatever.

You can make your own tags and the list grows as you write about new things requiring new tags. You make them up and add them and they are kept in a nice little list with check boxes and so say your second blatherfest about Ben Folds you don't have to retag it you just check the Ben Folds checkbox. Easy as pie.

One last thing I'll say before I go to is one good thing about off-line editing is if you need to hunt up sites for information you can go to Safari and look stuff up without going off your edit page. Also the publishing seems to take place much quicker.

I think I will buy this program next week when I get money. It is $30 USD and seems well worth the money. There are some things like adding media that I don't know how to do yet and as I learn I will share but for now I strongly recomend this program. It is fairly accessible and over all makes blogging easy as composing an Email. I'll paste bits from the marsedit website below in case my rambelings haven't been convensing enough. *smile*

The addy is:

http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/




Press, Awards, and Links
“Nearly every word I write for Daring Fireball is published through MarsEdit.”
John Gruber, Daring Fireball



“Anyone who’s ever lost a Weblog post owing to a browser freezing or site going down will appreciate this tool.”
Lisa Schmeiser, Macworld



“MarsEdit is a joy to use.”
Derrick Story, O'Reilly MacDevCenter.com

You love MarsEdit, too? Why not blog about it?
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MarsEdit 2
Download And TryPowerful Blog Publishing For Your Mac.
Write, preview, and publish without a web browser.


Why Blog From Your Mac?Why Blog From Your Mac?
Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online to use them. While your blog's web interface struggles to perform the simplest of tasks, MarsEdit uses the power of your Mac to provide an amazing blog editing experience. MarsEdit is a desktop blog editor, so you can write a blog without giving up the comforts of your Mac.



Intuitive Interface
MarsEdit's no-nonsense interface works just like email. Edit your drafts in a convenient text editor, spell-check, and publish.
Flickr Powered
Quickly scan your entire Flickr library, then insert an image into your blog post with the click of a button.
Wildly Compatible
Works with WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Vox. And that's just to name a few.
Easy Uploads
Upload images and files directly to your weblog. When you want to reuse an item, just select it from the media catalog.
Perfect Previews
Build a template to match your blog, then let MarsEdit's live preview show you how your posts will look before you publish them.
Re-Blog It!
Add a "Blog This" bookmarklet to your browser, and start new MarsEdit posts with the click of a button.
Powerful Markup Macros
Tired of typing the same things again and again? Set up macros with MarsEdit to easily insert commonly used snippets.
Offline Freedom
Write when you want to, without an internet connection. Fine-tune your masterpiece on the plane, and publish when you get home.
Use Your Favorite Editor
Combine the power of MarsEdit with your favorite editor. Integrates cleanly with BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, or TextWrangler.
Custom Features
Extensive AppleScript support makes it possible to add features we haven't even thought of. The sky is the limit!

Note to self... Get a flicker account. Why doesn't photobucket get support? Ah well just as well as all my photobucket album is a jumble of unorgnized crap. I do want to post pictures in my blogs so what is one more photo album site online to go with "MySpace, "FaceBook" and "PhotoBucket"? LOL Well that's all Ive got to say. Go download this nifty little program. I'm sure you'll like it too. P.s. to myself, read the help files and pay stricter attention next time you get a software that you may review so you don't sound like a kid making up a bookreport on a book they didn't read just skimmed. LOL It will make you look less demented...