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Audiobooks

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I’m listening to the Ender’s Game audiobooks over the holidays. What I found really helpful with that is the foobar bookmarks plugin. When I turn of the computer, listen to some other song, or for some other reason stop listening to the audiobook, it bookmarks the last position.

This makes listening to them on the netbook a superior experience even to listening to them on the phone or on an mp3 player – in a twelve hour mp3 file finding the position you were at the last time by slowly fast-forwarding through it, is completely impossible to do more than once and stay sane.

About those audiobooks: They are brilliant. Unabridged and wonderfully read. Thank you, Morten, for pointing them out to me.

Acer Aspire One, 6 weeks later

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

Quick summary: I’m loving the little guy.

Work: This week I was at a client’s site in Switzerland. I went to the office in the morning and left the power cable at the hotel. No problem – power lasts for a full day if you use it normally. I was mucking around in Eclipse, installing software, the hard disk was kept busy. When I left the office 8 hours later to get to the Christmas party, I had 24 minutes left on the battery.

Entertainment: In the hotel, I had a flaky wireless connection (thanks, unknown donor) which meant I had Skype, but I also had a bunch of TV shows on the 160 GB harddrive (not regretting that) and that meant independence from Swiss/Italian/German television. In between watching TV I was coding and listening to the Ender’s game audio books.

Gadget Envy: When I bought my first laptop in 97, people would walk up to me on the train and ask “is that a real computer?”. Over time, everyone got a laptop, and that reaction turned into “OMG, your laptop is OLD!”. Now they walk up to me again and the reaction is “is that thing a full PC? Can I lift it?”. The Acer makes people smile, gets them talking. I tell them that it’s great for work, but sucks for games other than AO (curse you all for not supporting Intel Graphics better), but makes a nice “minimum spec” platform for testing, too: my goal is for AO to still run on it after the engine upgrade.