Problems solved mostly

[altivo]

Got the Sanza to behave, no thanks to the useless instruction documents. He's listened to it all afternoon and says it's OK.

Spent an hour this evening trying to help my boss get another Sanza (same model) to work with the library's new downloadable audiobook supplier. We failed utterly, though I don't think this one is attributable to SanDisk. It's the vendor's fault. Their software is just plain rotten and inadequately tested.

Taking tomorrow off as a comp for Saturday (when the library was closed on my usual day off.) Normally I let these pass, but Gary wanted me to go to Chicago with him and it's a slow week anyway.

Have to remember to take the frozen turkey out tomorrow morning and put it in the fridge to thaw for Saturday...

Oh, and Gary made yellow split pea soup from the Christmas hambone. It smelled so good even before I got into the house. He puts in garlic, carrots, onions, and tomatoes. He also had a lot of pasta casserole left over from his potluck this afternoon, so supper was really yum.

Think I've made up my mind on the airbrush choices, though I'm still not sure whether I need adapters to make the hose fit onto Gary's existing compressor. Surely they can be obtained if needed, though. I'll probably order it tomorrow while Amazon still has them in stock and I can get free shipping.

Comments

[moonhare]

My Sansas are difficult to use with our digital downloads. If you stop a book in the middle of a track, you end up back at the beginning when you return to it. This wouldn't be so annoying if the FF wasn't so slow. I finally gave up and went back to ripping CDs and dropping the files into the device: this works fine as long as you number the discs tracks correctly (include the disc number; 101, 102, 201, 202...) so that the player doesn't read all track 01s first...

I've never considered air brushing. I await you reviews :o)

[altivo]

Which digital download provider? And which player model?

If your downloads are the EBSCO (formerly Netlibrary) that problem exists for everyone with their stuff. It isn't the player, it's the way they set up the files.

[moonhare]

OSL uses Overdrive. Suddenly patrons are excited about this because they can use some of the titles on their e-readers (Kindles and whatnot).

I have some Sansa m240 1GB players, and an m250 2GB player. I love their simplicity, and their cheap earbuds are as good as any high dollar set.

[altivo]

Mmm, those may be old enough that they don't support Microsoft's latest version of DRM. Have you checked to see if the firmware can be upgraded? Most likely that's the issue with Overdrive.

We don't have Overdrive yet, but are in the process of getting it. This was forced by Amazon's lying advertisements for Kindle stating that "Your public library can lend you Kindle titles." They neglected to state that not all public libraries have Overdrive, which is required. The consequence, which I'm sure they intended, was that people started showing up here with their Kindles and having temper tantrums when they found out we did NOT have any way to lend them e-books. This was considered to be OUR fault, not Amazon's.

The audiobook download system we are battling is Recorded Books' OneClickDigital. The boss bought into that because EBSCO's takeover of NetLibrary made the system we had before entirely unusable. However, OneClickDigital is two years late in delivering the promised product and... it doesn't work very well either. They haven't even got the searching for titles and authors right on their website, never mind the mess that is actually downloading something and getting it to where you can listen to it.