Partly because it’s too late, I doubt there are many true undecideds on the Internet, and none of them visiting here. But mostly because it’s just not Senator Obama’s message. While the other side can only speak terrible untruths, the Obama campaign has been about change, progress, and hope. It’s a message that is deeply patriotic, and for me personally, deeply moving. Getting off that train to take shots at the other guys is just about being sad. Barack is more positive, and that’s where I want to be.

Well, maybe a few words are still in order. Here’s the new process, which will work every time:

1. Import your audiobook using your favorite process, in your favorite audio format. (I’ve written detailed instructions for both standard Audio CD audiobooks and for MP3 CD audiobooks.)
2. Select the imported track(s) in iTunes, and choose File > Get Info, and then click on the Options tab, to get to the Track Info Options panel.
3. From the Media Kind pop-up menu, choose “Audiobook”.
4. Click the OK button.

From now on, iTunes, iPods, and iPhones will all treat the track(s) as full audiobooks, including remembering playback position automatically (saving your “bookmark”), skipping the track when you’re playing a random shuffle of music, and allowing you to speed up or slow down playback with the Settings > Audiobooks speed options on your iPod or iPhone.

If you’re interested in more of the details of what’s new in iTunes 8, I suggest iLounge’s Instant Expert: Secrets & Features of iTunes 8 as the best and most detailed guide I’ve seen.

My reaction takes about a second in the two and a half minute segment, but it is me on TV, so I gotta point to it (hi Mom):

CBS5 San Francisco: Group Looks to Ban Hot Dogs in California Schools

My longer, more thoughtful reaction would be that getting quality food into school cafeterias is a hard problem, because there’s a lot of political issues in play, including funding, contracts, and so on. But the discussion is not helped by the radical vegetarian group PETA, who is hiding behind the scary “cancer” word, and a scientific study they helped sponsor but which does not reveal their affiliation.

I think lunch today will be a nice chili dog at Rosamunde!

Although individual applications are mostly $10 or less, buying a bunch of them adds up. Since everything is so new, there’s not a lot of reviews, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on some of the applications I like.

I’ve downloaded and tested the following applications:

Games

• Bejeweled 2 — What a terrific game. Stands head-and-shoulders above the (free) web-based version I’ve been playing for the last year, in game play, sound effects, graphics quality. Well worth the $10. My only complaint: it takes over sound output, so I can’t play when listening to my own audio. So I still play the web-based version when I’m listening to audiobooks. I’d love a mute option, so I could stick with the native version at all times.
• Morocco — Reversi / Othello, and free. Nicely done, and you can’t beat the price.
• Muddled — This is a neat word game, and for $2 a great deal. You can think of it as speed training for Scrabble or Boggle, but it’s a good game in and of itself. A few interface quirks, where moving the letter tiles can be awkward or get stuck, but this is minor, and probably easily fixed in an update.
• Quordy — Kind of a Boggle clone, but it makes outstanding use of the touchscreen, to make selecting a word incredibly simple. Great use of the iPhone’s features, and $3 is a nice price.
• Scrabble — I consider Scrabble an all-time classic game, and having it in my pocket was a no-brainer, especially for only $10. I managed to beat the computer my first game, but just barely. Nicely implemented on the small touch screen. I look forward to testing multi-person play.
• Solebon Solitaire — Smallware has been making challenging solitaire games for the Mac and Palm for many years, and their attention to detail is spectacular. This is not a flashy game, with lot of custom card designs, flashy animations, etc. The focus is on highly readable cards, interesting games, and graceful game play. If you want a mindless card game, this is not it. The solitaire variations available are “hard,” which means that you don’t have to get lucky with the shuffle of the cards; with thought you can win most games. Challenging, interesting, deep. I chose this game because I love one of Smallware’s other solitaire games, Solavant for Mac. There are a lot of solitaire options in the App Store; I don’t know about the others, but this one is worth the $10.
• Texas Hold’em — For the production value, this may be the best deal in a game in the App Store. Apple has clearly set the price low ($5) with the expectation that they’ll make their money on volume. It’s a very well made game, with great graphics, video of opponents with lots of variations, and thoughtful interface touches for the iPhone touchscreen, like double-tapping to check, flicking your cards to the dealer to fold, and flicking your chips to go all in.

There seem to be a couple of games with lots of competing versions on the App Store. As noted, solitaire is one of them, and since there are no trial versions available, I’ve only tried Solebon. That was an easy decision, since I knew I could count on Smallware’s quality and game play.

There are a bunch of casino-style games, like blackjack and video poker, in which I have no interest. Lots of Sudoku, again no interest. And there are a bunch of Mahjong versions, in which I am interested; I’m looking forward to a review of the options, since trying them all would be a bit pricey.

Other

• Evernote — Evernote is an interesting service that I am still trying to figure out how to integrate into my information collection and management practices. But one thing about it leapt out at me: the application is free, and takes voice recordings. Most of the other recorder applications cost money. That makes ought to make Evernote a no-brainer. Update: Other reports of Evernote are less kind, and it does seem problematic at the moment. Hopefully updates will fix the issues.
• Mobile News Network — Their web-based version was a great example of how to make a great iPhone web application. This native version, also free, is even better. Currently the best general news reading application for the iPhone, IMHO.
• Things — An early version of a promising tasks manager. The developer is offering a steep discount (50% or so) right now, in recognition that some critical features, like desktop syncing, are not yet there. Those will come in a free update, when they are completed. If you have faith in the vendor and don’t mind waiting for missing features, $10 is probably the lowest price this app will ever see.
• Twitterific — I’m currently using the free version, since I have yet to really “get” Twitter. I think it will evolve into something really interesting, but right now it interrupts me more than it helps or entertains me.

iPhone 3G Thoughts

While the vast majority of the improvements in the iPhone come through the software, and thus work on my original iPhone, I’m planning on getting an iPhone 3G for a couple reasons. One, I have definitely found the speed of data access on the EDGE (2G) network to be limiting, especially with Maps. And looking up who-starred-in-what-movie to settle drinking discussions takes way too long. The faster data rate of 3G will get used.

Two, I want the location services of GPS. The simulated GPS in the original iPhone works pretty well, but adding true GPS makes it better, more accurate and in more places. A lot of the third-party iPhone applications already take advantage of knowing your location, but this is only getting started. Location-based services are going to be huge.

Finally, I learned today that phone calls go directly to voicemail if you’re using the EDGE data network, i.e., surfing the web, checking email, etc. This would explain a lot of the voicemails that appear on my phone, when the phone never rang. The 3G network does away with this limitation.

A great illustration of just how bad eBay has become is related at The Consumerist: It’s Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay

What used to be a [great] ‘virtual yard-sale’ has now turned into a hybrid mass of scammers and shady garage-retailers, clumped together with a straggling, dying breed of people who used to be excited about eBay, but who are now wishing it would return to what it used to be.

It’s an instructive read, and mirrors my own attempts to report receiving counterfeit goods (plastic “Laguiole” steak knives). My experiences indicate, at least to me, that the problem is not limited to expensive electronics (though that’s certainly the most broken part of eBay).

Fundamentally, the problem is one of scale. There’s just too many auctions, too many people, too much fraud for eBay to be able to cost-effectively deal with every issue, or even a sizable percentage. So, as the article illustrates, about all you can hope for is a form letter. The same form letter. No matter what your problem is.

Teridon’s Audiobook Helper

I have not yet tested it with importing a book, but it looks like it gets a couple of things really right, namely allowing you to set the meta data for the tracks manually, overriding what comes in from the Gracenote CDDB lookup that iTunes does automatically, and which is often inaccurate. Bogus meta data is one of the top causes for problems that people have with sort and playback order of audiobook tracks, and if this tool can reduce or eliminate that, it’s going to be very useful indeed.

When listening to audiobooks, you of course want both Repeat and Shuffle turned off. On standard iPods, you do this in the main settings menu, and it’s effective for all tracks. But on the iPhone, as Dan explains and illustrates, the setting is harder to find, until you know where it is, and can be turned on and off while fiddling with your place in a track. See Dan’s full post for the details.

Take my book. It’s free. Giving away books as podcasts is new way to promote sales.

The basic idea is, the author reads their novel a chunk at a time, recording it, and publishing the recordings on a regular, sequential basis. A chapter a week is a common pattern. Interested listeners can download the recordings and listen to them on their computer, iPod, whatever. For free.

The best news is that iTunes can make receiving the periodic recordings totally automatic. Once you subscribe to the author’s podcast, the chapters will be downloaded automatically as published, and can even be automatically transferred to your iPod. Very slick.

The article has more details about the hows and whys, including references to the podcasts for several authors who got started podcasting, but are now professionally published, so it’s not just “hey, look at this cool technology” informative, it’s also got direct links to new authors and books for you to check out.

For a non-technology writer (she’s a novelist), it’s a remarkably clear explanation of what DRM is, and why Random House is dropping it, along with what it means to her as an author.

From the general perspective of audiobook lovers, what it means is that there will be more online options from which to download audiobooks, at least the ones published by Random House. I don’t expect this to change my recommendation of Audible.com, at least not in the short run. In the long run, if it exposes more people to audiobooks, and sales volumes grow, then perhaps it will result in lower prices, too.

Update: Grant’s rant in Not books too! is an entirely different perspective on the announcement, gloom and doom, and fairly representative of old school thinking. He seems to not have actually read the release he copies verbatim into his post, which clearly stated that Random House had not found the for-pay, no DRM versions of audiobooks on piracy sites, i.e., eliminating DRM wasn’t increasing theft of audiobooks.

Maybe that will change when more sites offer them as downloads, but I suspect not. People who are going to steal are going to steal. People who just want more audiobooks will steal, occasionally, but only as long as it’s more convenient than not stealing, i.e., buying legitimate copies of books. Look at the growth of the iTunes Store for music, rising to the #2 seller of music in the world, and on their way to #1 before the end of the year. There are more people downloading from the iTunes Store than there are downloading stolen music.

Make it convenient, and reasonably priced, and people will pay for content.

I’m still waiting for a deluxe boxed set of all the audiobooks, like the deluxe print books set, but if you’re just looking for a great deal on a complete set, packaging be damned, here’s all seven Harry Potter audiobooks at Amazon.com, at a 40% discount from full retail.

It’s still $275, but considering what they cost individually, if you want to own all seven, this is the way to go. The total running time is almost five days — at under $2.50/hour, it’s hard to imagine a better value for your entertainment dollar. Enjoy!

Want crime reports for your neighborhood? Got ‘em. Want restaurant inspection reports? Got ‘em. Want reviews of local establishments on Yelp? Got ‘em. They compile standard news outlets, public records, other local sites, and even geo-tagged Flickr photos.

Go to the site, type in your street address, and then spend the next hour (or more) browsing the different pieces of information available. This is seriously interesting. I think in the long run it’ll be as influential as craigslist.

(I have no affiliation with EveryBlock, I just figure that everyone has an interest in what’s happening in their neighborhood, and this looks like a compelling way to find out.)

This post isn’t a thorough tutorial on how to accomplish this, merely an expansion of the existing FAQ on the subject. There are all kinds of extra details you might want to consider if you’re as anal retentive as I am about getting all those details “right.” Still, this should give you most of what you would want to know.

For Windows Users

If you are using iTunes on Windows, there is a free tool called MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter that will allow you to take a collection of MP3 tracks, and do two things:

• Merge the tracks into a single, long track.
• Convert the track from MP3 to AAC, and change the file type to make iTunes consider it an audiobook.

There are some limitations. First, you need to start with your audiobook tracks in MP3 format, not AAC format as my instructions recommend. Just choose the MP3 encoder when you set your iTunes import settings, instead of AAC, before you import your audiobooks. Second, the tool does not add chapter marks in between the tracks. It’s one long track. While iTunes and your iPod will save your place, allow you to speed up or slow down playback, and let you scrub through the track, there’s no navigating by chapters, i.e., clicking forward or backward to skip to the next chunk.

For Mac Users

If you are a Mac OS X user, you have two options, one free and very good, one $10 and outstanding. First the free Join Together AppleScript application put together by Doug Adams of Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes.

I’ve written about Join Together previously, so I’ll keep this to the pluses and minuses. On the plus side:

• It works within iTunes (with a separate application for entering audiobook information).
• It handles AAC and MP3 files equally well, and turns out perfect audiobooks every time.
• It adds chapter marks at the track boundaries.
• It’s straightforward.
• It’s free (though donations are requested, and it’s well worth making a small contribution).

There are a few minuses:

• It’s free, so support can be limited.
• You still have to follow my long instructions to get your audiobook tracks imported from CDs in the first place (though you can simplify or omit some of the steps).
• Quirks and UI limitations, due to working as an AppleScript.
• Can’t handle multiple merges of tracks.

This last issue is the one that killed me, while importing the Harry Potter books. The trick is that I wanted to merge all of the disc tracks for a single chapter together, and then merge all of the chapters together to make a single book. But once the chapter tracks were merged, the chapter track would cause the merge of the entire book to fail. It seemed to be an underlying bug in QuickTime, but there was no way around it. Until I found…

The Recommended Solution: Audiobook Builder

I’ve written a complete review of Audiobook Builder, a $10 utility whose sole purpose is to create perfect audiobooks. So again, I’ll keep myself to plusses and minuses. On the plus side:

• Perfect audiobooks, every time.
• It handles the entire process, from importing CDs to adding to iTunes. You can skip all of my silly steps, and work entirely within Audiobook Builder. This is a huge timesaver. Even if you only work at Starbucks, after 3-4 books you’ll have saved enough time to pay for it.
• Handles discs and tracks that are in any format, and adds chapter marks at exactly the places you tell it. Also handles the merge-chapter-tracks-then-book-tracks problem easily.
• It automatically works around a few bugs known to exist in iPod firmware, related to very long tracks like audiobooks.
• My experiences with Splasm Software’s support have been exceptional.

The minuses are very minor:

• The user interface for grouping tracks together prior to the final merge can be confusing initially, and tricky even after you master it. This is only a problem if you’re being anal retentive (like me) about having your chapter marks at actual chapter boundaries in the book.
• There are a few features that I’d like to see added, to make things even easier.

That last “minus” really isn’t fair. Audiobook Builder comes very close to being the ideal tool for making audiobooks, so calling it out for not being perfect is really nitpicking.

Anyway, for more details on these three tools, follow the links. Until I get around to writing an excruciatingly detailed account of how I build my audiobooks, those are my last words on merging audiobook tracks.

Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.

For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.

Maybe it will be for you as well.

The Amazon Kindle has a bunch of innovative features that are new in an ebook device, the two most important being an always-on wireless connection to the Internet, and the services provided by the (always connected) Amazon Kindle Store. You can learn more about the device’s specific features at the Kindle Store.

There has been a wide range of opinions expressed about the Kindle, from violent dislike to sighs of bliss. Probably the two best, most reasoned opinions come from Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times, who likes the Kindle a lot, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball, who hopes and believes it will fail. (And here are two more that also bring intelligent perspectives.)

Since I don’t own and haven’t even held a Kindle, I hesitate to express an opinion about it. On the one hand, looking at the features list, the device gets a lot of things right. But having a feature is not the same as doing it well; just look at the iPod vs. its competition. The devil’s in the details, and without using one, I can’t say if the feature list is a bunch of checked off boxes, or capabilities that are a delight to use (these reviews make me think the former). And there are also some small-but-serious omissions; for me the number one issue is no backlight, which means I can’t use it in bed without turning on a reading light, which wakes Rochelle up if she’s sleeping — a big no-no.

So I think it’s too early to tell. I would predict success for it, if it was not so relentlessly unstylish, trapped in a case designed for the 1980s. It’s not that style is the most important thing, but it is important.

In the end, the only reason I’m bothering to post about the Kindle at all is because among its many features, it can play audiobooks from Audible.com. As I wrote above, I have no idea if this feature is well-implemented, and I have a hard time imagining it as a good fit for audiobooks in a car while commuting (the form factor is all wrong). But if you’re the sort of person who “goes both ways” with their books (print and audio), you might find the Kindle very interesting.

Disclosure: If you buy a Kindle through the links above, I’ll get a kickback from Amazon. I’m not particularly recommending you do that, but just so you know.