Lately, I’ve had one or two ripped books to simply cut off the end anywhere from
1 minute to longer. Can’t figure if this is a CD problem or iTunes.
Donna in AR

But as you point out, it’s ridiculously expensive to get access to the complete set of Fry-narrated books. It’s not just that the set is $275+, but the Fry performances are impossible to get in the U.S. So it’s Amazon.co.uk, and the big shipping charge that’ll come with it. So I’m waiting for the deluxe sets, so I only have to buy them (both Fry and Dale) once. (And don’t get me started on the children’s vs. adult’s editions of the Fry performances — the artwork on each is amazing, and wildly different. I want both!)

My only bone of contention was that of the comments made about Stephen Fry’s narration which to my mind, is absolutely brilliant. Hence the many audiobook awards he has been given. Please US readers, give him every chance as 15 minutes does not give him the respect he deserves.

Having said all that, I will have to listen to Jim Dale’s narration now. This is going to cost a fortune!

I did a test-import of nearly 10 years of accumulated mail from Outlook into Thunderbird 1.5, and it was successful, turning a 900MB PST into a 1.2GB profile folder. Space is cheap. I cleaned up my multi-account set-up a bit, and have since upgraded to Thunderbird 2.x and then switched to Portable Thunderbird. I recently added the Lightning extensions and synchronize my contacts and calendar using scheduleworld.

I am, as such, a “power-user” of Thunderbird. I’m also a programmer by profession and know my way around various OSs.

My AV of choice is ClamWin for Windows and ClamAV for Linux.

And no, I don’t have any virus protection for my Thunderbird. To be fair, I really don’t receive more than one or two attachments a month, and I can’t even remember when I last received an executable of any type in the mail.

However, I also use Firefox and have it configured to scan downloaded files using ClamWin. If there was a reasonable way to scan incoming messages in TB, I would configure it to do that. However, there is not, and I think that is Michael’s point. Matt seems to misunderstand this.

The Mozilla folks are doing a bang-up job on Firefox and Thunderbird, but to not have a single configuration example for TB+AV for any AV program is a gross omission that borders on negligence. And it’s even more so for the fact that beyond a number of “free” AV solution, there’s a very solid open-source program available. And — Hello Matt — ClamAV even updates virus definitions automatically!

All that aside, I think the best solution for email virus protection is to scan at the server level. My ISP uses an installation of ASSP which not only scrutinizes the headers, but also greylists senders (thus delaying or rejection mail from “drones”) and scans attachments. Local POP3/SMTP proxies were fine and well a couple of years ago, but who uses unencrypted POP3 anymore?

So, Michael — yes, it’s a shame Mozilla doesn’t even document a simple antivirus configuration. It’ll hurt Thunderbird adoption in the long run.

Matt — yes, “security” is unknown to the average computer user these days. Even to some of the “above average” users, it’s difficult. I recall a programmer of mine who got his development machine infected and was about to roll out an infected exe to a few hundred users. That’s exactly the reason why it security has to be made available to those users… and that was the point this blog post is making.

However, there are also defects in software/firmware on the iPod, which limit track lengths to quite a bit less than the theoretical maximum. The longest tracks in my collection are just under 17 hours long.

But I wouldn’t even go that far these days. Audiobook Builder limits you to 12 hour tracks, and will automatically split up a longer book into tracks no longer than that. The developers of Audiobook Builder have done a lot more technical research than I have on the practical limits in length, and so I trust that’s the right maximum length. So your 40 hour book should be split across four tracks.

And really, that’s a good idea anyway. That way as you finish a part of the book, you can remove that section from your iPod, saving space for other books. If it was one huge track, you wouldn’t be able reclaim the space until the very last word.

There are also definitely textual differences, at least in the Harry Potter novels, but they’re mostly trivial. But they necessitate extra time in the recording studio, additional pre- and post-production effort, etc. I imagine at that point doing an entirely different performance isn’t as huge a deal as it might seem, especially if there are different aesthetic goals for each.

I have listened to only the first 15 minutes of the Stephen Fry performance of HP #1, so it’s very hard for me to judge his qualities as a narrator for the series. Fry’s performance seemed more understated than the Jim Dale recordings, which I love. While I very often prefer the more subtle sensibilities of British vs American actors, in the case of the fantastical and whimsical Harry Potter books, I suspect that Jim Dale’s more energetic narration will be my preference.

I plan to purchase complete box sets of both the Dale and Fry performances, though, and will give them a complete review once I’ve listened to them thoroughly (which means it’ll be a year or two before this gets done).

I was at work today (washing dishes to pay for college) and I had my Shffule attached to the outside of my pocket. and I was able to, with one hand, while carrying a load of pans, reach down, pause the shffule, rewind it, control the volume, ect… all intuitively without stopping what i was doing.

and now, with all of the audiobook files joined, I will be able to switch just as effortsly between mu music any my audio book by turning on the shuffle feature when the music hits me, and just hit the play button three times to go to the last bookmark in my audiobook as it will be the first thing in my playlist. with a nano, I would have had to stop what i was doing and take the thing out of my pocket. really, navigating the thing is verry intuitive once you get used to it.