UPDATE 06/25: Looks like the Audible app is showing up in more and more non-US markets.
UPDATE 06/22 @ 4.40 pm CEST: It seems the direct link isn’t working for UK users for the time being. From what I know it does work from Belgium. Anywhere else?
YES! It’s finally here, with great fanfare – the Windows Phone Audible app. BUT, it’s not showing up in certain non-US WP Marketplaces, and the link the Windows Blog is providing doesn’t seem to be working.. Fortunately, Audible has e-mailed some of its customers a direct link into the Windows Phone Marketplace (on the phone) that does work (just be sure to open it from your phone):
UPDATE 05/12
We’re now almost two weeks later, and still no love from Audible.com! Latest unconfirmed reports state Audible might keep us hanging for another 1-3 months (see http://forums.wpcentral.com/marketplace-apps/190732-3.htm). Like most other Audible members, I’m extremely patient and loyal toward this company, but um, seriously… I wonder what’s taking them so damn long.
Seriously doubting the Windows Phone platform now, Audible is a key app for me.
In my search for more information on the nascent release of the Audible App for the Windows Phone platform, I stumbled upon the following response from an official Audible rep, posted on WPCentral’s forums, stating that the release might be due in 2 weeks:
Dear Audible Listener,
Thank you for contacting Audible!
I understand you would like to know when the Audible Audible for Windows Phone will be released. I would be happy to assist.
After receiving numerous requests from Windows Phone users, we are excited to say that an application is actively being developed. While we cannot yet comment on its exact release date but it should be available for download within 2 weeks, we are confident you will love being able to use Audible with Windows Phone. When the application is complete, we will be announcing it on our website, newsletter, and social media channels.
Thanks for your interest in using Audible with Windows Phone. If you need any further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Have a wonderful day!
Sincerely,
Sade F
Audible Customer Support
Thank you for your inquiry. As a valued customer, your experience is important to us. We invite you to answer the question below regarding your Customer Care experience.
Your feedback will help us better serve your future needs.
I’ll be happy to ditch my iPod Nano for the Windows Phone app. This release is long overdue, just get it out already..
BZIP2 compression does seem to offer the best compromise between compression time and compression ratio, as reviewed here: http://odzangba.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/gzip-vs-bzip2-vs-lzma/. I was looking for quick and efficient way to zip up some old files for back up. Bz2 won out for me.
I’m using Ubuntu 12.04′s built-in compression tool.
Had trouble installing JungleDisk (‘junglediskdesktop’) on Ubuntu again. This time it’s version 11.10. Mike Jennings from gmjjavadesigns.com has a complete guide on how to get libnotify.so.1 linked correctly and make the tray icon appear. The latter part in particular was of interest to me:
gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist “['all']“
JungleDisk is broken for Ubuntu again. It won’t start when selected from Gnome 3′s Activities dashboard, nor will it start when calling it manually from the command line.
$ junglediskdesktop
junglediskdesktop: error while loading shared libraries: libnotify.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
As suggested by JungleJason (http://askubuntu.com/a/84499), you’ll need to symlink libnotify.so.4 to libnotify.so.1. The latest version of Ubuntu (11.10) apparently only comes with the former variant.
If you’re running a 32-bit Ubuntu:
$ cd /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ ; sudo ln -s ./libnotify.so.4 libnotify.so.1
UPDATE: Works with Node.js 0.6.6 and 0.6.7 on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) / Linux Mint 12 (Lisa).
There are no pre-compiled packages for Linux, so if you want to use Node.js, you’ll have to build it yourself. It’s easy enough though, and here’s how.
Download and unpack Node.js Source
You can obtain the release version from their website or get an edgier version from their Git source repository. If you acquired it from the former source, you’ll need to decompress it first, for instance to /usr/local/src/.
(optional) Install the build tools
If you haven’t done this before, your system most likely won’t have the required tools for software compilation. You can easily install them:
sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall
(optional) Install openssl-dev
If you want to compile with SSL support (default), you’ll also need to install the OpenSSL Development Packages, like so:
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
Build Node.js
Open up a terminal witndow and navigate to the directory that contains the Node.js source, e.g. /usr/local/src/node-0.6.6. And execute the following commands in succession:
./configure
make
sudo make install
If all goes well, you should be able to access the node command from any terminal window.
Windows has always had a ponderous command-line experience. And no wonder, because for the longest time, Microsoft developed Windows to be GUI-first. As a result, the terminal shell in Windows was always something of an afterthought (until Windows PowerShell happened). While PowerShell is a big improvement by virtue of its .NET roots and UNIX-inspired command set, the UI still suffers greatly from strange issues of old, e.g. fixed window size and screwed copy-paste.
Fortunately, free software comes to the rescue. Console2 is a software project hosted on SourceForge and describes itself as (citing their project page):
Console is a Windows console window enhancement. Console features include: multiple tabs, text editor-like text selection, different background types, alpha and color-key transparency, configurable font, different window styles
Yeah, Console2 adds everything Command Prompt lacks, and it gets better, because we can configure it to use PowerShell as its shell to create the ultimate Windows command-line environment.
Here’s how.
Download & Install Console2
Get it from its project page at SourceForge, here.
(optional) Download Windows PowerShell
If Windows Update hasn’t already installed PowerShell on your system, you might want to fire up Windows Update manually and enable it. If you’re running Windows XP, you can get it manually.
Configure Console2 to use PowerShell
Open up a Console2 instance and open the settings dialog via Edit > Settings.
Use the browse button next to the Shell field to select powershell.exe from its installation directory. On my system (a Windows XP machine, issued by work..), I used a system variable to reference the PS executable, like so:
I’ve been using this setup for a couple of months now and I’m extremely satisfied with it. The combination of PowerShell and the features Console2 adds, I’m in CLI Nirvana whenever I need to use it.
While playing around with Lubuntu in a virtual machine I came across an annoying UX flaw. There is absolutely no way to set up keyboard layout switching in Lubuntu. I use this feature all the time on Windows and Mac to switch between QWERTY and AZERTY layouts. On Windows, this is done with a keyboard shortcut: ALT+SHIFT. On Mac there’s a little switch on the menu bar. To make this work on Linux, however, we’ll need to hop into a Terminal:
setxkbmap -option grp:ctrl_shift_toggle us,be
This causes CTRL+SHIFT to switch between US and Belgian keyboard layouts. Admittedly not extremely user friendly, but if you’re setting up Linux in a virtual machine, you’re probably not a novice user.
A couple of days ago I ran into an annoying scenario: the merging of two source files which reside in two different SVN repositories. TortoiseSVN, my favorite SVN client on Windows has the clout to tackle this task with its built-in diff editor, except that it doesn’t work for files in different repositories (or non-versioned files). A quick Google search brought me to the open-source WinMerge.
WinMerge offers a user-friendly and extremely interface, offering many features like:
Folder compare
File compare (differences within lines, moved-lines detection, etc.)
Version control features (conflict resolving, patch file generation, etc.)
Integration with TortoiseSVN, Visual SourceSafe, etc.
.
