November 20, 2002 Archives

Via Ben Hyde I found out that This American Life has a website with a full archive of all their shows. Awesome! There are so many cool programs to listen to. I am not very good at remembering to listen in, but I always enjoy the accidential encounter when I turn on the radio when the show is on; so this is so great.

The RealPlayer One beta I had on OS X has expired, so I go to download a new one; but no such luck. They don't have a free player for OS X! They want me to pay $10 a month or something. Fair enough that they want to make money, but it shows how much it sucks to put your content in a closed format.

"This Life" cite rights to distribute (different than streaming, or so they say) as their reason for not providing mp3 downloads. You can however buy mp3s of some programs via audible.com. I thought Audible was a sorta mp3 format with DRM crap? Hmn... I'd be more than happy to pay a few bucks for a download if I could preview say the prologue and keep the media in an accessible format.

This beats the Casio wrist watch with address book I had when I was 13.

Xeni Jardin at boingboing writes:

Hip-and-affordable watchmaker Fossil is teaming up with PalmSource and Flextronics to produce two USB-synchronizable "wrist PDAs." The new models are scheduled for consumer release in spring '03, and will include address book, date book, memo pad and calculator, as well as the ability to beam data to full-size PDAs and each other.

USAToday story excerpt: The models, which sell for $199 and $299 but operate identically, each have a 1-inch backlighted screen, far smaller than Palm's usual 21/4 inches square but a bit larger than a traditional watch face. They have a tiny stylus in the wristband for writing information on the screen. The rechargable battery is said to last four days at 30 minutes of use a day. [...] Fossil says the watch has all the capabilities of the Zire, the recently introduced, lowest-priced Palm device at $99.