I just got one of these through the post from Amazon. I had ordered it on about Thursday last week, kind of hoping it would get here by Saturday, but unfortunately no such luck. When it did arrive the Amazon box it came in was pretty battered as well - though the actual packaging was OK. That'll be ParcelForce then...
It's currently attached to the laptop and charging, and I can't quite inspire it to turn on yet so I'm going to wait and hope that it's meant to do that. What I can say is that the Windows software installation is about the most annoying thing I have ever seen. The wizard moves the mouse around to what it thinks is the option you want, then it will go full-screen and get in the way of anything more useful that you happen to be doing, and pop up occasional dialogue boxes to steal the focus. Then when you reboot it will launch a full-screen Flash gizmo to register the device, before something to do with Audible comes along and does something similar.
Final gripe so far - the headphones it comes with are pathetic. I'm not sure why they do that - surely better headphones give a better impression of the device. I didn't have any intention of using them though. I'll either continue to use the slightly battered Sony things I have or give my E2cs another shot. I seem to have the smallest ears in the world, and even the very smallest rubber parts for them don't properly fit me.
I'll write some more when I've got the thing up and running, including if I have to mess about to get it to work in Linux.
michael@firefly:~$ vim /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 bloglines.com www.bloglines.com
:wq
This appears to be the coolest thing I've seen for at least a couple of weeks. It describes how to convince XULRunner to run as an ActiveX control to support XUL and SVG in Internet Explorer. Could be useful for those situations where you just have to run IE...
In this post I would just like to thank Eolas (this one, not the defunct one from Lewis) for their very helpful and not-remotely-frivilous lawsuit against Microsoft in 2004 with regard to patent 5,838,906. The one that prevents people from using Flash movies and other embedded content without clicking on it first. Honest, it's really not annoying to have to do that every 10 seconds when doing Cisco online courses using IE. And people wonder why we don't like the idea of software patents in Europe...
I just saw a post somewhere advocating the FireBug extension for Firefox, so I decided to go and install it to see what it's like. I clicked the link, but since I'm running Firefox 2, things were a bit different - instead of saying it will be installed when I restart, it said "Restart Now". When I clicked that, it warned me all my tabs would close, so I let it do that. Then, it restarted, and came back up with the same contents in all the tabs - including a Bloglines window, complete with posts being displayed, that wouldn't have appeared properly if it had only used the URL and not pulled it from cache. That was very cool. It's a minor thing, but very nice to have.
Incidentally, Firefox 2 seems to be a lot faster than 1.5, and looks a bit nicer too - again, nothing major, but minor improvements all over the place. I think the new tab bar (with close buttons on every tab) is cool, though since I remembered to start using middle-click all the time, I use it less than I would have done before. Highly recommended.