Just for fun, I whipped this together and released it: https://github.com/brianpipa/OverdriveMP3Downloader
Initial version took a couple of hours, then a couple more hours to clean it up a bit. Works great!
I attended three-day Palantir developer training this past week. Palantir is an incredibly useful technology and I can’t wait to start coding for it at work.
Found a great use for the iphone app Orchestra. Its main purpose is to help you make todo lists by speaking them and it converts it to text. But… I found a cool trick… my daughter frequently needs help spelling longer words she hasn’t learned yet for papers and reports, etc. It would take her a while to look up the word online or in a dictionary and it really added up when she had a long paper to write and had to look up the spelling of lots of words. Now, I let her use Orchestra – she just says the word and it shows her how to spell it almost instantly. For every individual word she has tried it (so far) has been 100% correct.
I setup FreeNAS and it has a builtin UPnP server so I was looking for a way to view the videos (AVI/DIVX/XVID/MPG/etc) on my ipad. I finally found 8Player. Costs $5 but it streams all music, videos and pictures like a champ. Well worth the $5. I tried almost every other one I could find that did UPnP and this one was the best.
Over the weekend I installed FreeNAS 7 (not the latest – 8) on a mini PC I was looking to sell. Nobody wanted to buy it and I had read recently on Lifehacker about FreeNAS. I’ve been wanting a central file server for a while now that could house MP3s and movies, etc and stream it to various devices (iphone, ipad, Xbox 360, XBMX, etc) and this sounded perfect. I got it all setup finally despite it being somewhat involved and non-intuitive. I wanted to plug in my 500GB USB HD into it but it says not to use NTFS with it so if I want to do that I’m going to have to copy all the data off of it (not sure I have ~300GB of extra space anywhere), format it for FreeNAS, then copy the stuff back. Maybe I’ll just get an internal drive for it instead and start fresh.