Next problem.. she refuses to learn braille yet as she is fighting to get her eyesight back. So getting audio books and music is great however she has no way to identify what it is in the case. Yep. You guessed it, next suggestion is well lets get her an mp3 player. So I start looking for software for an Ipod.. and HOLY SHIT BATMAN.. Apple has ZERO support that I could find for Blind people. So I start digging..

There are an estimated 1 MILLION blind adults in the United States as of 2004. Lets think this through.. there are 1 Million People who DEPEND on their hearing and not a single MP3 player I could find on the market supports voice menus. Hell.. even when I started looking into IPods I discovered that you can NOT buy a new, bigger IPod without a video screen.. Well shit.. now what..

Well the open source community has done a fantastic thing and created their own software for MP3 players that support Ipods. www.rockbox.org has a dual boot firmware application that takes 10 seconds to install (not including download time) and will read small files placed into each folder aloud making it a perfect application for blind people.

I did run into a few configuration issues which I am going to post here for anyone who wants to the same thing for a friend.
There are a couple ways of viewing files for the sighted, one is using their own database or the other is by using a directory system. Unfortunately I did not realise that the database does not allow for recorded folder and file mp3 files which means as you scroll through the options in the database it will spell out each folder for you which is aggravating to say the least. So.. after I deleted the 20+ GBs of Audio Books from ITunes I set about creating a folder structure that made sense, the reasons for this will be explained in a moment.

Audiobooks

——> History

———–> The Learning Company

—————–> The Civil War

mp3 files




Audiobooks

——> Thriller

———–> Book Group – John Sandford

—————–> John Sandford – 02 – Shadow Prey

mp3 files




Using a very sweet little application called VoiceBox (also from RockBox) it will auto generate voice tags using text to speech for every folder and mp3 file in the directory structure. This can be a serious time saver when your trying to do this quickly! However this forced me to start thinking like a blind person. I originally had my folder called John Sandford. Well that doesent help me identify if it is a grouping folder or a folder with files in it. So I changed the folder name to Book Group – John Sandford to help her know which folders are groups and which would contain mp3s.

I used the following links to be able to set up the Ipod 5.5 Generation 30Gb Video.


Main Installation Instructions for Ipod.


Voice Tagging

– Begin Rant –
I can NOT understand why the software to do this has to be developed by open sourcers.. You would have thought some marketing genius at Apple or some other company would have said.. Hey.. if we build IPod software that will read directory names and file names outloud as you scroll that there are at least a million new consumers out there would would want to buy our product immeadiately. Come on people! I mean anyone if they shut their eyes can manage a click wheel and know where the four buttons on the click wheel are. It is almost the perfect tool for a blind person and yet.. NADA. NOT A SINGLE SOLITARY SAUSAGE!
– End Rant –

1 Full canister later and all we had done was the living room and a hallway.. 3/4 cat hair that we couldnt even see and the rest was dust and dirt.

I am impressed!!

Update : Finally managed to try it out on the kids rooms. 8 Cannisters later.. wow they manage to hide a lot of mess everywhere!

I also remembered something if anyone comes across this post.

I called Dyson directly when I couldn’t find the Dyson DC17 Animal or any other Dyson DC17 Model on their website but it seemed to be for sale at a few places on the web. Apparently they are not offering the Dyson DC17 for sale in their own web store for awhile. What I got a little more annoyed about was the fact they didn’t even have any specifications for it on their site either and I wanted to know what the hell the difference was between the Dyson DC17 Animal and the Dyson DC14 Animal and the Dyson DC15 Animal.. well I didn’t get too many straight answers to that question other than “its newer and is more powerful” etc etc.. all the usual things you would expect them to say. Anyways.. long story short.. the Dyson DC17 Animal is definately worth the price tag considering the 5 year warranty that comes with it.

P.S. Their instructions could have been a little more helpful as well in explaining exactly how your supposed to attach the mini turbine head!

Dual Xeon 3.2Ghz
8 * 1 Gb of DDR 333 Ram – Dual Rank
4 Sata 74Gb WD Raptor Drives.

Problemo #1
Well you might wonder why I put the Dual Rank there.. well it seems the server class motherboard I have from super micro : X6DH8-G does not like more than 4 sticks of Dual Rank Ram.. why? I have no fucking clue and it appears no one can explain it to me either.. So I have posted to various forums in the hope that some geek will answer it for me.

Problemo #2 The fabulous 10,000 RPM raptor drive.. is slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.. yes its SATA.. Yes that means 150MB’s per second transfer.. well maybe in my dreams.. i clocked my raptor transferring a whopping 2.4 Mb per second on a write to the disk.. wow.. thats slower than IDE 33 from 5 years ago.. so after calling WD and getting on the phone they would love to tell me to run their diagnostics tool BUT I have 2003 Server and they dont have a diagnostics tool that works on that OS. Pardon?? They tout that raptors are for enterprises and speed demons and they dont have a tool that will work on a server operating system… Oh the joy of idiocy..

Stop Error Codes : inaccessible boot device 0×00007B
My laptop (after it had been sent away and returned with a new MB developed this problem while travelling to NY to spend thanksgiving with my mom..
Bloody wonderfull.. Thankfully I brought my backup laptop and after many painful minutes of spending time on the web googling this POS code from microsoft I was NO closer to resolving the problem. I removed the DVD burner, the CD Burner.. no dice. I left those two out of the case. I then proceeded to remove the 4 sticks of ram that make up the 2GBs of ram.. reboot each time with each piece of ram.. no dice. As you can imagine I am PISSED!!!!
So in absolute frustration I remove the hard drives . Thats right both of them.. from my laptop. I put the OS drive into my backup and bootup.. it immeadiately runs chkdsk /f on the drive.. finds some errors.. theres a shock!.. i log in and click defrag.. well it was heavily fragmented.. it finally finished drefragging 60GBs later. I pop it back into the laptop and voila it boots without issue as if to drive home the fact that computers and laptops have no feelings and tough shit if you have been pulling out your hair for the better part of 6 hours.

Do they really think I am going to fall for an email that says the card was rejected 6 months ago??
Not to mention.. the email is from invoice-apply@earthling.net and asks me to reply back to earthling.net

Come on idiots, if your going to tie up my bandwidth (not) with this email crap then at least be creative and double check your scam email!

Remit To:
Page: 1
EarthLink Inc. Invoice Date: 11/29/04
P.O. Box 530530 Invoice Number: 53992221
Atlanta, GA. 30353-0530

Date Description Qty Price Amount
——– —————————————— ———— ————-
10/29/04 Previous Balance 10.97
05/22/04 ** REJECTED ** VISA 10.97 .00
05/25/04 ** REJECTED ** VISA 10.97 .00
05/27/04 Charge to VISA 10.97CR
————-
Adjusted Beginning Balance .00
New Charges: 21.95

*** Payment Rejected *** Credit Floor-302

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