Palm Tungsten Blog


Wednesday, September 17, 2003



Audible



People who own a T|T and a Mac should be rightly miffed that Audible ignore them. In the minds of Audible marketing people, if you use a Mac, then the only mobile audio device you use is an iPod. I can understand them not having an auuble -> PPC converter, but why no audible -> Palm?

Anyway, there is a workaround, but if you live in the US even reading about this is probably illegal. If you download the Audible files you have paid for, you can listen to them in iTunes, but you cannot pla them with teh Palm Audible player, nor can you convert them to mp3s to play with PocketTunes. So this is what you must do:

1. Buy a large spindle of very cheap CD-Rs (you can guess the rest)
2. In iTunes, burn your Audible content to CD. This will take up about one CD per 80 minutes of Audible content.
3. Insert your newly created audio CDs into your Mac and open iTunes.
4. Select preferneces and change the settings to 32kbps and Mono.
5. Select your audio track from the CD and 'Import'.
6. Copy the resulting mp3 to your SD card (you will need about 8mb per CD on these settings) and listen with PocketTunes.

Time-consuming and wasteful, I admit, but at least you get the goods you paid for in a form you want them in.


Friday, September 05, 2003



Daniel e-mailed with a question about back-up solutions and restoring the TT Update patch. The simple answer is: no back-up solution, either to SD crd or the desktop, can restore the patch - it needs to be re-installed.

However, there seems to be a much simpler solution: keep a copy of the original .prc file 'PalmTungstenTUpdate_enUS.prc' on your SD card, preferably in PALM/Launcher. If you run this as a normal app from the launcher, it appears to install all the patches (well, all the ones I looked for, and it consumes 600kb of RAM then asks for a reset).

[I have just done several hard resets to test this. I think it is a tribute to the robustness of the PAlm OS that I am happy to do such things with my main PDA.]

My only problem after a hard reset is LauncherX - it crashes every time I try to run it. Since it is mapped to the Home button, it takes a bit of ingenuity to deal with this. I have to do a soft reset to get to the Preferences panel, then map one of the hard buttons to Applications. Then use that to launch Filez, delete the LauncherX application (but not data) from the Palm, and then copy teh LX application from my SD card back-up onto the Palm. And then all works fine.


Thursday, September 04, 2003



Eudora v.6 (for Mac, not Palm, unfortunately) is out. It has a nice new look, a spam filter and is much snappier than the beta release. Even the IMAP handling seems more efficient. Download it from www.eudora.com

Has anyone had any luck using the Eudora address book conduit under Mac OS X?