Kindle 2 & Amazon Service
I took the plunge and bought myself a Kindle 2. The sole purpose and reason was because I love taking books with me when I travel but I hate having to lug around a bug full of books. The kindle will allow me to do just this.
So mine arrived Friday morning and I have been playing with it since and I am loving it. the whispernet delivery is fast, very fast even here in SA. it feels comfortable, I read for hours on it and my eyes never got sore either ! A big plus.
One issue I did have was that when I started up the Kindle for the first time I knew I had to register the device so it will be linked with my Amazon account, so I went to the settings, and did the whole registration step. Once it was done, it told me the device was registered with my account, great, but the device had other ideas. It decided that it could not see any 3G networks even though my phone told me that there were 3G networks available.
So after trying everything I could think of, I phoned the Amazon Kindle help line, which I really didn’t want to do cause of the cost. It ended up being a five minute call. I told the “American” person on the other end of the line what my problem was, and he took me through 3 easy steps to select a different 3G network:
- Go to the home screen.
- Select Settings from the menu.
- Once on the settings screen, type in 311 and follow the prompts.
Now I have a complete connected Kindle 2 and with in one minute of it finding signal, I had received all the samples I had requested and the updated Kindle manual.
So big up to Amazon for having such good customer support and secondly, a fantastic product!
The only issue I have is that the person I spoke to kept apologising for the issue. I know it is a nice touch but since I know that it wasn’t his fault, I would have preferred if he had apologised once, and then told me how to fix it.
But still, great all round experience so far. I will give more feed back in a month or two, after my first long haul travel –> Johannesburg to Cape Town.
Catch you on the flipside.
Directory Listing Application
I have a music folder on my media server which has over 40 gig’s of music on it and every now and then I have the need for a complete list of my music (Artist and albums).
The final straw came this week. I am going away with a few friends in January next year to Cape Town. We will be driving down from Johannesburg, and it is an extremely long trip, can take anything from 10 hours up, depending on traffic, your speed etc etc etc. One of the sections you drive through, the Karoo, is not the most visually appealing area either. If you are not driving, the Karoo makes a extremely effective replacement for counting sheep.
Everyone going on this trip are huge music people and have random and obscure albums etc etc. So instead of us taking along a massive amount of cd’s to play in the car, I thought it would be a great idea if everyone gave me the cd’s they would want in the car and I put them on my IPod for the trip. Knowing that I will be getting a lot of cd’s from everyone, I thought it would be a good idea to send out a list of all the music I have, since there is a big overlap in tastes and my collection, so I only get cd’s that I don’t have already.
So instead of spending a very long time typing out a list, or formatting a piped output from the command line, I decided I would take two hours out of my day and write an app I can use to give the structure of any directory.
The app lets you specify your root folder, and then it will generate a list of child folders. You can then select the folders you wanted included in the list (I have some music “system” folders I don’t want included in the list such as artwork or temp ripping folders). You can also select the way the list is saved. so straight list will put one folder name per line, another will indicate the hierarchy, and another for music folders will create an artist/album structure and if you specify a prefix for your disc folders when you have multiple discs per album, it will put how many discs are in the album if it finds a folder that has the prefix in the name.
Below are screen shots of the application and then the saved documents:
This is the application at startup
The application with a listing generated (General – Show Hierarchy has been used).
This is the saved file when using General – Show Hierarchy.
This is the saved file when using General – Straight List
This is the saved file when using Music.
In the last picture (using Music), the album 2 for Artist 3 had two child folders called Disc 1 and Disc 2. I told the application that any folders that have Disc in the name are disc folders so when the application came across these within the album it did a count and then appended the number at the end of the album.
So finally the disclaimer:
This is an as is download, it works on my machine. I do not guarantee that this application will work correctly on your machine, won’t kill your dog, or steal your girlfriend. I also have very little time to provide support for it. If you find a bug, post a comment here and I will get to it when or if I can. I will at some point post the source code, so you can modify it as you see fit.
All I can promise is that there is no spyware, viruses etc embedded in the code.
Prerequisites:
- Some Microsoft Operating System.
- DotNet Framework 3.5 SP1.
Download: Directory Listing zip files
about me
I am a C#, Silverlight, K2 workflow and Sharepoint Consultant, living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa. I have a passion for teaching people anything I can in order to spread the knowledge and skills I have. You can follow me on twitter at @MrThirsty. You can view my full profile at about.me
