[gui-talk] the BARD shufffle- Maybe I'm not so dumb, after all

[Joel Deutsch]

Hi Gerald,
I bought a new 8 GB thumb drive to use as a more capacious upgrade for 
backing up files just so that I could use my 2 Gb thumb drive for BARD. I 
had no idea at the time that it wouldn't be able to hold *and play!* a hell 
of a lot of BARD books! I couldn't have foreseen this stupid limitation, 
which ought to be remedied by NLS design people soon. Believe me, if I 
wanted to play it this way, I'd have to buy a whole pocketful of thumb 
drives so that I could have a novel on this one, another novel on that one, 
a magazine on this one and another issue of another magazine on that one, ad 
infinite, so I could go from thing to thing just as if it was normal sight 
time a few years ago and I could just pick up an issue of a magazine or a 
copy of a book from my desk or  coffee table and then put it down and pick 
up and open something else. But who wants a pocket full of thumb drives each 
of which can hold half a computer's worth of files but for this purpose can 
hold only the dozen or fifteen files for one NLS publication? That's not 
appealing to me. I exaggerate for effect. But I'm making a sincere point. I 
don't want to have to choose between just one book and one issue of one 
magazine, and have had to pay scores of dollars for thumb drives just to do 
this.


BTW, they're supposed to eventually get some company or other to manufacture 
blank Digital Player cartridges that look like the pre-recorded ones they 
now offer a few of, which you can just slip into a slot and play. Basically 
flash drives in a cassette-sort of case. Then some company or companies will 
have to sell these things, and one can only hope they'll be eraseable and 
re-recordable. That will solve the whole thing, starting with the silliness 
of having this digital player that's built like a tank, I swear you couldn't 
destroy it with a roadside bomb, but with your thumb drive sticking out of a 
port in its side like a tranquilizer dart stuck in an elephant's 
hide.sillinesss erassable jue
Arghh. Ack. Ugh.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gerald Levy" <bwaylimited at verizon.net>
To: "NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2009 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] the BARD shufffle- Maybe I'm not so dumb, after all



Joel,

Why don't you just buy another thumb ddrive or two to download your
magazines?  You can pick up a 4gb model for under ten bucks and an 8gb model
for about 15 bucks at newegg.com.  Then you wouldn't have to perform your
self-improvised shuffle.

Gerald
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Joel Deutsch" <jdeutsch at dslextreme.com>
To: "GUI-Talk" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2009 4:48 PM
Subject: [gui-talk] the BARD shufffle- Maybe I'm not so dumb, after all


>I figured out a method (refer to my earlier post):
>
> I of course downloaded Smart computing to a folder where I wanted it and
> unzipped it. But then of course I had to put it onto that thumb drive I
> stick into the NLS digital Player, and I had to clear that thumb drive of
> a
> BARD-downloaded novel I'm in the middle of reading. Because the software
> of
> the player can't deal with anything more complicated. Like having two
> books
> in two folders on that thumb drive.
>
> So herein created a second folder for the novel I'm listening to and moved
> the files from my thumb drive into that folder. I kept the original
> downloaded stuff, too, just in case, but in another subfolder under the
> author's name. My hope is that when the time comes, if I copy the new
> stuff
> onto the thumb drive again, the player will be able to remember where I
> left
> off, rather than my having to navigate to that point.
>
> And then of course I unzipped and copied the Smart Computing  files  onto
> the thumb drive, and of course it's playing fine on the player.
>
> Now I won't find out until later whether my updated cluster of files for
> that novel, if I copy them to the thumb drive, will clue in the player's
> firmware as to where I left off listening, but everything is backed up, as
> we say, so it's a worthy experiment.
>
> Ah, the gymnastics. They really should have made that download/player deal
> a
> little more sophisticated and flexible, in terms of programming. Even just
> a
> little. Oh, well.
>
>
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