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I’m loading up the Archos now that it has a super big hard drive and can hold all of my music. I keep singles in a file called @Downloads. The @ is so that it sorts to the top of the list. But the Archos doesn’t automatically play everything in a folder (I think Rockbox has a preference where it will do that, but that’s not what I want to do anywhere else). So I opened a song in Windows Media Player which is my default MP3 player on my laptop. Then I drag all of the songs in the folder into that window. Now I have a list of all the songs. Then there is a Now Playing drop-down list where I can choose “Shuffle List Now”. Then from that same list I can choose “Save List As” and then change the type to m3u instead of WMP’s default.

Now I have a shuffled playlist. This is better than just regular shuffling because regular shuffling will repeat songs. The playlist it creates has all of these extra lines in it that start with #EXTINF. I’m not sure exactly what those do, but I think they help generate all of the song info faster. WinAmp playlists are the same way.

I did a search for how to strip out the EXTINF lines and found a guy who knows way too much about DOS. He said that you should start a command window (Start:Run and type cmd is the fastest) then navigate to the folder you want to go to and type in the following magical line where +clean.m3u is the name of the playlist without the extra lines in it:

findstr /i /b /V “#EXTINF” “+downloads.m3u” > “+clean.m3u”

This is pretty good, but I still had a bunch of blank lines (I could probably get rid of them by modifying the command above, but I don’t know how to do that). So I opened the new file in Notepad, copied everything, pasted it into a blank Word document, and searched for ^p^p and replaced it with ^p. Then I selected all, copied, and pasted it back into the Notepad file. Finally, just delete the downloads.m3u file and rename clean.m3u.

Here is what the switches mean:

/i Case insensitive

/b Match text at the beginning of the line

/V Print only lines that do not match the pattern

Then you do the file name to look in and then type > and the output file, otherwise it will just print it to the screen.

Later I found out how to strip blank lines from a text file:

findstr /v “^$” “+clean.m3u” > “+downloads.m3u”

Now all you have to do is delete +clean.m3u since the original +downloads.m3u will be overwritten by this second command. Apparently ^ is the shortcut for beginning of line and $ is a shortcut for the end of a line, so an entire blank line is ^$.

One of the advantages of the Archos is that it uses a standard notebook hard drive, specifically a 2.5 inch ATA hard drive (current notebooks use SATA drives which are not the same). So ever since I bought it, I knew there was the tantalizing possibility of upgrading the hard drive to something bigger than the original 20 GB. When I wrote an entry about looking for a cheap used hard drive, Jeb offered up his broken iBooks as possible sources of a new drive. One problem was he didn’t remember how big the hard drives were and Apple doesn’t give iBooks model numbers to help find out (Dell gives every computer a service tag which allows you to at least look up the original configuration for that specific computer).

Continue reading “Archos Jukebox Upgrade”

This weekend I was contemplating how I could upgrade the hard drive in the Archos. It uses a standard IDE notebook hard drive (2.5″), so I was thinking it should be easy to come across a used 40-80 GB hard drive someplace. The instructions said the drive had to be formatted FAT32, which Windows XP and Vista won’t do on hard drives that size, but older versions of Windows will. It was recommended to get an adapter to connect a 2.5″ drive to a regular computer (3.5″) and format it before swapping the old drive out, but I didn’t have such an adapter and didn’t want to anything for one since I would only use it once.

I went to eBay to look for used notebook hard drives and the search turned up these adapters. They were $1.32 with free shipping! I figured I couldn’t afford *not* to buy one at that price (though later on I found them for 99 cents plus 6 cents shipping; so it always pays to keep looking). I don’t see how they can afford to even send me something in the mail (it’s pretty small though), and it is shipping all the way from Hong Kong.

Still haven’t found a hard drive. I bid $23 plus $7 shipping for a used 60 GB hard drive, but the winning bid was $32.77 plus shipping. That’s crazy! New 500 GB hard drives at Amazon are $90 with free shipping. They are SATA, though, and the Archos won’t support that. Amazon may have some used hard drives for reasonable prices if I look hard enough.

This entry is for something at work and is just so I can remember it later . . .

Using Microsoft Word 2007, modify the Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles by right-clicking the Style on the Home tab and choosing Modify. This brings up the Modify Style dialog box. At the lower left, hold down the Format button and choose Paragraph. In the Paragraph dialog box go to the Line and Page Breaks tab and check the box that says “Page break before”. Do this for both Heading 1 and Heading 2. Heading 1 will be for each chapter and Heading 2 will be each cell.

Anything with Heading 2 will be followed by a picture of the cell and the description and instructions. But the Heading 1 page will blank except for the heading. Instead of having it blank, put a chapter contents table there. To do this you have to make one bookmark that encompasses all the cells in that chapter. So starting with the heading of the first cell, select everything until the end of the chapter, then go under the Insert tab and choose Bookmark. For Chapter 1, call the Bookmark “Section01”. Now click the white space below Heading 1 at the beginning of the chapter and press CTRL+F9 to insert a field. You can’t insert a Table of Contents from the menus because it only lets you have one of those, but you can do it with fields. When you do CTRL+F9 it will put you in a field with curly brackets {} around it. You want to type TOC \b “Section01” \h in between the brackets (\h is needed to make the page numbers hyperlinks when it is converted to a pdf). Then click somewhere else. Now right-click the field and select Update Field and it should give you a table of contents for everything you bookmarked.

I also wanted the manual to have the name of the chapter in the footer of each page. Each chapter starts with a different Heading 1, so click in the the footer and the Header & Footer Tools menu should show up. Hold down the Quick Parts button and choose Field. In the Field dialog box choose StyleRef in the “Field names” list. This brings up another list called “Style name”. Choose Heading 1 from the style names. Now any time you use another instance of Heading 1 as the chapter name, it will show at the bottom of the page.

Today, the head of General Motors, Barack Obama, announced an exciting new vehicle that will be offered soon. He expects millions of Americans to buy it.

Q: Mr. Obama, what type of vehicle is this? Is it a car?

A: We’re not sure yet. We are pretty sure that it won’t be a car. If you have a car today, you will not need this vehicle. We do not want to compete with automakers.

Q: Will it use gasoline?

A: No. It will be a clean vehicle.

Q: Will it be solar powered?

A: Maybe. Whether we use solar power, gasoline, or any other means of propulsion is still to be decided.

Q: I thought you said it won’t use gasoline?

A: Look, gasoline has served us well in the past and you can get it just about anywhere. You can’t really have a car without gasoline.

Q: Have you done any market research to see if people are interested in this vehicle?

A: We expect to sell 45 million of these vehicles. Because we are going to sell large numbers of vehicles, it seems pointless to do any market research. We will spend several months, if necessary, coming up with the design of this vehicle and then produce millions of them. There is no reason to try out different versions of the vehicle in different markets to see if any improvements can be made to it.

Alan Mullaley, the CEO of Ford Motors had this to say about GM’s new vehicle: “Clearly this is a dangerous vehicle for both its driver and anyone close to it. The government wants to take away everyone’s cars and force them to use these government cars which, as I understand it, will fueled by the blood of retired people. Although I have no information about this car, I am telling you now that it will destroy America.”