If I have a Mac, how can I go about playing .avi files?

No guarantees, but your best bet is VLC.

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Thanks, Tom! Hopefully that will work.

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For those of you with Palm OS have you tried TCPMP? It's a free open source media player that's supposed to play pretty much anything.

Huh. I'll check it out. How come it's unfindable through all the palm freeware channels I wonder?

Thanks, Wolfram, my shareware license on AeroPlayer expires tomorrow. This may save me $20.

ETA: Oh, it is nice, just letting me open folders on my card, exactly as a media player SHOULD. Sadly, it also appears to be unable to play music in the background, which is essential. I'll keep an eye on it, but in the meantime I guess I'll need to pay for Aeroplayer.

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Gris, you can play mp3s in realplayer in the background. And I'd bet folding money that TCPMP includes a background option pretty soon. It's just too essential for any full-purpose media player.

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Yeah, probably, but I'm just gonna pay the $24.95 for an Aeroplayer license. It also gets me AAC playback, which isn't available anymore in TCPMP for IP issues, and I often buy stuff from the iTMS and take off the DRM. I'll keep TCPMP around for video playback though, cuz that's neat. Maybe through some music videos on there.

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I know a bunch of us use Bloglines to track rss feeds. This just in:

Bloglines will have a planned outage on Monday, December 19, 2005 in order to relocate to a new data center. Here's our planned schedule for tomorrow:

• 2:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC): Your subscriptions will stop updating with new items.
• 4:00pm PDT (12:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be completely offline. During this time you will not be able to access your account.
• 8:00pm PDT (4:00am UTC December 20th): The Bloglines site will be back online by this time. New articles posted during the outage will appear in your account.

We look forward to vastly improved hardware capacity and tons of elbow room for growth. Thank you for your patience during this outage.

- The Bloglines Team

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Random iPod randomness:

Even smaller iPod shuffle may debut in January

And at the same link:

Meanwhile, the analyst acknowledged there may be a minor radio frequency interference problem with Apple's latest iPods where the players will go "crazy" when placed very close to a ringing GSM cell phone.

However, Wu believes concerns over the issue may be overblown:

"From our checks, it appears to impact GSM and not CDMA phones and only on nanos and video Pods," Wu said. "When a ringing GSM phone is directly in front of the clickwheel, the iPod could go 'crazy' and its volume could fluctuate uncontrollably (reminds us of R2D2 when shot by a laser gun)."

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the players will go "crazy"

And the Shuffles did run wild across the land, leaving a path of destruction in their wake...

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From our checks, it appears to impact GSM and not CDMA phones and only on nanos and video Pods.

My GSM phone affects my iPod (4th Gen, iPhoto) but it affects everything. Car stereos, TVs, the regular stereo, etc. and usually only when there is an incoming call or, if I am driving, when there is a major fluctuation in the signal.

I don't really mind it - I def. know when my phone is ringing.

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Yeah, me too. It was worse on my old phone, which was crappy. It is also most noticeable on really crappy speakers, like the $15 ones i bought from Radioshack. Shielding of higher quality than "dollar tree aluminum foil" probably helps.

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