I finally did it - I bought an MP3 player. Yes, my name is Greg and until today, I was a geek without an MP3 player.

My choice of weapons? The just-released and sparsely-available Rio Carbon 5GB. And my first impression, after using it for a couple hours this evening, is that this thing is sweet:

• 5GB Seagate compact-flash type hard drive (more on this later)
• Voice recorder capability (with built-in mic - I need this)
• MP3 (80 hours) and WMA (160 hours)
• 20-hour lithium-ion rechargable battery
• Nice controls on the edges and face
• USB 2.0 data interface (charges from USB too)
• Impressive audio clarity and quality
• It's freakin' thin and compact (smallest 5GB unit around)
• Speaks Windows and Mac
• Plays well with Audible.com (to which I am now addicted, thanks Chris)
• Cool bonus sample recordings out of the box (Augean Stables is cool, so is Backyard Galaxy)

These devices are not exactly readily available or easy to find. Last night I missed dinner while I went looking for one at the Best Buy store closest to where I work (in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland, Oregon). Not a single one in stock. So today I logged onto bestbuy.com and found they were already completely out of stock there, too. But a friendly link on the site helped me discover that the Best Buy store in Clackamas (which is on the other side of the city) had one in stock. I called them and confirmed (they give you a link to a printable page with phone numbers, a map and driving directions nice!), then headed across town in evening traffic. Success!

While I have never owned my own dedicated MP3 player device, I have used a number of different kinds, and have some idea about what works well and what doesn't. So, I have something on which to base my opinion of the Carbon.

It's nice. About as small as a credit card on its face, overall I think it's just a little smaller than the iPod mini, and it has 25% more storage in it - not a bad setup. This thing will fit in any pocket easily, comes with a little case to keep the scratch monster away, and has decent quality earbuds in the package, too. Audio quality is great. I'll add a little FM transmitter and be listening to audible books and other recordings while I'm on my work commute.

What's all this about cannibals???

Well, the thing is, my original intent was not to buy the Carbon to use as an MP3 player. My plan was to buy it, bust it wide open, and cannibalize the 5GB CF micro hard drive for use in my digital camera. Music was not on my mind - pictures were. But once I saw the thing, realized how cool and compact it was, and reached a conclusion that /me without an MP3 player in 2004 was tantamount to sacrilege or mortal sin, well... I decided I had to buy the Carbon and keep it in it's native state, for use just as it was intended.

So I bought two.

I justified the extra expenditure (lamely) with the fact that I just got an unexpected check for something I had completely forgotten about, the amount of which almost exactly covered the cost of the second unit. Hey - I still want 5GB of storage in my camera - at 6 megapixels, having 5GB onboard storage is just about right!

But for now, I am having so much fun with the MP3 player, the cannibalism party will have to wait. When I get around to ripping the second unit apart, I'll post about that here, too. I'll be trying to do it in a way that will allow me to stick a 512MB compact flash card back in the Rio though, in place of the transplanted hard drive, so it can still be used for music purposes. Chances are I'll need a tube of super glue (and it's also entirely possible the hard drive won't work in my camera, but I am told its worked for others), but that's fine.

From Engadget... of course... A robot that consumes flies and uses their consequential energy, if you will, to power itself. Ummm, wow, and you thought your teenager's feet smelled bad:

We know what you’re thinking. A robot that totes around human sewage, digesting living beings for energy? What, you’re not inexorably excited about this? The EcoBot II (ah, what a benign, nonthreatening name) is fed flies into 12 sewage-based bacterial fuel cells, which break them down, digest them, and use the electrons released as current. And we don’t wanna hear no jibberjabber about how it’s only a matter of time before these bots turn on their human masters, because if you’re gonna go, what’s so bad about being slowly digested in human feces by giant robot oppressors?

/me marks September 21st on my calendar...

On that day, the first three Star Wars films (Episodes IV-VI: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) will be released on DVD after having been digitally cleaned up. Lowry Digital Images assigned 80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage to take the original films to their DVD boxed set release.

from USA Today and Paul Thurrott via Scoble

The awesome and bloggerific KC Lemson points to a Knowledge Base article that describes how to tell Internet Explorer to leave your Office documents and files alone when you're opening them from a web server via hyperlink. We use SharePoint where I work, and it can be downright annoying at times when a document opens in-line in Internet Explorer when what I really want is for it to open in the application that was used to create it.

This is easy but good stuff - excerpt from the KB article:

To configure Internet Explorer to open Office files in the appropriate Office program by using the Folder Options tool:

1. Open My Computer.
2. On the Tools menu (or the View menu), click Folder Options (or click Options).
3. Click the File Types tab.
4. In the Registered file types list, click the specific Office document type (for example, Microsoft Excel Worksheet), and then click Advanced (or click Edit).
5. In the Edit File Type dialog box, click to clear the Browse in same window check box (or click to clear the Open Web documents in place check box).
6. Click OK.

UPDATE: The Genesis space capsule crashed in the desert after a parachute system intended to slow it's descent failed to deploy. The plan was for a helicopter crew to hook the parachute in mid-air in order to prevent the capsule from impacting the ground even under parachute speeds, but without the chute the capsule impacted at nearly 200 miles per hour.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is home to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Scientists there do incredible research about many, many things - including our sun and such important and fascinating things as the solar winds, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and solar flares. My stepfather pioneered the term CME and has dedicated years of work in the field. I have not had a chance to talk to him yet about what the loss of this experiment means to his colleagues, but I imagine it's a real heart-breaker. There is still some optimism that there will be usable solar matter collected from the mission, and my fingers are crossed.

At precisely 8:52:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), northwest of Bend, Oregon, a fireball will appear in the sky: a white-hot dot of light, brighter than the planet Venus, gliding across the blue morning sky.

No, it's not a scary movie, it's a space capsule returning to earth after being jettisoned by the Genesis spacecraft. Inside are samples of our sun's solar wind particles, which are being returned to earth for research.

If you live in Southern Oregon (from Bend to the southeast), Southern Idaho or Northern Nevada, look up in the sky at about 8:52 a.m. today - and take a video - I am curious what this will look like!

• Viewer's map here
• Story here