Trout is an audio player that DC member Skwire started writing as an entry to our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) Challenge on DonationCoder.  For those of us who aren't into fancy skins and prefer a more compact, clean, standard listview user interface, Trout is a breath of fresh air.

http://skwire.dcmembers.c.../pages/software/trout.php

Trout has tons of features that one might expect in a serious audio player (lyrics, album art, etc.).  But truthfully I don't care about or use such features.  What I wanted to write about was how uniquely useful Trout is for listening to Audiobooks.


Why is Trout good for listening to Audiobooks?

Trout makes it really simple to load up a directory of tracks and sort by filename or track name, and makes it really easily to save and load playlists.  Ok nothing special there -- but it's done well and no weirdness like the Microsoft Media Player where its hard to work with the song list or sort by different fields.

It has an option that will announce, using text-to-speech (or a simple tone), the audio file tracks as they are played.  This can be incredibly useful in two situations when listening to audio books.  First, it helps you remember which tracks you were last listening to when you went to sleep.  And second, it helps you navigate tracks using the keyboard (media keys are supported) even when the monitor is off.

It has a very nice big track progress display that you can click on to easily jump around.

While these may seem like minor features -- they do make Trout the best audio player for audio books that i have found.

I've been putting off again and again making screencast demos of my programs.. I know it would be a useful thing to have a bunch of short demos showing how to do certain things and what features are available, etc.

So I've come up with an idea to force me to finally make these screencasts, and that is to pledge to release one per day, every day, in the month of August.

Every day next month I will release another short screencast for one of my programs, 30 in total by the end of the month.

DC member Jibz has restarted his programming blog, "Hard to C".

Jibz is an old school c/c++/asm coder so this is probably going to be one of those things that experts get more out of than new programmers, but worth a visit no matter what:

http://www.hardtoc.com/

1. Newsletter Editorial - Part One

Greetings everyone.  It's been over 30 days since the last newsletter went out -- with all this summer heat it seems that we've slipped back into the once-a-month newsletter habit.  We will try hard to get back to releasing the newsletter twice a month so that we don't have such a hard time figuring out what items to leave out of each edition.

For this edition there are a bunch of fun things to tell you about.  First of all, those of you familiar with the DonationCoder website will know that we have a little bird/duck mascot named Cody (designed by DC member and artist Nick Pearson), who can be seen all over the site.  This month we commissioned another artist, who goes by the name of OneTrueTree and shows her work on the Etsy.com website, to create a "plushie" (teddy bear type doll) of Cody, and so was born.. Baby Cody!  He is extremely cute (see pictures below) and fun to hold.  Rather than keep him caged up in my house (especially in the Midwest where it's blisteringly hot) -- we're going to send him around the globe using a site that has been mentioned on DC in the past: ToyVoyagers.com.  Basically, the creature has his own web page and people can volunteer to host him and take him along on their adventures before passing him along to the next host.  Even we speak he is winging his way across the Atlantic to England to visit Nick (nudone).  After that he may make a tour of England and then head off to the Orient.  Wish him luck -- and if you want to host him for a visit, just make a post on that thread and get in line!


2. Newsletter Editorial - Part Two

Next up.. Monkeys.  Back in February of 2008, longtime DC member Ampa (Rob Fisher) made a post on the forum asking for people who might be willing to play test a board game he had been working on.  It was just a printable sheet of pieces and some brief instructions.  Fast forward to June 2009.. and the game has actually been published, looks beautiful, and is a big hit(!)  It's really exciting to see a project come to fruition like this, and I hope we will continue to share in these kinds of journeys.  To celebrate the success of the game, Rob is going to let us give away a copy of the game to one lucky DC member -- so make sure you check out this month's giveaway and enter to win a copy.

Lastly, I'm thrilled to announce that DC member Hamradio (Carroll Dearstone) has finally completed what I consider to be one of the holy grails of plugins for my Find and Run Robot (FARR) application.  If you've been waiting for an excuse to try FARR, this would be a good time to do it.  His plugin, aptly titled "hamNotes", is basically a minimalistic note taking tool that uses FARR to perform note addition and most importantly instant search as you type.  While there are a lot of really excellent and powerful note taking tools, many of us just want something really simple that is always available and that lets us *instantly* add new notes and find existing notes when we need them, with no muss or fuss.  HamNotes fills this role perfectly.  There are features for keyword tagging and you can edit, print, and delete notes, etc.  Most important is how efficiently you can add and find notes, so that it becomes second nature and you don't get distracted in the process.  The notes are stored in a clean xml plaintext file so you can easily import and export them to and from other programs.  Great, great stuff.  Please do consider sending hamradio some donationcredits if you find the plugin useful.

DC server admin Gothic found this neat site which keeps tabs on the latest security tools and issues:

http://www.security-database.com/toolswatch/

Well, I missed the set ~48 hour (I've read 75k download limit) download window from Microsoft, however I did still manage to obtain a copy and have it running on my machine now (alongside Spyware Terminator and Threatfire, no problems).

Figured I would give my opinion/experience thus far and maybe PM a link to the installer to those that may be inclined to give it a test of their own...

My experience:

The setup is straightforward and fast. It takes a whole 60 seconds from launch (of Setup) to launch (of MSE) - Windows Validation is tested before installation, and since mine has already passed it took ~1 second to see that and pass me on through. Once finished, it prompted me to start MSE and download updates + run a quick scan.

...

My opinion:

While it isn't great, it isn't as disappointing as I was expecting - false positives aren't automatically removed (ONLY because I changed the option before it found them, OTHERWISE it would have removed them permanently, so take note of that! ) and it gives you a nice little window when it finds something. The GUI, while basic, keeps it just right for always-on protection and the occasional scan.

Anyone else have MSE? Have an opinion? If you would like the installer, send a PM my way and I'll get you a link (or some googling may work, but Microsoft may be tearing it down from 3rd party download sites already).

Table of contents for this week's edition of Tech News Weekly:

• 1. Social Networking Big Boys Must Bow to EU Data Laws
• 2. Web Slows After Jackson's Death
• 3. Pirate Bay Retrial Call Rejected
• 4. FTC to Crack Down On Undisclosed "sponsored" Blogging
• 5. China Not Backing Off Despite Filter Code Post On Wikileaks
• 6. Achtung! RapidShare Ordered to Filter All User Uploads
• 7. Australian 'Net Filter to Block Video Games, Too
• 8. Google Access Disrupted in China
• 9. Star Trek: Confusion

Here is a great productivity tip from the Onion:


http://www.theonion.com/c...udy_finds_working_at_work

Today Cnet download blog procalims "AutoCopy" the 'best' firefox extension.  Worth checking out:

http://download.cnet.com/...1-2007_4-10274187-12.html

After 2 years it looks like there is going to be a grand winner to the Netflix Prize, a one million dollar programming challenge to improve the netflix movie recommendation algorithm.. amazing.

http://tech.slashdot.org/...ze-May-Have-Been-Achieved

The nice thing will be reading about the final algorithms.. we've actually known most of the details of it since the authors are academics and published papers on their algorithms.. But it will be interesting to hear how they squeezed out the last drops of performance.

Nice review of FARR on the (great) makeuseof.com site today:


http://www.makeuseof.com/...-files-quickly-with-farr/

DC member hewhoeatspie has recently shared with us a few cool new little freeware utilities he's made.  Turns out he also writes a neat little freeware review blog called FreewareWire.

http://freewarewire.blogspot.com

I used a program that generated file names as:
consonant : vowel : consonant : vowel : consonant ...
Using random letters, it generated 15 letter names AND you could always pronounce them!

I would like a program to generate and output:
random words of my specified length;
number of words generated of my choosing;
in the form above, consonant : vowel : consonant;
displayed in a table for easy looking;
(letters can be used more than once in the same name)