A Tip for Your NLS Talking Book Player

So, I've found lots of tutorials for the NLS Digital Talking Book Player, and there is a built-in guide and manual. However, the one thing I have not seen mentioned is how to get the serial number and version of your player. This is needed for getting downloads specifically for your player, such as an RFBD user authorization key to play your RFBD books on your NLS Digital Talking Book Player (yes you can do this!). So I thought I'd make a quick note of how to find your serial number for this.

1. Turn your player on without a cartridge or flash drive in the player.
2. Press the Sleep button (the half-moon) ten times until it says "Serial Number."
3. Write down your serial number for future reference. It will repeat the information (serial number and version) until you press the play/stop button (the large, bright green button between the bottom arrow buttons).
4. Now you have the serial number of your NLS player, you can enter it to authorize it to play RFBD books!

Straight Talk about Vision Loss

While visiting the National Federation of the Blind website's audio/video center, I came across a great program called Straight Talk. This is a web-based video series hosted by the NFB Jernigan Institute's executive director. It discusses "issues surrounding blindness and vision loss," according to the NFB page about the series, found at NFB Straight Talk. The latest in the series was recorded at the 2010 NFB National convention in Dallas, Texas, and is about Blackboard 9.1, the version that many schools use today.

Just a Little Game to Busy Your Mind

I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I'm just sitting there bored, waiting for a book or movie to download, waiting for a webpage to load, or just waiting for a phone call. I hate just sitting there, but really don't want to do anything sometimes...so I play a little game called Finger Panic.

This game is free and so very simple. It doesn't have any instructions, so you have to either do trial and error or...well, read my post about it, because I'm going to give you a few hints about the game.

First of all, you are placed at random in a five by five square grid. You are trying to find the orbs (I call them orbs, they are just a sound, really. The creators call them crackerjacks). Every time you get an orb, the timer speeds up. It doesn't tell you how long you have left, which means you can't panic at the last second, so just play every second as if it is your last!

Now, a hint. When you run into a wall, it gives you a boom sound. Find a corner, where the boom sound is on two sides when you try to go in those directions. From there, scan the rows back and forth by hitting an arrow key four times one way, over the next way, and on. For example, I might start in the bottom left corner. I go up four times, right once, down four times, right once, up four times, etc. until I get to the far side. Then I like to switch it up, left four times, down once, right four times, etc. You have to be very fast to get many. My high score of yet is 700 (you get 50 points for each orb you collect, so that's 14 orbs).

The game can be found at BSC Games.

enjoy!