Speeding up Barbri lectures (for Mac) and the philosophical dilemma

So you wanna speed up your Barbri lectures? (I presume that's why you are here) I have a few suggestions.

Into:
If you are anything like me, you walked into the Barbri class and though (among other things) t: F-this I'm going to watch these video's on my computer and finish the lectures early and save myself 30+hours. As there are about 30 lectures (not including the preview) each lecture being about 3 hours that's 105 hours of watching lectures watch them at 1.5 times the speed (some are do-able at 2.0x) and you are now looking at ≈70 hours! Almost 2 days of your life is handed back to you!  This leaves so much more time for Facebooking!  If only I hadn't taken that sabbatical from FB like all my other friends :-\ .

My Experience, a brief overview of what I have done to try to speed up the lectures:
 The problem: Barbri has changed they way they present their content, it is done by streaming Flash player.  And thanks to their friends at Brightcove, there is no way to speed up the lectures.

1. Tried every shortcut I could think of--nothing
2. Emailed Barbri 4 months ago--nothing (or they are trying to come up with a solution)
3. Tried downloading lectures to my ipad and listening to them at 1.5x the speed.  This did work at one time, it now does not.  There are to explanations I can think of a) Barbri changed the way the content appears b) Apple removed the speed up content option that was embedded in their Quicktime player
4. Read through numerous forums and blogs, all of which were pretty entertaining. Someone suggested Myspeed by enounce
5. Bought Myspeed (≈ $30)--I now can speed up any flash video! Hooray beer! But, Barbri/brightcove does not supply sufficient stream/bandwidth speed to do this :-(.  Here is what I mean: the videos are sped-up for about 10 seconds, but then you have to wait for the stream to refresh, for about 2-10 seconds.  The time saved is marginal, I clocked it and I did about 12 minutes of lecturing in 10. In short Myspeed is a solution, it is however, not the solution your heart desires.
6. Called Barbri tech support, he said to "try a different browser"or that "having my laptop plugged-in to a power source" might help...Genius.  Nice guy, but he clearly believes in magic. He did however say that he will add my suggestion to "speed up the stream rate" to the circular file, where all the suggestions go. ( Once you are barred are you really going to follow-up with your complaint? Didn't think so.  This is a great business model.
7. Tried speeding up the lectures on a PC, this no longer works.

At this point I thought to myself: You know, it really odd how shitty business (or political) practices passively coerce people into breaking the law.  This is a perfect example, I am not asking for something extraneous, it should be a simple fix.  Yet if someone offered me a USB drive with all the Barbri lectures on it in MP3 format I would have a hard time turning it down. Even worse, if there was a torrent with all the lectures, it would be tempting to download it.  I'm so close to becoming a lawyer, should I chance $160,000 degree in order to save 2 days of my life?  What if they were the last 2 days of my life?  Indeed a moral/legal quandary.

Here are the options I am presented with:

1. Record the lectures to my computer 
2. Try to find a droid based tablet or phone and see if you can speed up the barbri lectures on the Barbri app. (which I will try later on today.

option 1) This doesn't sound like a bad plan.  However, recording the lecture, even for personal use is most likely against Barbri's terms and conditions ( I am just guessing), moreover it's probably not legal.  So that scares me from doing it, so I won't.  I will just have to wait for a better solution. However, if you call and ask Barbri and they give you permission (which I would get in writing). Here is how I would do it.

1. Paid for programs, Wiretap, Hijack...use the Google machine.
2. I already paid 4k to Barbri, let's do this for free.
1. Download Audacity--Audacity  
2. Download Soundflower 
3. Follow these instructions http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/User:BillWharrie/Using_Soundflower_to_record_streaming_audio
4. Use the export to save File>export>mp3
5. Download VLC player ( you should have this anyway)
1. Use Command + (+/=) key to speed up.
2. Missed a part? Use: Command+option+‹ To go back 10 seconds.
6. Every night record the lecture, listen to it the next day and delete it.

Again, I don't condone doing this without the express consent of Barbri, and even still you might get in trouble.  I am only writing this blog is let Barbri know that they are causing people attempt to violate their terms and conditions because they are not providing the experience that: a) they did at one time, and we relied on that experience when choosing Barbri. b) That they could, with a simple fix.

Either way, Crush the Bar!

Cheers

www.stpetersburginjurylawyers.com

EVO vs. Iphone 4 and Droid vs. iOS for the REAL person

I don't think that this blog post is going to be ground shattering or anything, but I've been thinking about these things and they need to be said to help you and for my mental wellbeing.
My goal is to make this as simple as possible for someone who might be considering an Evo or Evo shift, one who is tired of AT&T , wants to change it up/ see what droid is all about. I applaud you for stepping outside of your comfort zone and looking to other options that might suit you. I went from the Iphone 4 to the evo because
1) ATT gets terrible reception (contrary to their misleading coverage map).
2) I kept putting people on mute and hanging up with them
3) I got a really killer deal w/ Sprint, via a friend. The death grip thing wasn't an issue for me because if I have 1 or 2 bars I am not going to be calling anyone anyway.
4) ATT is retardedly expensive (unless you are on a family plan, and it's still ridiculous)
Good bye iphone 4, HELLO Evo!...well I was kind of excited, the research I did pretty much told me what I was about to figure out.
1) It's pretty big compared to an iphone in your pocket, the screen is really big.
2) It feels kinda cheap (w/out a case) not that I care.
3) 4G is a load of shit, doesn't seem much faster than 3G and KILLS the battery. Don't get sprint or Verizon for 4G it's not worth it.
4) THE BATTERY IS TERRIBLE!!!! If there is one thing that you pull away, extrapolate from my mindless rambling, it should be this. THE BATTERY LIFE OF THIS PHONE IS THE SUX (that's how bad it is). I thought "I'll upgrade from the 1500 (stock) mah to 2000" It helped, a little bit most because I had an extra battery that I could always have charged. My girlfriend got the 3500 MAH that seemed to work for her, but if you were worried about the 4.3 in screen being too big, then you might feel like you are wearing a VCR with the 3500 mah battery.
People say " You need to root it; get task killers, kill all tasks, turn off data, turn off Bluetooth, wifi, GPS. etc" However, even after doing all these things that battery STILL couldn't handle 5-6 hours of average phone use. That means, no photos, maybe 20 minutes of talking. 20-30 texts, maybe 5 minutes of internet usage, 5 minutes of game play....In short, no matter how you slice it the battery life sucks. I presume the same will be said abou the evo shift.
5) Droid/HTC
For ever cool option that droid has, there is something about it that pisses me off equally if no more than it's pro value. for example
Cool- Very customizable
sucks- Still not very intuitive.
Cool- very cool apps and keyboards, format layouts, background animation, emulators
Sucks- slows your phone down a lot and guess what, kills the shit out of your battery
6) interchangeable memory card-- I like this and I hate this. I is good for because it can be removed, upgraded, etc. However, it makes managing apps, music, and documents kind of shitty sometimes they just don't work. Moreover, when I plugged the evo into my computer (mac) it didn't want to eject it (when i'd put music on it or anything). That being said if they can get the app management down (ie some apps don't want to exist on your memory card, they only want to exist on your phone's memory, which bogs it down, and kills battery more), but if they feature was solid I'd love it. In fact if the iphone would let you keep you music and podcasts in an external memory card, I think it would be great, so long as it was implemented properly.
7) Google maps sucks
I don't know why by the google maps feature, was either perfect or shitty, simple searches like "home depot" (or as I like to call it Home Despot) might not work, or will tell you to go somewhere there wasn't a HD. I don't know I didn't like it, and I wasn't very good. And guess what? GPS KILLS your battery!
8) I almost forgot, the location of the "home button" to take it out of sleep Is TERRIBLE it's where the power button is on the iphone is and it's just as small and not ergonomically sound.

I am not really done but I'd like to sum up because this is just getting ridiculously long for something that was suppose to be simple.

Evo- Could be great, Droid is very innovative but still isn't very solid. BATTERY SUX,
Iphone- hardware needs work, not very customizable, but simple and easy to use, better battery life than Evo.

I'd choose the iphone 4 even though ATT sucks, I don't know much about Verizon, but I don't think it can be that bad.
As for now I am using my brother's iphone 3G, old school style, and you know what? I honestly don't mind! I haven't charged it all day 15 hours so far, I've talked on the phone for about an hour, used my internet briefly, downloaded 2 apps, one was a big one over wifi, listened to music as I went for a jog about 20 min and I still have about 25-30% battery life. This will be fine until i5 (that's what I'd call it) or iphone 5 comes out this summer, which I am waiting for.

For the record, I do like most of Apple products, but I would be happy to buy something that worked better or that was better than an iphone. I didn't have a terrible experience with Droid, I just didn't know what to expect, some days I was content and others I was annoyed; however I see a lot of potential in Droid.