It's not tied to a single vendor's phone ecosystem. It's on Google Play. I'm on a OnePlus and can get it fine.

With all the miles of rope he already has, as much as I'd like to see it happen, if it was going to happen, it would have already. We're fucked.

Just yesterday I was looking at the idea of moving over to Spotify for listening to my podcasts, and it lacks some really basic functionality, such as being able to mark episodes as listened to. If I'm already caught up on a podcast that has hundreds of episodes, I don't want it trying to get me to listen to those older episodes again. It was a total show-stopper for me, literally.

If anyone knows differently, I'd love to hear it.

The chat client ICQ was doing this back in 1998. Why is it surprising that this would still be possible 20 years later?

Without even trying, I see similar results on my Honda Fit. It's estimated for 27 city, 33 highway, and driving about 40/60 split of city and highway miles, I average about 38 mpg, and this is in hilly New Jersey. In flat Texas (DFW area) I would regularly average 42 to 43 mpg, and if I was really trying to save gas, I could eek out upper 40s or low 50s just by driving conservatively. (No crazy stuff like shutting off the engine while moving, or other bizarre stuff I've heard of self proclaimed "hypermilers" doing.)

I think Sprint missed a real opportunity using "star" instead of "pound".

##Mom

I am in a similar situation to you. I also work in a company (distribution and corporate side of after sales parts for an auto manufacturer) that does not allow installation of non-approved software, and while I agree with some of the other posters regarding getting into possible firing territory by going against company policy, sometimes the experience can still be useful to help you move up or around in your company. Try to associate your tinkering with something already related to your job, or to help others in your department. Depending on the size of your company, strictness of management and company policy, you may wind up using a hobby to make lives easier for you and those around you. Or you may get canned. You don't say what kind of work you normally do or what sector of industry you work in, but you have several options. Here are some of the options I have looked at and used.

Personally, my first choice would be to find something that is already available to you without the need to install new software and work within that area. For example, you probably hve a web browswer available on uour work computer, and you already work with HTML and CSS, so you could move on to JavaScript. You can make little standalone projects using just these that are available to run unchanged on just about any computer. There are, of course, limits to this, such as local file access and things, but projects like TiddlyWiki may have some pointers. Another option within this realm is taking a look at the office suite available to you. For example, if you have MS Access or Excel on hand, you can make lots of things by getting into VBA scripting. (I recommend Access only because it lends itself better to application development. If you know enough VBA, you can just about make any Office app do what you want, but it's harder to do data manipulation in Word for example).

Another option, of you feel braver is to go the PortableApp route, like you mentioned. You can find portable versions of some scripting languages, such a s Python, which are workable. The downside is that if you decide you need a specific library that doesn't respect being shoehorned into being "portable" (in the sense of being able to run it from an external flash drive or hard drive without leaving traces on the host computer) it could lead to possible discovery by your IT group, depending on how invasive they are in their tracking.

Along in this portable app group, one item I might suggest trying is a scripting language called Rebol. (rebol.com). It's multiplatform interpreter and GUI library in a single file that has some interesting features. Depending on how you run it, it may put a couple of folders in the folder it exists in, but other than that, I think it's pretty "quiet".

Outside of that, some of the posters above have some neat ideas about either remote access to your home computer or utilizing online programming environments. I may even look into these for myself, as the may be feasible depending on what is currently not off limits thought the proxy at work.

By going with the "using what's already available to you" route, whether it's a web browser or an office suite, you may be better suited to present some of your projects and ideas to coworkers and management, since by using those, you technically may not be violating your company's do-not-install rule. It doesn't mean it's bulletproof as they could view creation of new scripts and projects as a violation of the rule, depending on how strict they are. You're the one that has to use your judgement and figure out what you think they will or will not allow, and whether or not it puts you in danger of getting fired.

Sounds like a case of kennitalia envy.

Why does it smell like sea water in here?

I'm personally a big fan of Linux Mint. It builds off of Ubuntu, but it comes already setup with a number of proprietary items that other distros don't want to include, such as flash , mp3 and NVidia support. It has the familiar Windows-like setup you mentioned and it's easy to maintain with the mint-update tool, which lets the user know when there are updates to install. (I know other distros have similar utilities, but Mint's never seemed to break anything on an update.) It also has a number of other mint-* tools that make maintenance very easy and gives it a nice polish even over Ubuntu.

I was having the same problem with Jamendo, and then realized that my issue was that I had flashblock or adblock turned on and it surpressed the embedded player in the side bar. Once I allowed that through and allowed it to load fully, then clicking the play button next to a song or album brought up the mini-window embedded player and it worked fine.

I just hope they don't use it near any pools.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqzlDj0N47g