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So What's in Your Podcast Directory?

Posted Apr 15, 2006
to: Fun Stuff

Since the whole "Podcasting Revolution", I've found a lot of neat podcasts to listen to, so much that I hardly listen to my own music anymore. Here's a list of some of my favorite feeds that I'm subscribed to in iTunes. Click on any of the titles to go directly to the iTunes music store where you can subscribe to them.

ABC News Nightline

ABC World News Now - Videocast

ABC's attempt to provide a 20 minute daily customized video newscast. All of the day's news in 5 minutes, and then 15 minutes of filler garbage, like their 'partnership with Google', where they discuss a few of the top rising searches in Google, followed by a discussion of something internet related, such as the latest viral videos. Honestly, why can't they just provide the nightly newscast that they run at 5pm each night?

All in the Mind

Psychology discussions with an Australian accent. 20-30 minutes each, they discuss some interesting topics.

Discovery Channel Features

I haven't decided on an opinion on this one, they are weekly 20-30 minute podcasts discussing one of their current shows, but in audio format only. Some of the other science related podcasts below are much better.

NBC News - Meet the Press

NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams

The nightly news, but in audio format. Actually, I find that I don't miss the video all that much. Most of the time, the news is nothing but a talking head, why stare at it when I can be working on something else? If I need to see something that they talked about, footage of just about anything is almost always somewhere on the web and is easily findable with a quick search.

New Scientist Podcast

News and Events in the scientific community, or at least the News and Events that their magazine is publishing this week. All sarcasm aside, the stories are usually pretty interesting.

Newshour with Jim Lehrer Podcast | PBS

Most of the Newshour TV show, broken up into segments by subject, and nicely titled. I usually listen to these

NOW | PBS

On the Media from NPR/WNYC

The media, discussing the media.

Penn Jillette - Free FM

Penn, of Penn & Teller fame, has his own daily talk show. Definitely subscribe to it, it's pretty darn entertaining. Too bad they only publish them in a big batch once a week! What's so hard about publishing them each day after the show airs, it's not like it's magic!

Real Time with Ball Maher

Politically incorrect political round table discussion. Airs each week on HBO, and they provide the entire thing as an audiocast. Good for them. Even though I have HBO, I wouldn't turn on the show and watch it, it's nice to be able to listen as I do other things.

Science Friday

4 or 5 shows each Friday, varying in length from 10 to 30 minutes, about current scientific news. This is by far my favorite of my science related podcasts.

Security Now!

After listening to a few of these, you'll want to shut off your internet connection! Good information and discussions about internet security. They discuss routers, encryption, viruses, and all sorts of other things.

Terra: The Nature of Our World | PBS

I just found this recently. It's a short (10-20 minute) PBS video podcast about nature-related topics.

The Onion Radio News

Faux news. Sometimes a nice refresher after listening to all of the other (bad) news for the day. It's starting to wear a bit thin though, more and more lately, I find my self glancing at the titles, getting a quick chuckle out of the first 10 seconds, and then then moving on. Not every joke needs to be padded to exactly one minute, and it's a bit formulaic.

The World: Technology from BBC/PRI/WGBH

Well produced technology stories.

Washington Week Podcast | PBS

More Politics

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Special Bonus Podcasts

These are two special podcasts. They are a bit different from all of the other podcasts. Subscribe at your own risk. These links don't go to the iTunes music store, as they aren't published there. Right click on them and copy the link to the clipboard. Then go to iTunes and choose Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast, and then paste in the link.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. You can sign up for an account, and then you can add your own bookmarks to the list. When an audio or a video file is bookmarked by any user anywhere on the web, they are added to these two feeds and downloaded directly to iTunes. You'll find all sorts of interesting things, and even more not so interesting things. We're talking like a 100-1 ratio of crap to interesting at times, but I find the few random gems to be worth wading through the rest of the garbage. I've got my Universal remote control all configured with iRed/IRTrans to skip 20 seconds forward and backward at a push of a button, so I can quickly fast forward and scan through a bunch of files, delete out all of the cruft, and then go back an listen to the rest at my leisure.

Del.icio.us Audio

Music, Technology Panels, wierd music, mashups, netlabels, things you've heard of, things you've never heard of, and more.

Del.icio.us Video

Music videos, cool commercials, viral videos, demo reels, screencasts, short clips from the Daily Show, news, amateur video blogs, random vacation videos, videos that defy description, and more. Basically, if it's readable by QuickTime and available on the web, eventually it will land here.

Make sure that you've got a few gigs of free space on your hard drive, 200+ files a day between the two podcasts aren't uncommon.

Be especially careful with the video feed. Occasionally, some jackass decides to bookmark a porno clip, and you'll be fast forwarding through random videos and all of a sudden come across some nasty ass porn. These are usually pretty easy to spot, as they are always under 20 seconds, are poorly named, and are usually bookmarked in a batch. Before playing the video podcast, I just quickly scan down the list and delete everything that meets this criteria.

Anyways, that's all of them. Be sure and tell me if I'm missing out on anything cool.

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Phone Companies: QUIT LITTERING ON MY DOORSTEP!!!

Posted Apr 04, 2006
to: Random Rantings

I just received yet ANOTHER stupid phonebook on my doorstep today. I would have thought that these would have gone the way of the dinosaur by now, but I guess they don't understand that we have the internet and don't need a book that was outdated before the printing run was finished.

Maybe we should all take them back and drop them on their doorsteps, then again, we would all get tickets for littering.

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How to Find and Replace text across 20,000 files

Posted Mar 03, 2006
to: Things I Learned Today

So I needed to remove HTML headers from about 20,000 files. I pretty much suck at shell scripting, but GUI editors choke hard on 20,000 files in a project directory. I tried Xcode and TextMate, and knew from past experience that GoLive wasn't even worth opening up for that many files.

A bit of Googling, and I was able to come up with the following snippet of code to remove the title tag but leave its title (the $1):

perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<TITLE.*>(.*)<\/TITLE>//gi'

After a bit of playing around and examining the files for exactly what I needed, and I was able to create the following shell script:

#/bin/sh # Clean out html, head, and body elements echo "HTML" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/<HTML.*>//gi' echo "HEAD" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<HEAD.*>//gi' echo "META" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<META.*>//gi' echo "TITLE" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<TITLE.*>(.*)<\/TITLE>//gi' echo "SCRIPT" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<SCRIPT.*>(.*)<\/SCRIPT>//gi' echo "LINK" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<LINK.*>//gi' echo "/HEAD" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<\/HEAD.*>//gi' echo "BODY" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<BODY.*>//gi' echo "/BODY" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<\/BODY.*>//gi' echo "/HTML" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\t*<\/HTML.*>//gi' # Delete out all multiple linebreaks echo "linebreaks" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\n+/\n/g' # Fix all image references # /common/stats/images/bar.gif # to # /controlpanel/images/yellow.gif echo "images" find . -name '*.php' | xargs perl -0777 -pi -e 's/\/common\/stats\/images\/bar.gif/\/controlpanel\/images\/yellow.gif/g'

I just had to place it in the root directory that I was working with and let it run through the files one by one. It's actually working right now. I'm guessing that it's going to take about an hour and a half to do it's thing.

I'm sure that there are better optimized ways to do this, feel free to offer any suggestions.

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New Kitten!

Posted Mar 03, 2006
to: Our "Kids"

We got a new kitten. I spent a month or so and watched Craigslist for a posting that sounded right, and finally found one from a no kill shelter in The Dalles called CatLink. We drove out on Tuesday and came back with a beautiful little girl named Grace. Apparently she was left at a gas station in White Salmon and rescued. She is the sweetest little thing, purrs non stop, and follows us all around the house.

Big Cat was PISSED! He spent the evening all puffed up and growled and hissed and glared at us for the first day, but has finally started to warm up a bit.

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Why do you hate Dashboard?

Posted Feb 28, 2006
to: Mac OS X

I don't get people's problem with Dashboard.Take the ease of creating an HTML and CSS interface, and add the ability to access and use all of the unix system commands at the same time.That is a pretty powerful combination, and without the learning curve of Xcode, IB, or Cocoa, which I'm still struggling with.:)

Dashboard has become my laptop's gateway to the surrounding world.I purchased an iRed USB to remote control device, and have built a bunch of fun little widgets for all of my remote controls in the house, so Dashboard 'controls' my stereo, TV, Cable Box, Air Conditioner, and even the Roomba! With my Vonage widget, Dashboard 'dials' any number that I want it to for me. And let's not forget Couch Potato! :)

I've only got three widgets on my dashboard that I didn't build myself (calculator, weather, and Indigo, for controlling my X-10 lighting, something I definitely can't live without').The other 15 or so are all Widgets that I've built for myself.Most of my widgets interface with the command line version of PHP that comes with OS X for all of the heavy lifting.This is done through the widget.system() call to a php script which outputs a file when it's done with it's job, and the use of XMLHTTPRequest to parse the resulting file and display it in a div.

For automating day to day tasks, it can't be beat.For my own use, I've created a mysql widget for syncing any of the MySQL databases on my laptop to/from our web server using the command line mysql and mysqldump commands, another one that uses rsync to sync any folder I drop on it to/from our webserver (not quote done with this one yet, but close).Another widget reads a php script on our webserver every 10 seconds, which gives me current load averages, mysql connections, etc, parses it, and emails me and sends me text messages if there is a problem.

So, yeah, there are lots and lots of widgets I can't live without, they just all happen to be widgets I've built for myself!

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This is about Cat

Posted Feb 21, 2006
by Jason
to: Our "Kids"

Cat is weird sometimes and freaks out.

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You've Got to Love the iTMS!

Posted Feb 21, 2006
to: Fun Stuff

It's pretty damn cool that you can buy TV shows on iTunes now. Have you bought any TV for your iPod yet, or hooked that computer of yours up to the TV where it belongs?

I bought the pilot from Sleeper Cell, a Showtime series that is supposed to be a bit like 24.

They've also got a free episode of some new show called Conviction. I'm not a bit Law and Order fan, but I figured Rachael might like it.

I also grabbed the free singles of the week which sounded pretty cool. All in all I ended up spending just under 10 bucks and got 10 songs by 9 different artists (Rachael had to have two Gwen Stefani songs) and two videos of new shows to sample. I'm just hoping that HBO follows suit and I can cancel my cable and just buy the Sopranos.

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First Post!

Posted Feb 21, 2006
to: Fun Stuff

Here is the first post on my new blog...Pretty Exciting, huh?

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