fling93 loves fishies

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Adventures in Podcasting

As I mentioned earlier, I’m taking part in “an open source audio-literary attempt to harness the power of the many to record and disseminate, in podcast form, books from the public domain.” Namely, LibriVox. Essentially, a bunch of us volunteered to record ourselves reading chapters from books available freely from Project Gutenberg, and Hugh is assembling them into a podcast.

The book we’re doing right now is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. I was originally assigned chapter four, but the guy doing chapter three needed some more time to sort through issues with his recording setup, so I got bumped up in the batting order (despite the fact that I have a lousy on-base percentage).

Anyway, that’s how I spent the last weekend. So without further ado, here’s my reading of Chapter 3. It clocks in at 33:48. For those who missed out on the earlier chapters, you can get chapter one here, and chapter two here (these are read by other people). You can also subscribe to the LibriVox RSS feed or their podcast feed.

And if you don’t care about the minute and uninteresting details of the story behind the making of this recording, you can stop reading right now. Those of you who are too bored to bother to look for something else more interesting, continue on (there’s a cute kitty cat picture!).

The RoboDJ Weighted Shuffler for Winamp

Somebody noticed that I use the RoboDJ weighted shuffler plugin for Winamp. They also used it regularly but had lost it after a Windows reinstall. Since the robodj.org page is no longer up, they asked if I had a copy that I could send them. I responded that I did, but by that time they had found it online, albeit on a page that doesn’t turn up when you Google for it.

Since I have a somewhat decent Google PageRank for reasons that will forever be a mystery to me, let me see if I can rectify this matter by linking to Burnap’s excellent RoboDJ for Winamp plugin as many times as possible. Alas, he’s no longer maintaining RoboDJ, but he does have the source code available if anybody out there wants to take a crack at it. And of course you can still download and install RoboDJ.

Basically, RoboDJ is a weighted-shuffler plugin for the Winamp MP3 player for Windows. It’s ideal for those of you who don’t like building lots of playlists and prefer just to put your entire music collection on random shuffle. The weighted part means that if you assign a song a higher weight, RoboDJ will give it a higher probability of selection. Pretty handy for automatically listening your favorite songs and artists more often than the other songs that you have. And did I mention that it’s free (although donations are welcome)?

Yeah, I know the Mac crowd will say that iTunes already does this with the Party Shuffle, but for those of us who do our music listening at work and have to compile on our machines, the slim and trim Winamp is far preferable to iTunes. And I like that RoboDJ gives you finer control than iTunes’s four-star system, which doesn’t let you specify how much more often it plays a four-star song than a three-star song. To be sure RoboDJ’s user interface isn’t great, but it does the job. You can always change weights manually by editing a text file.

Anyway, even if you don’t weight any of your songs, RoboDJ is still indispensible because, let’s face it, the shuffle feature for most MP3 players sucks ass. Most of them are not very random at all, and some of them are just downright weird. For example, I’ve noticed that my Nomad Jukebox 3 will choose a lot of songs from artists alphabetically close to each other and then jump to somewhere else in the alphabet and stay there for a while, etc. This often results in several songs in a row of the same artist which I find quite annoying. RoboDJ’s shuffle algorithm is superior and doesn’t have that problem. Indeed, I’d even taken to creating randomized playlists with RoboDJ and loading them onto the Nomad (even though it kinda defeats the purpose of having your entire music collection on a portable player).

Anyhow, enough of my ramblings (I’d go on to talk about my other music listening habits, but then I might dilute the PageRank by linking to other sites). If you use Winamp, give RoboDJ a try!

CommentBlogging Ahead of My Time?

For about six months, I’ve been doing something on the bleeding edge without realizing it, and in fact, it never even occurred to me that others might find the idea useful. Now it seems to be catching on (no thanks to me), so I guess I might as well bring some more attention it now.

As I mentioned earlier, I do write quite a few comments on other blogs (although I’m nowhere near as prolific or knowledgeable or insightful as that ubiquitous uber-commenter, Praktike). Now, blog comment systems are ridiculously primitive compared to message board technology in that most blogs don’t notify you when there are replies to your comments, so you need to check back yourself. If you have quite a few comments on active threads, it’s pretty hard to remember them all.

I also find that some of my comments are great jumping off points for full-blown blog posts. For example, my lengthy On Marriage essay started off as a short comment at Winds of Change. My helluva long piece about Bush included some material that I first articulated in a comment thread about Richard Clarke at Sebastian Holsclaw’s blog (you might be surprised to know that Clarke was also the impetus behind my The Message, Not the Messenger post). And of course I even recently blatantly reposted pieces of a comment thread I participated in at Djerejian’s The Belgravia Dispatch.

Anyway, suffice to say that it’s pretty handy for me to keep track of my comments for future reference. Intially, I used a text file into which I copied and pasted the URLs of all the blogposts on which I’d commented. Well, about six months ago, it occurred to me to use del.icio.us instead.

Comment Spam and MT-Blacklist

Comment spam seems to have gotten even more rampant lately — twice last week I’ve found 20-50 new comments, all spam. And I’m also seeing more and more comment spam on other blogs (plus Brayden King’s been griping about spam recently).

Certainly, it can be a nice boost for a blogger’s self-esteem to read through comments like “Nice site!” and “You are doing a great service to the web!” and “Excellent, that was really well explained and helpful!” But after a while it gets about as old as those generic feedbacks you get from eBay, like “Great transaction, would do business again, A+++++++!!” And there’s just only so many porn links a blog can take before it starts to look a little sleazy.

Well, I hope most of you Movable Type bloggers already know about this plug-in, but in case not (and it seems Dan Drezner only found out about it last month), let me direct your attention to Jay Allen’s indispensable spam-fighting plug-in, MT-Blacklist.

iTunes visualizations & G-Force

One of the cool things about iTunes is the truly trippy visualizations, especially in full-screen mode (and the “Tripping Hard” effect, of course). Some music-snob purists might object to needing any visual accompaniment for music, but I personally find it easier to concentrate on the music when viewing a visualizer, since I’m otherwise easily distracted by other things (the visualization, on the other hand, reinforces the music). Plus, it’s just way cool.

You may or may not be aware that it responds to keyboard input. While the visualization is running, you can hit ‘H’ to bring up the Help menu, from which you have a surprising number of options. The important ones involve the various configurations, namely the waveforms, effects, and color schemes (the combination of which make up what you see). You can use keys to cycle through them manually or switch to a different random configuration. Plus, if you see a particularly interesting combination, you can map it to a key to call it up later. Several cheat-sheets for all these options are available here and a more updated one here.

But there’s more to the story than that.

Microsoft and Bundling

There’s been some discussion of bundling and Microsoft lately. Some of it is really interesting and eye-opening, but I thought I’d clear up some misconceptions myself. Warning, this is pretty long.

MT-Textile and SmartyPants

Here’s a little peek under the hood, which hopefully might be a helpful tip to other bloggers. In case those of you on my RSS feed were wondering why there were so many modified entries, it’s because I finally upgraded to Brad Choate’s MT-Textile 2.0.

For those of you who blog using Movable Type, this plugin is absolutely indispensable (a similar alternative is Jon Gruber’s Markdown, but I’ve not tried that myself, so I don’t know how it compares). It saves me a lot of typing, and more importantly, it lets me concentrate on writing instead of worrying about proper HTML syntax. Of course, it has its own syntax rules, but they’re much simpler, and they don’t take too long to learn. Here are a few examples:

Television's Replacement

While pondering on how TiVo allows me to time-shift (especially valuable when it comes to watching Formula One), hearing on NPR about the rise in popularity of Internet animations, and reading on Slashdot on how television is losing out to video games, it occurred to me how television is probably going to evolve — or be supplanted, depending on how you look at it. Perhaps my vision has been thought of by others, because it seems so darn obvious, but I haven’t seen it discussed much before.

(Update 3/20/04
Indeed, combining RSS and BitTorrent technologies achieves what I’m thinking of, as already discussed on Slashdot and in much depth by Ernest Miller in a concept he calls “broadcatching,” but note that much of the discussion is pretty technical, so my take is still worth reading.)

Hmmmm… maybe I should back up a bit. Back in my post about the shifting of creative power, I reported the unfortunate cancellation of Angel, the excellent spin-off to Buffy the Vampire Slayer that had received a burst of energy this season when Joss Whedon was able to devote his full attention to it after the end of Buffy and the cancellation of Firefly (by the way, Julian Sanchez reports that the Firefly movie has been given the go-ahead — and in other good news, Family Guy will be returning!).

In searching for a silver lining, I did note that developments in film and music seemed to indicate that the barrier to entry in the creative arts continues to drop drastically:

Sidebar Additions & XFN

As you might have noticed, I’ve done some pretty heavy-duty writing here as of late, so I’m taking a bit of a breather to play Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King on the PS2. But you may have noticed I’ve tweaked the sidebar a bit. It now includes more of my recent posts, as well as a new list of testimonials for my site, which should hopefully get more people to realize what a really strange blog this is. I’ve also made several long overdue additions to the blogroll.

And another change, albeit a more subtle one that most of you won’t notice, is that this site is finally XFN friendly. Basically, XFN allows you to specify what actual human relationship you have with the people you are linking. I know your browser probably doesn’t show them any differently (I think there’s a way for me to set up the style-sheet to do that), but for now you can take a look at the relationships I added here.

As you can see, nobody out there considers me their friend (except the fishies, who don’t know how to write HTML). You might also assume that at least nobody out there considers me their enemy, but this would actually be an incorrect assumption because XFN doesn’t (yet) have “enemy” as one of the values to choose for the “rel” attribute.

My First GarageBand Experience

Well, right after writing my SF Giants post on Sunday morning, I eagerly fired up GarageBand and spent the whole rest of the day (and Monday and Tuesday evening) playing around with it. I’ve been itching to try my hand at songwriting for the longest time, even going so far as grabbing a copy of CakeWalk Home Studio several years ago (I think this was before Windows 95, actually), but I never really got going. The most I ever did was merely transcribe the theme to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

So needless to say, I was looking forward to this, and let me tell you, it did not disappoint. This is definitely a great program to get started with, no matter what your level of musical expertise (or lack thereof). It comes with a large selection of loops where you can drag onto your song. Even more, it’ll automatically transpose a loop to match the key of the song so that it’ll sound right. Loops are actually pretty useful for the musically inclined who intend to record every single track manually, in that they can quickly kick start a song by being a placeholder that gives you a good idea of what the final song will sound like pretty early in the process (which actually did come in handy in the song that I wrote, which I’ll provide at the end). And it also comes with a large assortment of professional sounding software instruments that you can play using the virtual keyboard or your own external MIDI instrument (MIDI-to-USB interface is not included, but can be found inexpensively at most music stores).

Audioscrobbler Update & MusicMobs

I previously blogged on Audioscrobbler in an earlier post. Basically, you download a plugin for your MP3 player, and it automatically keeps track of which songs, artists, and albums you listen to the most. The idea being that you can find other users with similar tastes to discover new artists (and it protects your privacy — you only provide a username, not an e-mail address).

They’ve recently moved to a new server, so there’ve been some hiccups. Not all of the original functionality has been restored (e.g., forums, generated list of users similar to you, searching for artists), but it’s getting there. And shortly after I blogged on them, their server went down for a while, and after they came up, they’d changed the protocol, requiring users to download a new plugin. For a while, I ran into a few issues with the Winamp plugin’s song submissions, but the latest one (v1.1.4, Build 589) seems to be stable. As always, you can see what I’ve been listening to here.

National ID Card That Respects Privacy?

As a libertarian, I’ve generally opposed ideas like national identification cards, but I have to admit I’ve never thoroughly thought through the issue (whew, I’m glad I’m writing, not talking!). Turns out I had a common misconception about the whole concept, cleared up by this interesting Wired article:

The truth is, any identification system is inherently neutral; it can either respect privacy or threaten it.…
…
…a privacy-friendly card is feasible if it follows one simple rule: verification, not identification. In other words, the card would confirm identity but wouldn’t allow the government to pick you out of a crowd. There’s a model: In 1995, Canadian entrepreneur George Tomko invented an innovative technology that made it possible to lock packets of data in encrypted files, using a fingerprint as a private key. After clearing a background check, the users of a Tomko-like card would receive a digitized packet of information that said, for example, they were cleared to cross a particular border. They’d download the parcel onto a card and lock it with a thumbprint.

Using this card at a border checkpoint, they’d swipe it and then provide a thumbprint. If the print decrypted the file, the system would verify their identity. Because the fingerprints wouldn’t be stored in a central database, individuals would retain complete control over how much personal information was revealed. To maximize privacy, the system would keep no identifiable records of who had passed through, and it would not be linked with any other databases that might allow predictions of future behavior.

iTunes

Yeah, blogging’s been slow lately, partly because of the holidays, but mostly because of my new iBook, as I warned. I’m still installing utilities and neat things here and there (maybe I’ll post a summary), and I even bought a neat bag for it from WaterField Designs, but I find I spend the bulk of my time enjoying the ability to surf the web from the living room, often while watching TV in the background.

I know I’ve already mentioned in my Chaos Bleeds review that I’m a late adopter of technology, but it’s especially strange in this case because I actually used to work at a wireless LAN company — indeed, before 802.11b came out. So I’ve known about wireless networking for, like seven years, before ever really using it for myself (testing/debugging it doesn’t count). Mostly because laptops are expensive, become obsolete really quickly, and weren’t really that big a value add for me — until I started blogging.

Aside from wirelessly surfing the web for pictures of Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, and Alicia Witt… um… I mean for important news stories, I’m also spending a lot of time using iTunes. I’d been staying away from them because I don’t have an iPod, but the feature-laden but relatively bulky Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 instead, which doesn’t play AAC format music files. I’m also leaning towards moving my collection away from MP3 and towards Ogg Vorbis, which is an open patent-free format, unlike MP3, or WMA, which is a proprietary format owned by Microsoft, as my brother learned the hard way when he found out he couldn’t play his WMA collection on his new PowerBook. Ogg is also completely free of DRM (security that limits or prevents users from copying and/or burning), unlike AAC and WMA.

My New iBook

Okay, I gotta warn you that this one’s going to be a geeky post. And I don’t mean in a sci-fi sorta way, but in a techie sorta way. Anyway, I just got my new iBook in and will probably be playing with it quite a bit for the next few days, so my blogging will probably be sporadic for a while. Yeah, I’ve generally been a PC person, but so many people recommended the iBooks and PowerBooks that I couldn’t ignore them. Very happy with it so far!

Audioscrobbler

Most tools for discovering new music and new artists rely on the user rating a bunch of artists they like and dislike. Well, Audioscrobbler does this for you by keeping track of what you listen to. Using a Winamp plugin (although version 3 was worse than 2, I’ve heard the newly-released version 5 is better), it checks for songs you actually listen to (it makes sure you actually play at least half of the song, thus filtering out songs you decide to skip), and then submits it to Audioscrobbler’s server where statistics are kept on how often you’ve played each artist. You can then use this to discover other users who listen to the same artists.

By the way, this is not a commercial site that will sell your name and preferences. It doesn’t even ask for your e-mail address. The whole thing is open-source. From their “About” page:

There are no popups/adverts or any other crap, Audioscrobbler plugins are all Open Source. Audioscrobbler data is periodically released under a Creative Commons License. We are striving to eliminate any possibilities of Audioscrobbler “doing a GraceNote” by periodically releasing data collected by plugins, and keeping the plugins and protocol open-source.