Putting 'In Our Time' on your iPod

Update 9/12/11: This post is, happily, now obsolete! All episodes are now available for download. I've retained it as an example of the technique.

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I am an In Our Time junkie. The once weekly podcasts used to suffice, but my needs have grown. I want more. I need more. As with all addictions it's displaced my prior life. I used to listen to NPR. Why bother now? It's only fund raisers and "balanced" interviews between a reasonable person and a loon. Better to spend time listening to Melvyn's guests -- rationalists all. (Though I suspect Melvyn has a bit of a weakness for "alternative medicine".) After the experimenting is done, the hard core junkie must loot the archives. This is what I use:

• An iPod and iTunes
• RealAudio (Sorry. Be very careful to get the free player on the right. Thanks to litigation they're removed most of the scumware features)
• AudioHijack Pro (I think there are now cheaper, better alternatives, but I own it).
• The archive site

What you need from the archive site is the URL for the real audio stream. Consider the superb 2004 episode on China: The Warring States Period. The URL you need to copy to the clipboard is in the 'Listen Again' box above Melvyn's picture.

To set up AudioHijack Pro you need to read the section in the manual about recording using RealAudio. Sorry, AHP is not a simple program. A few tips:

• Set this up once and save it: Capture as 'mono' with a bit rate of 64 kpbs. Using AHP properly you can set all the tags you want in advance, including autonaming the saved file with the title tag using the %name% variable. You can also set the time to 45 minutes and auto-stop on silence. Use bookmarkable AAC as a format so you can readily return where I left off. Save these as your default file (See screen shots at bottom).
  
• Paste the URL you got into the source field. Edit the title field and the date fields in AHP to match the episode.
• Click Record and AHP will launch RealAudio. It will stop automatically at the time you specified or when the RA stream ends. You have to either exit AHP or click ‘Hijack’ to close the file you created. The file is about 20MB. Now drag and drop the file to iTunes.
• It won't show up in the podcast menu on the iPod (since it's not), but it's easy to create an 'In Our Times' playlist that includes both the shows delivered via podcast and those delivered via AHP.

My library is up to about 30 episodes, I think there must be 60 in all. I guess when I catch up I’ll have to review the rest of the BBC for a new drug. Time shifting and narrowcasting. Not good news for radio …

Screen shots - Audio Hijack Pro

Input view and Recording View (no effects)

IE + Onfolio spanks Firefox, Google, and Windows RSS clients

This is not good news. I've been using the new beta MSN live "toolbar", based on Onfolio's products. Microsoft acquired them recently. The "toolbar" is really a large set of extensions to IE and Windows, including Microsoft's full text search engine.

It's good. The Onfolio - Read RSS reader beats every other Windows client I've looked at - and it's free. The toolbar gives IE tabs. The rest of the Onfolio suite is enticing.

It's good, so it's also bad. IE 7 is extremely unimpressive, but IE 6 with Onfolio will displace Firefox and Google's IE toolbar from a lot of machines. In particular few other RSS clients will work with Microsoft's sharepoint RSS solution (uses another acquisition) -- thanks to Microsoft's control of user authentication.

If you have to do RSS on Windows, this is probably the solution to use. It also incorporates a posting ability which I've yet to test ....

Hard drives: sometimes there really is a difference

Presumably these findings are related to differing optimizations made by hard drive vendors ...

Macworld: Editors' Notes: Black and white differences:

... With the systems shipping with identical processors, RAM and graphics, we focused our testing attention on the hard drive. Thankfully, switching hard drives between the MacBooks is fairly painless, because we did a lot of it and found that the results in question followed the drive to whatever system it was installed in. We bought and installed a 100GB, 7,200RPM Seagate drive in the black MacBook and saw its performance benefit immediately, reducing the gap between white and black on many of our tests, like Compressor, iMovie and iTunes, while whipping the white in the more drive-intensive tasks like zipping, unzipping, and duplicating files.

The weirdest results came from our iPhoto import test, which appears to be very hard drive sensitive. Surprisingly, the winner wasn’t the Seagate 7200RPM drive, but the Fujitsu 5,400-rpm drives found in the black MacBook and 17-inch MacBook Pro. The white MacBook had a Seagate 5,400-rpm drive, which edged out the Fujitsu in zipping and unzipping large folders, but lagged far behind in the iPhoto test. The top-level specs of these drives don’t offer any explanation—both have 8MB caches and both run at 5,400-rpm. We installed, wiped, reinstalled, and moved the drives around trying to figure this one out, but the results always followed the drives.

Fascinating. We think of hard drives as commodities ... (though some are more or less reliable!)

Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000

I loathe Microsoft software. I love Microsoft hardware. They really know how to do hardware.

So I'm very interested in the Amazon.com: Microsoft LifeCam VX-6000. I zoomed the Amazon images and I was able to imagine that the damn thing might even have a focus ring.

I experimented years ago with various PC webcams as a videoconferencing aide. I wanted to image a whiteboard and send readable snaps every 5-10 seconds. The devices ran into bandwidth issues (too much data for a USB 1 cable) and the resolution was inadequate. I think these guys might work. Very neat.

I wonder how they compare to Apple's excellent webcam (though the built-in ones aren't as good). Alas, the Apple cam only works on a Mac. I wonder if this one might do Mac as well ...

Upgrading a Mac drive: nice tip

I like the procedure outlined here ...

Macintouch - MacBook

The specific screwdriver needed to remove the factory-installed HDD from its metal cover is a T-8 torx. Home Depot and Lowe's have these in multi-size Torx driver sets for less than $6...

Apricorn (www.apricorn.com) has a USB enclosure for a SATA drive (model EZ UP - S).

What I did was:

1. bought a replacement HDD
2. installed it into the above described USB enclosure
3. used Super Duper! to copy factory HDD to the new one in the USB enclosure and make it bootable (although you can not boot from a USB drive, it's still important to make the cloned HDD bootable).
4. Swapped the internal and external drives. This is easy if you have the above T-8 Torx screwdriver.
5. put the factory HDD into the USB enclosure.

Mactracker: a reference source for Mac hardware.

Mactracker - Get info on any Mac

Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple, Motorola, PowerComputing, and UMAX Mac OS computer ever made, including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, AirPort Base Stations, Newtons, and Mac OS versions.

via Macintouch. Excessive certainly. Valued, yes.

Allow Safari to handle Google Earth links

This worked for me. I created the file "com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist" in my personal Library: Google Earth Community: Tip: Auto-open Safari links in Google Earth.