CodeSushi

xkcd is a great web comic... nerdy, smart, creative, and fun... It's one of my favorite RSS feeds. Today's comic is brilliant as always... but I felt like I had a slight improvement to make :)

I bought the audio book (and hard cover) version of Cory Doctorow's new book Little Brother. It's delivered as a 163 megabyte MP3 file, over 11 hours of spoken word... I have listened to dozens of audio books delivered as podcasts, but I only have one "normal" audio book (The Areas Of My Expertise by John Hodgman... hilarious) which I bought through iTunes, it is broken into 3 (2.5 hour) parts, which is still a bit long for an "episode". I really prefer the podcast episode per chapter form factor because it caters to my various neurosises and gives me a feeling of progress and accomplishment even when I don't really deserve said feeling.

I listen to my podcasts in three places, my iPhone, my Apple TV, and through iTunes on my MacBook Pro (Holy fanboy, Batman). While the synchronization between the three is pretty good, it can mess up and lose my place in an audio file. This usually isn't an issue because I rarely need more than a sitting to complete any particular file. I suspect that I'm not going to finish an 11+ hour audio book in a sitting... or even 11... so there is bound to be frustration and cursing as I lose my place repeatedly somewhere in the syncing madness.

After some Googling, I found AudioSlicer. In under 30 minutes I had the book split into 26 named sections, intro, chapters 1-21, epilogue, afterword, bibliography, and credits and copyrights. Here is my .split file (unzip it) which you can use with AudioSlicer to split the MP3 you purchase into the same chapters (if you have a mac). When you "Export Splitted" make sure "Filename Format" is "[trackNumber]_[title]_[album]_[artist]".

Now I could just import these files as a playlist in iTunes, but that's not how I roll... I want everything to be a podcast. Here is the iTunes friendly RSS based podcast feed i created (you'll need to follow the rest of the steps to make that useful, you can't just click that link and subscribe).

Now, take the mp3 files you created, and the podcast feed, and put them in a directory named "lb"... now put that lb directory in "/Library/WebServer/Documents/". If you have web sharing enabled (System Preferences -> Sharing -> Web Sharing) you should now go to iTunes (or whatever) and go to Advanced -> Subscribe to podcast and paste in "http://localhost/lb/little_brother.xml"

Once the downloads are complete you should have something that looks like this:


All the files are served up locally and should not be available on the network at-large. Once all the chapters are downloaded into iTunes (or whatever) you can delete the lb directory and disable your web sharing (if you don't need it for other stuff, obviously).

I hope this is helpful to someone besides me... if anyone finds an easy way to split the file up on Linux or Windows, let me know.

Some technical wishes for Roller... I wish there were a generic way to pass values provided through the admin UI to the themes. For instance, analytics, adsense and google reader stuff.. I could then make this theme available to others with all those features ready to go out of the box. Not that this theme is particularly good.. but I think there are some cool technical aspects to it that could make life easier for people less technically inclined...

I wish I didn't have to restart Roller to apply theme changes. It seems like there should be at least an option to use the theme resources directly. Maybe that's just me wanting Roller to be a content management system when it's not.

I wish I had time to dig into the Roller source code.

All in all, I like it.. it's a cool system that's relatively easy to maintain and I have full control.

I've been working on this theme a little..

I added a tag cloud on the right and a list of old posts. I'll try to tag each post pretty well so that maintains good utility.

Each post now has a few social bookmarking links under it. You most likely know what they are, and if you don't, they probably won't make your life any better. Leave a comment if there's some service you really like.

I have also added a widget from my RSS reader. I'm subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds from a pretty wide variety of topics. Any I flag as "shared" will appear in that box on the right. I don't flag very many... but I think they're usually pretty good :)

Check out this TED talk by Johnny Lee about how he has used the Nintendo Wii controller (just the $40 controller) to create really cheap projection touchscreens and more.



I just found out about TED fairly recently, and I've been watching the videos voraciously ever since. If you're not familiar with TED it's a yearly conference where some of the worlds most innovative and intelligent people give talks from 5 to 40 minutes in length. It's been going on for 20+ years, and has featured household names in science, politics, entertainment and just about any field you can think of. Most amazing are the people who most of us have never heard of, like Johnny Lee, with some incredible new invention, idea, insight or even just a great story.

Here are some good ones

• Alan Russell on regenerative medicine
• Hans Rosling shows some amazing graphical visualizations of global historic data
• Larry Brilliant eradicating the last case of Small Pox, personally

I could go on.. there are very few that I would say are not worth seeing, and there are hundreds out there, with more published all the time. The full podcast feed is here.

DonorsChoose.org is the type of service that would replace most of the functions of government in my perfect world. Match people who want to give charity with people and organizations in need. This particular effort is focused on private funding of various school programs at all levels of primary education. Here are over 100 Maine programs you can support. There are opportunities in every state.

We could apply this approach to just about anything! Schools, libraries, small business grants, victim support organizations, environmental research, scientific studies. Big charitable organizations can break out budget needs at a more regional and micro scale. The red cross could put out a call for marketing funds for an upcoming blood drive in a specific region or to provide shelter for a family faced with leaving their home due to fire or flood. A regional library could have specific micro funds for expanding specific collections allowing you to donate to fill out the computer science stack without supporting the purchase of religious texts or some other range of the Dewey Decimal System. The possibilities are endless.

Donors Choose is also using technology to its advantage, with region and keyword based RSS feeds! If there were more organizations like this I'd be tempted to create a MaineDonors site which would aggregate all the local charitable RSS feeds into a one stop shop for local giving.

How fun would it be to give away some percentage of the thousands of dollars the government takes from me each year to local causes that actually have an impact on my life and those around me directly? Direct giving inspires community involvement and could contribute to a feeling of responsibility for our neighbors, without forcing it on us or disconnecting the distribution of money from the act of giving as our current tax system does.

I digress, as usual... The point is: this is a really cool organization and concept that deserves our support.

Check out this video where Steven Colbert uses the election to raise money for Donors Choose programs... how cool is that?

It was only a matter of time, really.. Google introduces app engine.

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.

It's a pretty interesting platform... user authentication, load balancing, database all for "free". It's not tempting enough to learn Python yet, but they say there will be more supported languages in the future. It's certainly compelling enough to finally learn PHP. This would be a home run if it supported Java (unlikely).

Did you know John Cleese has a podcast? I don't care what my girlfriend says, Monty Python is comic genius. John tells some great stories.

Skeptoid is a really good skeptical podcast, the episodes are short and highly entertaining.

I used to be a fan of ZDtv, then it became TechTV, then it was G4TechTV and I stopped liking most of the programs, and now not at all as G4... but, if like me... you like the old ZDtv/TechTV days you might be happy to know about Revision 3. They have quite a diverse lineup of shows featuring quite a few folks from those early days of ZD.

I enjoy the weekly I, Cringly podcast. It's almost never longer than 10 minutes, usually shorter.

I am not saying schools will disappear. I AM saying that new modes of instruction will emerge and they will inevitably involve processing power and context. - April 4, 2008

He has some interesting ideas and predictions in the technology arena. He was also the guy behind the amazing PBS series Triumph of the Nerds.

Happy Fool's day... I only wish this was a joke:


Thanks, Senator Harry Reid... so... what you're saying is that as long as we do exactly what we're told to do, whatever "choice" we make is voluntary? That's great logic. I can see why you're a Senator! I'll be sure to remember that I'm voluntarily signing over 30% of my income on the 15th.. that should make it easier.

"Humor" aside... It's important to remember that every government mandate of every flavor is backed up with force AND violence..... BY DEFINITION! This is by necessity, obviously. No government can function if you can just say "no" and they have no recourse... It's patently false and utterly insulting for a government official to state that our tax system is voluntary. A quick google search yields plenty of counter evidence.. here's a good one.

It is true that the IRS frequently states that it relies on the “voluntary compliance” of taxpayers. But anyone who relies on that to say that the income tax is voluntary is confusing two different things: the duty to pay the tax and the method of enforcing that duty relied upon by the IRS.

It seems like this aught to be common knowledge to one of the 100 US Senators... maybe we should have a test or something... No Senator Left Behind.

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I combined a couple projects I've been working on, added some features, bought a domain and created GovRake.com.

This site indexes 8+ years of Maine state legislative records from the 119th congress to the 123rd (this session). Each day's session has a detail page with all the bills mentioned as well as a public comment area. GovRake keeps an updated pubic hearing schedule and links to bill details on each hearing. Bill detail pages have public comment areas and link to sessions in which they were mentioned. The front page also contains the public hearing schedule with links to the bill to be discussed and the audio stream for that hearing.

There is a wealth of data available from the state, some of it easier to get at than others. Now that I have a pretty good framework in place, it's just a matter of prying the data from the cold dead hands of the state web services which hold it hostage, and providing some modern services on top of that. My intent is to provide RSS and email updates for hearings, bills and anything else that is updated from time to time as well as a platform for community discussion and research.

This project is in ACTIVE development and there should be new features and improvements every few days.

I'd like to thank my representative, Seth Berry, for helping to fill me in on various state processes and putting up with my extreme political rants. If your government reps don't believe in transparency and accountability, like mine do... keep that in mind when November rolls around.

Leave a comment or email me ( dan-AT-codesushi-DOT-com ) with your question, comments or suggestions.