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.
admin audio, book, brother, doctorow, itunes, little, podcast, rss
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 
admin blog, bookmarks, roller, rss, social, wish
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?
admin charity, colbert, donorschoose, rss