MeyerBros

The usual readers of this blog (all three of you) may find this quite uninteresting, but I’m posting it here as Google-fodder in hopes it may be useful to someone out there.

Say there’s an internet audio stream that interests you (like, for example, a radio feed). But say you’d rather not listen to it while tied to a device with an internet connection - you need to rip it to a file on disk. And lastly, just for kicks, say the radio feed already has its advertisements kindly blanked out with silence by the stream provider, but you find those three-minute silences irritating to skip over manually.

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this has to be the number one blog topic for the week, so here goes:

I DON’T CARE IF THEY’RE NOT FOR SALE YET, YOU’RE STILL A LOSER IF YOU DON’T HAVE ONE.

so after downloading 17 widgets off of the dashboard top 50 list (check it out Mac users — there are some cool ones there), david told me about last.fm. it automatically “scrobbles” (records) the music that you listen to on your computer, which…hmm…has some helpful purpose i’m sure. but it’s fun, and you can see what music your friends are listening to and find people who listen to similar music. you can also create custom streaming radio stations. and best of all, you can successfully waste an entire afternoon and not feel guilty about it.

in other news, floyd landis lost the yellow jersey today, but not to a main competitor. i think he’ll be able to get it back this week.

spur of the moment michelle mentions that i need to get film footage of paris for Limonade Tous les Jours, a great little duet/play by Chuck Mee that we’re talking about for this season at New World and dad mentions that he has an old video camera that may or may not work so we get it out and play with it over footage of derek bontreger and doyle preheim at the damn in “The Town Where No One Got Off”. it worked.

so then we’re running to wal-mart because it’s the only place still open and buying miniDV tapes so i can do my thing when i realize i really really want an mp3 player for the trip and they have them fairly cheap and i could sell it on ebay later if i want to so here goes. and there went.

now i’m listening to it and it’s working fairly well. well enough for this trip.

france, here i come: OO AE DOO FROMAGE? DOE NAE MUA POO DE FROMAGE. EH LA VEH. (merci)

video: mplayerplug-in is great. After half a day wrestling with plugger and mozplugger and totem, with little success, mplayerplug-in works straight out of the box. Embedded streaming video in Linux. Beautiful. (Stop laughing, Mac user. You can’t understand.)

audio: podcasts and bashpodder are great. Contents of my bp.conf: democracynow.org, radio.linuxquestions.org, lugradio.org, twatech.org, hackermedia.org, colts.com and newworldarts.org. Perfect driving-around-the-rez listening material for when KILI is playing bad country (which is most afternoons) and NPR is boring (which is occasionally).

Not exactly great, but functional: gnomad2, which lets me copy mp3s to my Creative Zen mp3 player from Linux. Ideally I would be able to treat the Zen as a plain old filesystem, so I could rip CDs or download podcasts straight to it and eliminate a step of the process. Apparently this is more difficult than it seems, because the Zen stores files in a database, not a flat filesystem - but the folks over at Neutrino are working on it with njbstack.

I also had something political that I was going to blog about this morning after listening to Democracy Now! But now I forget what it was.

1. Buy a Creative Zen Nomad Jukebox Xtra 30GB mp3 player off EBay from Chance Deals, where they sell consumer returns and don’t guarantee that it works.
2. Receive it and find out that it doesn’t work. “Hard drive problem,” it says when you turn it on. Feel robbed for a day or so.
3. Check out this article on nomadness.net and discover that the Creative Zen player uses a standard Fujitsu laptop hard drive.
4. Buy a 40GB Fujitsu laptop hard drive off EBay.
5. Pop open the back cover and replace the hard drive.
6. Voila. You’re a geek.