Lotus Notes: Destroyer of Souls Originally uploaded by t1mmyb.
Or: reasons to hate Lotus Notes, number 4,912.
– “Does it do X?”
– “if you stand on your right leg, sacrifice a live chicken under a full moon while incanting Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, it’ll do 20% of what you want”
– “Sounds great! Sign me up!”
Meh.
Ben Hammersley wrote a little perl script – Radiopod – a while ago. It uses mplayer and the lame mp3 encoder to create mp3s of RealAudio streams, which are then usable on iPods and other portable mp3 players.
I had a bit of a nightmare getting set up on OS X, though. At first I tried installing mplayer and lame using Fink; this didn’t work, so I switched to Darwin Ports. This was fine for lame, but the DP version of mplayer didn’t play ball with downloaded RealPlayer codecs.
I then googled and stumbled upon this blog entry where the author describes how to set up lame and mplayer on OS X, for use with his own shell script.
Anyway, there it is: install the ffmpegx version of mplayer and all will be well. I can now listen to Gilles Peterson and Hotpot Radio (Mr. Scruff & Treva Whateva) on my iPod. Yay!
An aside: one of the limitations of Radiopod was that the start or end time couldn’t be after midnight. This is a bit of a limitation, as most of the shows I timeshift are late-night ones. I modded the script to take a duration option (in seconds), which the script then uses instead of the duration it calculates from the start and end times anyway. If I pull my finger out, I may submit my patch back to SourceForge.
I downloaded the latest version of everyone’s favourite Linux distribution yesterday, in both its install and Live CD versions. The install went on an old laptop I was donated, a Dell Inspiron 7000 (Pentium II 333 MHz, 128MB RAM). I installed at work, without a network card in the PC card slot, then popped the NIC in later. Ubuntu detected the card and I set up and activated it in about 30 seconds. Yay for the hardware abstraction layer!
I’m writing this from my work PC, which I’ve just booted from the Live CD. It’s a quick experiment to see how I’m likely to get on next month when I attend dConstruct (“The UK’s first grass-roots Web 2.0 Conference!”). Our new Powerbook is unlikely to have arrived by then, so I’ve ordered a loan laptop from work. The thing is, running a Windows laptop is likely to be the geek equivalent of social death. I’m kidding, of course: it won’t be that bad. In fact I may even be a source of interest and entertainment; as Apple laptops are so prevalent at tech conferences the presence of a “Pee-cee” might be a bit of a novelty. However, I’m much more comfortable when I’ve got a CLI to play with (and I won’t be allowed to install anything on the laptop) so it’s Ubuntu Live CD all the way, baby!
Update
I should have mentioned that the Dell laptop has a borked keyboard. One place in the US does replacements for $34.99, but the cheapest I could find here was £39.99 on eBay, or £70+ (as high as £110!) at laptop parts shops. This makes it slightly uneconomical to repair, but I could always plug in a PS/2 keyboard.
I’ve recently discovered a thing called GTD. It’s a philosophy based on a book by David Allen, which I haven’t read, but which talks about “Stress-Free Productivity”.
Thanks to a weblog called 43 Folders, and an article at O’Reilly by Giles Turnbull I’ve discovered some Mac-friendly GTD stuff. Apparently it takes some time to set yourself up to use GTD methods, but once you do, it’s well worth it.
So far I’ve just implemented a Hipster PDA – a stack of 3×5″ index cards and a bull clip. It’s already made a difference, though: when I think of things, I write them down rather than mulling them over and not sleeping. I then have a record of the thought, and can obviously recall it.
Another weblog of note is Life Hacker – lots of great tips there, like How to quiet noisy pipes.
Oh, and Stu: it was ace to chat to you last night. You need to get a web site, pal 
Apple have released the most affordable Mac ever: the Mac Mini. Starting at £339 (G4 1.25 GHz, 40GB HD, 256MB RAM, Combo drive; no monitor, keyboard or mouse), it represents a bit of a bargain.
Yes you can trick it out to the max and push the price up to over £1000, but a simple boost to the RAM (to 512MB) and hard disk (to 80GB) and a Superdrive upgrade comes to £527. Not bad for a Mac. Still expensive compared to a Wintel box, but I don’t plan on buying one of those any time soon.
Yesterday our solution to the iMac’s storage problem arrived: a 120GB Maxtor hard drive with 8MB cache. Yum. Now I just have to work out how to migrate the data from old to new…
Today my new mobile phone arrived. It’s a Sony Ericsson T630, which I’ve got with (effectively) free line rental for the first 12 months of an 18 month contract. I only wanted it for the Bluetooth facility, so that I can sync with the iMac, but I get to take part in the camera-phone/MMS revolution as well! It should make my Palm redundant, as this phone (unlike the T68) has a full address book facility, rather than just phone numbers and email addresses as, even though this phone doesn’t have postal address support per se, it’s possible to munge it, apparently.
I was watching an Apple Powerbook 15” (550MHz with combo drive) on Ebay, that eventually went for £320. We couldn’t afford it right now (despite the Christmas bonus) but it bodes well for the state of the second-hand Mac market, which until quite recently was overpriced.
But the biggest Christmas present of all (so far) was hearing our baby’s heartbeat at the clinic last Friday! It brought a tear to Kathy’s eye, and put a massive grin on my face. Life changes for ever next June…
Sorry it’s been a bit quiet around these parts lately. I’ve been spending my lunch breaks over at Digital Spy Forums and at various other times participating in the Podcasting revolution (!). While I haven’t been doing that, Kathy & I have been telling everyone who’ll listen that we’ll be having a baby next year! W00t! ‘Bump’ was all planned and everything, and occurred on our tour, but we’re not going in for Beckham-style location-based naming. I hear a collective sigh of relief…
In other news:
* Andy needs root canal work, and needs our prayers, big style.
* My Big Bro turned 40 at the weekend, and had a party at his house. He convened his jazz combo (him on guitar, plus other peeps on keys, trumpet and bass). An enjoyable time was had by all.
* I’ve done my first bit of recording with my Archos Jukebox. Nothing fancy: just Cinematic Orchestra’s Motion album.
* I’ve found someone else who’s upgrading an iMac G3. The Christmas bonus means that I have more chance of Kathy aquiescing to my request to buy a new hard drive. 7GB is not enough, I tell you!
That’s all, folks! See you in the, erm, "podcastosphere". Maybe now I can easily record straight to MP3, I’ll do a DJ mix podcast and get in there myself.
One of the things that I noticed during our recent tour was that urinals in European toilets are, on the whole, so much more technologically advanced than our own British ones. Mind you, I’ve never had to manually flush urinals in the UK, which happened a few times on the continent. Ours tend to be flushed, en masse, on a timed basis, whereas ones in continental Europe (even the recent EU-joiners like Slovakia) tend to operate using the automatic sensor, per-urinal-flushing method.
So, chalk up yet another thing that we in the UK do worse than our cousins over La Manche. Actually, Kathy & I started a list of things that they do better and things that we do better, and the list was heavily stacked in favour of the continent. I’ll dig the list out soon and post it here.
We are now in Paris! On our first day we went to the Eiffel Tower, only to the first floor as this was all Kathy’s knees could take. The view was great and the tower was impressive to say the least.
We have been enjoying french bread with nearly every meal and also some french beer with dinner!
Kathy’s teddy bear from nursery has been enjoying the sights as well, look out for pictures. Tim also blames the bear for the fact that we ended up at the Apple Mac Expo, an exhibition for the launch of their newest computer, the iMac G5!
Tim had a bit too much sun and not enough water and had to go to bed early with a headache so today we have been drinking lots and staying in the shade a bit more as the weather continues to be astoundingly beautiful.
Today is our 4th wedding anniversary – hurrah and huzzah! Thanks for all the cards we received before we went away; we are saving the celebration for when we meet up with a friend in Lyon.
We have enjoyed Paris but are looking forward to getting away from big city life and out onto the road again.
I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that (a) second-hand iPods are overpriced, and (b) eBay is a living, breathing example of the power of a heady mix of capitalism and stupidity. You know, more money than sense and all that…
I’ve been gathering data from eBay (manually) of the closing prices of iPods, which model they are and which generation.
[Note for the uninitiated: the latest "All New!" iPods are the fourth generation. The first ones were…oh, I think you get the idea]
At the moment it’s a CSV file. I will probably make a PHP script at some point to do strange and wonderous mathematical things to the numbers. Well, it will take the average for each model and generation, at least.
I suspect, though, that the numbers will bear out what I already know: second-hand iPods aren’t worth the bother, especially as the 4G models are (in the case of the 40GB) £100 cheaper than the 3G ones. I can only guess as to the mental state of the person who spent £215 (plus £8.50 p&p!) on a 3G 15GB iPod from eBay, when the 4G 20GB is £220 direct from Apple! If you’re on a budget, the Apple Refurb store last week had 3G 15GBs going for £175 with an Apple warranty.
The mind, quite literally, boggles.