ITauthor

I love listening to spoken-word audio on my iPod,, but, on the whole, I don’t like listening to audio from a Web page. Partly this is because the sound card on my Dell Vostro 1700 is extremely poor and picks up interference from the hard disk drive. But mainly it’s because I like to listen to audio when I’m walking the dog and when I’m commuting to work in my car.

Most of the time this means listening to podcasts and usually these days, where audio is available on a Web page it’s in MP3 format and it’s also available as a podcast. But in some places audio is still only available as RealAudio, which has to be played on your computer using RealPlayer.

So, if you’re like me, you need a way of getting audio that’s only available in RealAudio format off a Web page, into MP3 format, and into your iPod or other MP3 player.

My particular case was that I wanted to listen to the well-known audio documentary “Ghetto Life 101”. This is available from Sound Portraits (http://soundportraits.org/on-air/ghetto_life_101/) as a RAM file. Alternatively you can find a collection of David Isay documentaries, all as RAM files, here: http://www.talkinghistory.org/isay.html.

So here’s one way of doing this (this relies on using Firefox as your browser):

1. Download and install Firefox if you don’t already use this as your browser.
2. Once you’ve installed Firefox, download and install the DownloadThemAll Firefox add-on.
3. Browse to the Web page containing the RAM file you want to play on your MP3 player. For example, try going to http://www.talkinghistory.org/isay.html.
4. Choose Tools > DownloadThemAll! Tools > DownloadThemAll!
   
   The DownloadThemAll! dialog box opens, listing all the downloadable files on the Web page.
5. Unselect any selected Filter checkbox and enter *ram in the Fast filtering field. This will select just files with the .ram file name extension.
   
   In this screenshot I’ve used the filter *isdn*ram, because the page I’m processing has three versions of each RAM file and I only want the ISDN-quality files (which all have “isdn” in the file name)
   
   
6. In the Save files in field, enter the location where you want to save the file(s).
7. Click Start!
8. Download and install FormatFactory.
9. Start FormatFactory and click All to MP3.
   
   
10. Click Add File.
11. Select all the RAM files you downloaded.
12. Click OK.
    
     
13. Copy the resulting MP3 files to your MP3 player, or drag them into your music folder in iTunes and sync your iPod.

If you’re downloading a lot of files, you might like to give them all the same artist or album tag. To do this really easily, right-click this link and download and install ID3-TagIT (note: this link points to a zip file containing an .exe file – always run your virus scanner on any executable file you download before running it).

Ever since I first heard about twitter (way back when, probably on TWIT), I’ve resisted getting involved in it because I was certain that it would be just another thing that would stop me getting things done. I eventually signed up at twitter, but just in a kind of a land-grab sort of way: to get the itauthor twitter name before someone else did. But not a tweet was heard from me after that. Not until recently.

After listening to an interview with the makers of Blu on Hanselminutes, I decided to download this desktop client for twitter, just to see the login screen that Scott was getting so excited about. Of course, needless to say, I start using it and pretty soon I’m installing TwitterBerry on my Blackberry.

So will it stop me getting things done? Well, I’m not sure yet. I can’t see myself twittering very much – but you never know. What I’d like to know is:
Is there some way in which twitter could help me to get things done?
If there is then I could justify using it and it wouldn’t feel – as it does right now – like a guilty pleasure.

What do you do if the host name of your CVS server changes? For example, here’s my case. I checked out a whole lot of CVS modules from the repository while my laptop was on the domain. Now however, thanks to Vista SP1 not playing with an antiquated NT domain, the laptop can’t join the domain so to connect to a server I need to qualify its name with a domain. So, whereas I checked out the modules using the hostname “cvshost”, I now need to use “cvshost.mydomain.co.uk”.

Unfortunately, TortoiseCVS has no way to change the host names for modules you’ve already checked out. WinCVS can, supposedly, do this thanks to a macro. However, WinCVS stubbornly tells me I don’t have Python installed (I do) and therefore won’t let me use macros.

The solution is to just go through all the CVS “Root” files and change the host name. The Root file lives in the CVS directory at each level within a checked out module. This would be a laborious task by hand, but if you have SUA (Microsoft’s Subsystem for UNIX Applications) and Perl installed it’s easy. Just pull up a Korn shell and browse to the directory within which your checked out CVS modules live.

Run the following command.

find . -name 'Root' -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/oldhostname/newhostname/g'

For example, I ran the command:

find . -name 'Root' -print0 | xargs -0 perl -pi -e 's/cvshost/cvshost.mydomain.co.uk/g'

Which changed the Contents of the Root file from:

:pserver:achristie@cvshost:/company/repository

to:

:pserver:achristie@cvshost.mydomain.co.uk:/company/repository

The BBC iPlayer is a great bit of technology, but it's also a peer-to-peer file sharing client and sometimes you don't want lots of data being uploaded from your computer when you're trying to use that bandwidth for something else.

I've just added an article (my first since revamping this site) that describes how to take control of the iPlayer's KService Windows service and the iPlayer program itself: khost.exe.

Read the article: Preventing BBC iPlayer running all the time

I just stumbled upon the news that Bob Dylan has a new album out next week and NPR are streaming it on their Web site right now (but probably not for much longer).

OK, I know this has nothing to do with technical writing. But I like Bob Dylan and, hey, everyone needs a break from tech writing for a while (or for 12 months, and counting, in my case).

From what I've heard so far it's pretty good stuff but very familiar - very like the stuff he's done over the past years. Not surprising really. It is the stuff he's been doing over the past few years. It's more outtakes and tracks that didn't get used. But don't dismiss it for that. In true Dylan style, the tracks that didn't get used are sometimes better than the ones that did.

The YouTube video below is one of the tracks off the album.

I also came across a great Dylan podcast recently. It's not really a podcast though. It's a radio program that's been split up into a series of short podcasts. It's presented by Patti Smith (yes, the Patti Smith), who sounds very cool, and it has lots of great guests. Two problems with it though:

1. Like most music podcasts, you only get 30 seconds or so of each song.

2. There are only 19 episodes.

http://blogs.legacyrecordings.com/podcast/category/bob-dylan-podcast/