Month: April 2004

Who brought the cat?

(see Fruvous )

I went to the Arboretum to take a break from work yesterday.. wandered
into A Large Bookstore and noticed lots of chairs lined up, with people
sitting, waiting patiently to have their books signed (but only if they had a
ticket, according to the announcements). So a few minutes later Margaret
Atwood is at the podium telling the crowd how she’s never been in Austin before
and then she gives an overview of her new book Oryx & Crake. Sounded
neat .. something about a boy who lives in a tree and future-people with
built-in sunblock, built-in mosquito repellant, built-in birkenstocks … I may
have to read it.

Also, started reading the Harry Potter books .. halfway through the third now.
This is partly because it’d be nice to have read the book before seeing the
movie, but also partly because I found digital copies of all 5 books (we
already have the legitimate deadtree editions) which I loaded into my phone.
Oddly, that’s how I’ve read almost every book in the past year or so .. on my
phone. I suspect I would read even more if I could “rip” books like you can
rip CD’s.

merged linkbin

So I merged the blog and the linkbin (as many other people have already done) .. I
wrote a script to take my old linkbin.txt file, split it into manymany
individual .txt files, dumped those in a subdir of my blosxom datadir, and
added some templates (so links don’t take up as much space as regular entries).
Blosxom’s very smart — it uses the templates in the linkbin dir instead of the
standard templates .. neat. Even better, I set up a separated directory with a
separate blosxom.cgi to show just the linkbin, but blosxom does that nicely
also right here. Now how about everything except the linkbin?

Expiring mp3’s

(No, this has nothing to do with DRM .. )
It’d be neat if the iPod would let you flag something as “never play this
again”. Sure, you can already do this with the rating system — I give
something a 1-star rating, and then once in a while go remove all the mp3’s
with 1 star. But unless you make a special smart playlist and always use that
playlist, you might hear it again before it’s deleted. With a separate flag, it would never pop up again in a random shuffle.

This flag would have another use .. say I use streamripper to save some NPR program or
download some news from someplace like this. I probably only want to hear
this mp3 once, and only within a few days of copying to my iPod. So I set an
expiration date and/or a playcount limit. So after I hear it once or the story
is a week old, it never comes up randomly again. It stays on the iPod until I
explicitly delete it or all the expired tracks, so I can still manually select
it if I really do want to hear it again.

Just a thought ..

Might be possible someday with this Linux firmware for the iPod