Year: 2007

Podcatching – Goliath is the winner

Until very recently I was using “Doppler” as my podcatching client. It allowed me a degree of control in managing my subscriptions that I simply cannot get with iTunes. However, I was finding more and more problems – even with the older podcasts – as they focused on ensuring that the RSS tags were iTunes compatible and not necessarily other podcatcher compatible.

Also, I was finding some content available exclusively on iTunes which had me using its podcatching features anyway for those select offerings. For example I’m currently in the middle of a GREAT astrophysics lecture series from Berkeley that is available as part of many educational institutions’ efforts to make such content generally available.

Add to that the fact that the creator of Doppler has been really dragging his feet on updating the podcatcher and I had to reluctantly transfer all of my feeds to iTunes and find some new ways to manage my content.

iTunes doesn’t offer a feed-by-feed way of discarding unplayed podcasts (for instance, if I haven’t listened to a “Clark Howard” podcast in a month, then I’m just not going to listen to it) and there is no really good mechanism for marking a podcast as “done with” – you can do this in Doppler by simply assigning a rating to the podcast and it will automatically remove all with that rating if you have set that podcast up to be managed in that way.

In iTunes the only feedback mechanism I have is to run the podcast to the end so that the play count goes above zero. Then I have an “Obsolete podcast” Smartlist that picks these up. Periodically I go to that Smartlist and delete everything in it. I *know* I can have iTunes automatically delete all played podcasts but sometimes I do not want this to happen right away.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy with my iTunes podcatching experience so far. It’s sort of like when I finally joined the mainstream and installed Windows 95 after being a die-hard OS/2 user for so many years. I can finally do everything everybody else can do, the price being that I have to give up some of my prized features that just don’t seem to be in demand by the mainstream.

If you are interested, here is my current podcast list in OPML format: OPML File as of September 20, 2007. If you want to know how to import/export OPML files from iTunes, click here.

Below is a list of my current podcasts in order of preference. I enjoy ALL of these, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t download them. But some are more relevant, informative or fun than others.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
Astronomy Cast
Astro 10P: Introduction to General Astronomy – Fall 2006
TEDTalks (video)
Slashdot Review – SDR News
CBC Radio: Quirks & Quarks Complete Show
Skepticality: The Official Podcast of Skeptic Magazine
IT Conversations
Cato Daily Podcast
Cato Weekly Video
Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast
Humanist Network News
Mr. Deity
Career Opportunities
The Finer Points – Aviation Podcast
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Video and Audio Podcasts
The Economist
The Clark Howard Show
Clark Howard’s Scam Alerts
Clark Howard’s Call Of The Week
Battlestar Galactica Podcast
Astronomy Magazine Podcast
David Allen Company Updates
David Allen Company Podcast
43 Folders
Pilotcast – Aviation Podcast for Pilots, by Pilots
Slacker Astronomy podcast
Slacker Astronomy Video Podcast
The Skeptic Tank
Astronomy a Go Go!
SETI: Science and Skepticism: Are We Alone?
Cato Institute Event Podcast
Gmail Podcast
The Ellen DeGeneres Show in a minute
IdoNotes (and sleep)

De-cluttering our home and our lives

Garage SaleWe’ve been a bit busy for the past little while. In the post renovation euphoria, we realized that we really like the quasi-minimalism that we had in our newly re-invented rooms. We can find what we’re looking for and we like the feeling of lightness that comes from just knowing that there is not a mountain of *stuff* either behind the closet doors or filling up the drawers in the desk/cabinet/you name it.

Add to that Mich has been watching various home improvement shows and eventually zoomed in on “Clean Sweep” and has even ventured so far as to buy the “Clean Sweep” book (It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff) and started taking it’s philosophies to heart.

So we’ve been working our way through the house re-evaluating EVERYTHING. We’ve been discarding old papers that at one time we thought were so important – who really cares about those pay stubs from 15 years ago? And re-evaluated our “time capsules”, which are boxes of items that we didn’t want to get rid of for one reason or another and thought that they’d be interesting to us many years in the future. We went down from 4 time capsule boxes to 1. It *was* a little interesting going through some of the items we thought were so precious 15 or 20 years ago, but it was much more cathartic evaluating them and either selling, giving away or discarding them.

On the whole, digital pictures and smaller mementos to trigger memories of good times past are sufficient for our purposes.

Our neighborhood has a couple of garage sales a year – where the homeowners association does some advertisement and folks know to come through ’cause there will be a lot of sales concentrated in the area. So we participated in the one that was held last week and divested ourselves of a BUNCH of stuff and cleared a modest profit as well 🙂

Combining this de-cluttering with the philosophies embodied in our focus on “Getting Things Done“, we’re finding ourselves much clearer in our expectations for our free time and our lives and goals in general.

We picked up DVD storage pages, the kind that fit into a 3-ring binder, and we’ll be collapsing our DVD collection down from a couple of shelf-fulls to a handy binder size. This AFTER culling the collection for the garage sale.

Today we’ll finish assembling the shelves we picked up yesterday and complete organizing the back room we’ve designated as our “storage room”. We have no basement and there are some things that you simply do not want to store in a shed or the garage (Christmas items, party supplies) and so we’ve designated a room in the house that will host such items. But only after a THOROUGH vetting – do we really want/need to keep these things?

It takes a LOT of energy and effort to work through this kind of project, the renovation was a good shaking-up / taking off point for us. Hopefully the momentum from this effort can roll through the rest of our life as the satisfaction of finding what you need when you need it as well as being pleased with how your place looks is almost beyond description.

Dynamic image resizing (Really, this is impressive!)

Listed on CollegeHumor.com under the boring title “Advanced Photo Resizing”, this is astonishing. Sure, we’ve been able to modify images for quite a few years now. Photoshopping an image to remove, accentuate or beautify the subject matter is nothing new at all. We’ve simply become better at it over the years.

But this video, describing the ability to now allow images to be dynamically resized, including the ability to selectively emphasize what is removed, is truly a giant step forward in this arena.

Of course, the images presented could never be claimed to be a true representation of the original subject. But then, that’s been true since the first wide angle lense and the first filter were applied to still photography.

Reality has always been somewhat subjective, and now it can depend on the size of your viewing screen!  🙂

Remove duplicate tracks from iTunes Playlists on a Windows Machine

There seem to be plenty of utilities available for this kind of housekeeping on MAC systems on which iTunes is a native application. But it took a little digging to find these helpful little utilities. There are about 20 utilities of which I see a use for about 3 of them for my purposes.

Every once in a while I like to re-evaluate some of my playlists and/or create new ones. I don’t necessarily want to throw away my previous work (although sometimes I do that too…), so I wanted to be able to toss songs into, say, my “Driving” playlist without concern for whether or not those songs were already represented there.

Running Teridon’s script allows me to simply purge all the duplicates after I’m done. A handy little time saver.

Star Trek: “Time Warp”

I was put onto this by Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog.

Yes, I’ll admit it, I’m a geek and also recognized the lion’s share of the clips shown here. *AND* I like the Rocky Horror Picture show…

I can’t even begin to imagine how much time and effort has to go into deciding on, collecting and then bringing together all the elements required to make something like this. It truly must be a labor of (geek) love…

Internet Commenter Business Meeting

Translating all of the nonsense that goes on in Internet discussion forums to what they would look like if the same sort of behavior happened between live people in a business setting… brilliant!  Irritating, but brilliant!

When I peruse discussion groups – often as a result of a Google search – I usually only read as far as the first one or two trolls and then move on. In unmoderated settings you can almost predict how quickly the discussion will degrade into sophomoric shouting matches.

This doesn’t eliminate the usefulness of these forums but it does cap it.

For anybody who has ever participated or even lurked in these arenas, enjoy! 🙂

Don’t forget to check out the Perseid Meteor Shower Tomorrow night!!

Perseid Meteor ShowerWith a new moon, this most spectacular of annual meteor showers will be even more visible this year!

For my locale the Clear Sky Clock indicates that conditions should be nearly optimal. I’m thinking of popping up to Brasstown Bald for a chance to see this wonder of nature in as pristine conditions as we can get here in Georgia.

The peak meteor frequency is expected to be at about 1:00 am so it won’t be an early night that’s for sure.

For more details check out the Wikipedia entry as well as Space.com’s Sky calendar.

Copy Lotus Notes databases from the Domino Server console command line

I use this blog to remind myself of items now and then so I can just search here and find them. This was pulled from this article and I am reproducing it here for my own edification as it will be really useful going forward. You can just ignore this if Lotus Notes / Domino isn’t your thing…
Copy Lotus Notes databases from the Domino Server console command line
Bruce Elgort
07.19.2007

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Recently I needed to make “copies” of some Lotus Notes databases and didn’t want to do it from my Lotus Notes

client. This would have taken hours considering the Lotus Notes database was 5 GB.I knew that there had to be a way to do this and there is. Thanks to the assistance of my friend Thomas Gumz, I was able to issue a command line from the Domino Server console — and presto, the database was instantly copied. It’s not documented or supported, but it has been around for a long time, at least since R4 according to Thomas.

So let’s look at what you need to do to enable this feature. The Domino Server console commands are turned off by default, so you need to first enable them. Set this server notes.ini variable, like so:

  • set config CLUSTER_ADMIN_ON=1 (even if the server is not in a cluster, it doesn’t matter).

    No need to restart the Domino server, it becomes active immediately. This enables this new command: CL COPY sourcedb targetdb.

    Below, I have listed some examples for the CL COPY command:

  • CL copy serverA!!db1.nsf serverB!!db2.nsf
    This creates a regular non-replica copy of db1.nsf on serverA as db2.nsf on ServerB
  • CL copy serverA!!db1.nsf serverB!!db2.nsf REPLICA
    This creates a replica copy of db1.nsf on serverA as db2.nsf on ServerB
  • CL copy serverA!!db1.nsf serverB!!db2.nsf TEMPLATE
    This creates a template copy (only design, no data) of db1.nsf on serverA as db2.nsf on ServerB
  • CL copy db1.nsf db2.nsf
    This creates a regular non-replica copy of db1.nsf as db2.nsf on the same local server

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