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I drive too many hours each week, so audio content is a good thing for me. No, I’m not a proud iPod owner, but I got a Rio last year, and it works just fine. I even built a dashboard mount for it…

So where do we find good audio content? Let’s take a look.

The Linux Show is one I usually try to catch. The sound quailty isn’t the greatest, probably due to 4 or more people all talking on phones from various places, sometimes airports, or hotels, or in the deep tunnel project… Besides that, the content is good if you’re into the Linux/open-ource stuff… They’re always looking to upgrade equipment, so it should only get better.

Your Mac Life used to provide downloadable shows each week, but have stopped since they now sell these through an Audible.com subscription or individually through the iTunes Music Store. Definitely a show for Mac-geeks. Hardcore Mac-geeks, though not hardcore *nix-Geeks, as they don’t get into tech issues quite that much but tend to focus more on the Apple-as-a-lifestyle and the Mac as your ‘digital hub’ type stuff. Still, an interesting show it is. It runs about two and a half hours. Oh, if you think time-shifting is an option, you can just record the stream, which they offer free for one week after each Wednesday night broadcast. If you do this, don’t tell them about it, as it will upset them because they feel they are losing money this way. I won’t go into business models here, do what you will…

WebTalkGuys Radio Show. Ok, we’ve covered Linux, and the Mac, what about Windows? ;) Ok, it’s not a Windows show, it’s a ‘web’ show, though you can tell it’s got a slight Windows lean to it. Anyway, they do have some interesting content. The show feels almost squeaky clean though. It’s definitely got a professional feel to it, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard any sort of controversy on the show, which makes it seem a little limp compared to the others. The do tend to have good interviews, but they lose points for suggesting that Google had created Atom. (Listen to the 2-14-2005 episode, about 5 minutes into it.) They call Atom a new kind of RSS that’s not RSS. Hurm…

LugRadio is the newcomer, with just two eposides under their belt. I’m still listening to the first one, but it’s good so far and they’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. It’s done by 4 blokes in the UK. And I mean blokes! You might think it’s called “Luhg Ray-Dee-Oh” but it’s really “Loog Rah-Dy-Owe” Thick accents for sure! Besides that, it reminds me of the old Geeks in Space show, a bunch of guys sitting around discussing whatever. There really should be more of these shows. (I’d do one if I had the time, and people geographically close to me interested in such a thing.)

Besides the shows, there are also interviews.

Christopher Lydon occasionally has one that will interest me, but I almost always get good stuff from Doug Kaye at ITConversations. Doug does an awesome job of talking to interesting people. Since I can usually count on the quality of material from ITConversations, I wrote a script to parse the RSS feed with enclosures and download the newest stuff. It’s that good.

So concludes our radio notes for this time. Tune in again for more of the same! Did I miss a good show? Let me know…

I had this idea for an application. A mirror that has limits. I don’t know if this exists yet, but here’s the idea. Let’s say I wanted to be a mirror for a popular download. In this case, a completely legal MP3 file. I would put the file on my server, and provide a download link. Instead, it would be cool to put the file on my server, and have an application manage the serving of the file, so we can track the number of times it’s downloaded, total that up, and then make the download unavailable when bandwidth has exceeded a certain limit. When the bandwidth limit is exceeded, it should send you to another mirror, or to the original download site.

For all I know, this exists, perhaps CPAN or the SourceForge mirrors already do this. Of course maybe P2P is another solution. You know what, nevermind…

I’m sure you’ve wondered what’s up with the lack of photos around here? Well, the camera is somewhat broken. By somewhat I mean that it seems to work about 5% of the time. If you turn it on and off repeatedly. Which, in reality, means that it doesn’t work. It’s like a car that only starts on Sundays, it ain’t gonna get you to work…

I’ve attempted to troubleshoot it, but to no avail. My troubleshooting included hitting it really hard, which is the technique that works well with our television when it gets cranky. So the next step is to try to track down some info using the InterWeb. I’m not too hopeful though. I did get it as a manufacturer refurb almost two years ago, for right around $150 US dollars. While at the local Radio Shack I noticed that some of their cameras were less than $100, and had double the resolution. Still, I’m one for fixing what I’ve got rather than throwing money (I don’t have) at a problem to fix it.

In the meantime I’m pretty sure I’ll get to see Bigfoot, Nessie and perhaps a few UFO‘s while the camera is non-functional…

Long ago I mentioned an md5checker script that would find duplicate images and do the appropriate thing. brian d foy does something similar to clean up iPhoto dupes.

See? Great minds do think alike! ;)

You can do things the easy way or the hard way. I’m sure there are some in-between ways, but that’s not relevant here.

See, I was using the data from blo.gs for a while, and lamented that there was not an easy way to add support for XFN. So I thought about the problem, and came up with a solution. A less than elegant solution, mind you. I was going to implement the solution, but opted not too. Later, Matt makes a feature request to Jim at blo.gs to add XFN relations to things and blam! It’s in there.

So, the moral of the story is, if I had actually made the feature request, I might have gotten what I had wanted without doing much work. Even if I had done the work I had planned to, it would not have been as useful as the alternative, becuase now all blo.gs users have the XFN feature available.

So make feature requests! Even if you are some nerd who likes to roll their own, because this is a great big internet, and you’re not the only user out there…