welcome to spiceland.

I use Linux. I don’t have an iPod. I’ve been wanting a good way to auto download and sync podcasts with a non-iPod mp3 player such as Palm, Pocket PC, or any other drive map-able device. It had to be something I could do quickly on my way out the door. I’d found several that would download the podcasts, and several that would sync to an iPod. I didn’t find any that would download AND smartly sync to a non-iPod device. So I finally wrote my own.

Podcast Downloader is a collection of Perl scripts that one can use to easily auto download the latest podcasts and sync them with a mounted mp3 player. This setup is ideal for those of us with Palm Pilots, Pocket PC’s, and other portable MP3 players that mount as a normal drive that cannot use iTunes or the other fancy sync programs. Create a .txt file with all of the rss feeds for your podcasts. Setup cron (or another any scheduler) to run podcast-download.pl periodically to download all of the latest podcasts (e.g. each night). When you want to dump the latest to your portable device, run podcast-sync.pl

Links:

Permanent Project Link at FuzzyMonkey.net

Download the gzipped tar archive (v. 0.3)

The README

A sample data file

Update: Welcome Diggers!

Update: Upgrade to v. 0.2 to improve use with cron.

Update: Upgrade to v. 0.3 to fix bug in parsing special characters in podcasts.txt. Format of podcasts.txt has changed.

UPDATE: Rumor has it that this information is NOT true! I hope they are right! (8/5/2005)

It was recently announced/discovered that the new Intel based Mac’s operating system uses a DRM (Digital Rights Management) system known as TCPA. Basically, it transfers even more control of YOUR computer over to the makers of the software that is on it (e.g. Microsoft). It is like having a car that asks Toyota each time you install something on it or put gas in it to make sure that it is an “approved” part. Read the link to know why it is bad.

I’m starting to like Apple less and less.

Michael

For anyone who doesn’t know, you should try out Skype. Basically, it is like instant messenger but with voice chat in addition to text chat. The only way it will be usefull to us is if the people that we want to talk to are actually on it. Please download it and try it out. You can search for us by name to add us to your list.

What makes it much more unique than just what I stated before is that it actually works! Most Internet applications like this that I have tried don’t work well. This is an exception. I’ve tried it on 3 computers in my house and it works great on all of them. No messy manual configuration or anything.

Talk to you soon (on Skype).

Michael

For anyone who hasn’t tried it, Google maps is the best internet based map software that I’ve come across. It is still in beta so it isn’t liked in their main page. Try it out! Search for something. After you get the result you can pan around by clicking and dragging the map round. Very cool! After that, click on “local search”. You can search for stores and it shows you them on the map.

http://maps.google.com