numbersix

The televison in my hotel room is a typical weird hotel tv, not quite the same as a normal one, strange front end menu system. When you turn it off using the big button on the front, a message is displayed on a little LED panel to say 'OFF'. This stays until you turn it on again. My definition of off obviously isn't the same as Philips'.

Makes me think of a lot of PCs these days, their power buttons don't actually turn the power off, but mearly suggest to the machine that a shutdown has been requested. It seems then to be up to the PC to actually turn off if it wants. Of course what usually happens is that you're pressing the button because the machine has gotten itself into a state and is either too busy to field power off suggestions, or not in the mood, so it doesn't even work.

We're loosing control of the machines we're building! Of course there's always the power cable....

In an effort to rid my blog off all the comment spam I mistyped some SQL and blew all the comments away. Bugger. Sorry :( Will turn off comments until I can get round to figuring out a good way of preventing spam.

So the BBC have been making a ton of their radio programming available on the web via their Listen Again service. This is great if you happen to be near a broadband connection, but not so good if you're out and about with your iPod. I've seen a number of solutions to this, I even paid for a copy of Audio Hijack, but nothing so far has made the conversion from Real Audio stream to iPod as seamless as I'd like. So I rolled my own script based on bedouin's script found at www.macosxhints.com.

Pre-requisites :

- Lame
- Mplayer for OSX
- Curl (which I think is installed on OSX by default?)

The mplayer binary must be in the path (create a symlink to /usr/local/bin for instance).

Also, you need to make the cook codecs available for mplayer. I did this by copying the ones that come with RealPlayer thus:

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/mplayer
$ sudo cp -R /Applications/RealPlayer.app/Contents/Frameworks/HXClientKit.framework/HelixPlugins/Codecs/cook.bundle /usr/local/lib/mplayer

You could do this with a symbolic link also.

Then excecute, eg :

$ ./real_to_mp3.sh http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ram/inourtime.ram "BBC IOT The Physics of Reality"

Still to do - Pipe each stage into the next so things happen more smoothly, and automatic uploading to iPod would be neat.

At last the problem solved - plain text URLs automagically surrounded by anchor tags. No more bouncing on the OPTION-C,OPTION-T,OPTION-V keys to open them. And enforces once again what a genius idea it was to allow extensions to be written in Firefox/Mozilla. The developers can get on with making the core browser even better whilst leaving everyone else to work on the periphery stuff.