numbersix

got the HP9600 cd writer working with FreeBSD, a breeze. decided on an adaptec 2906 SCSI card to drive it. the only potential problem was that the packaging said mac all over it, though after a quick email to adaptec i discovered the card is the same for either machine, hooray for PCI! also nice to see FreeBSD mentioned on the adaptec support site, all be it listed as a linux distro :( mentioned as much in the support followup email, hoping they come to their senses. mkisofs and cdrecord worked fine off the bat, excellent documentation as usual on the fbsd site.

'spect goes out to trey, the mad impetuous fool that he is. may all his attempts at hanging some wicked air result in face plants :)

first entry in my new moveable type blog. reasonably painless so far....

at last, my work here is done, i have had a story accepted on slashdot, oh yes. the nerd in me can now retire.

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.