03.22.05
Posted in Food at 3:57 pm by Nicholas
Years ago I had an idea to revolutionize the food service industry. I was tired of calling for a pizza and being told I’d need to wait as long as 45 minutes for delivery. When I want a pizza delivered, it’s because I’ve already failed to plan my evening effectively. I don’t want to eat in an hour; I’m hungry now. So, I figured, the best way to improve delivery time is to move production from a fixed location a few miles away to mobile units that might be just around the corner. Each van would have a built-in oven and a set territory to roam. You could cover a larger total delivery area and still have less distance to drive for each individual delivery, and baking time would overlap with driving time!
Anyway, most people thought I was joking. The few who took me seriously explained all the reasons it wouldn’t work: a working oven in a moving van is a serious safety hazard; the heat buildup would make working conditions miserable; everyone has to be buckled in while the van is moving, so some of the speedup would be countered by the driver having to stop to put toppings on; all that heavy equipment would bring gas mileage down to single digits; powering the oven would require a large generator of some sort, meaning more gas; the company would have to maintain a fleet of huge, complicated vans instead of letting employees drive and maintain their own cars. Totally impractical, I was told.
And now someone’s doing it. I guess they’ve got the kinks worked out, though the article doesn’t have as many details as I’d like.
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03.15.05
Posted in General at 11:14 pm by Nicholas
With the important exception of interactive fiction, I’m not a gamer. It’s been a long time since I was really captivated by a game. But if Will Wright’s current project, Spore, turns out to be even half as good as it sounds, I will play it. I will upgrade my computer to the recommended specs. I may buy a system to devote to this game. Screenshots are here, but what I really want is a preorder form.
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03.14.05
Posted in General, Food at 2:32 pm by Nicholas
Today is March 14, or 3.14—Pi Day! Celebrate by calculating the surface area of a pie (πr2) and then eating it!
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Posted in Software at 10:59 am by Nicholas
In my last entry on the subject of podcasts, I mentioned that I was planning on writing an AppleScript to help me manage the podcasts to which I subscribe. That AppleScript—my first—is now complete.
My problem was that deleting podcasts after listening to them was not just a matter of dragging a few files to the trash. Let’s imagine, for example, that I have five files from one podcaster. Let’s say that I listened to two of them in their entirety while walking around with my iPod yesterday, meaning there are two files with a play count of 1, and of those two I want to save one to listen to again. And maybe I also started listening to another, realized I wasn’t interested in the subject matter of that particular episode, and stopped listening before the playcount was incremented (which occurs when the iPod reaches the very end of the file). Let us further imagine that all five of these podcasts are labeled according to the date on which they were uploaded, which means absolutely nothing to me, the listener. How do I remember which podcasts I wanted to save and which I wanted to delete? Probably by playing them in iTunes in the hope that the first couple of minutes will be enough to jog my memory.
My new AppleScript changes all that. It looks at all the tracks in the “Podcasts” playlist (which is assigned to them by NetNewsWire 2.0 Beta) and deletes
- tracks with a rating of exactly 1 star and
- tracks with a play count greater than 0 unless they also have a rating of exactly 5 stars
I chose to use the ratings this way because the rating is the only tag I can change while listening to a file on my iPod. If I’m listening to a track and decide I don’t want to finish it, I just set the rating to 1 star and it’ll be deleted the next time I synchronize and run this script. If I want to save something even if I’ve already listened to it all the way through, I set its rating to 5 stars. Otherwise, anything with a play count greater than 0 gets deleted.
By “deleted,” by the way, I mean the track is removed from the iTunes library (which also removes it from the Podcasts playlist) and the file is moved to the trash. At the end of the script, a dialog is displayed showing how many tracks were affected.
So the workflow now is this: when I plug in my iPod, it sends the new play counts and ratings to iTunes and receives any new files I’ve downloaded since the last sync. Then I run the script, cleaning out anything marked for deletion according to the rules detailed above. If any changes are made, the script automatically re-synchronizes the iPod. (A previous version of the script didn’t automatically re-synchronize.)
The script, if you’d like to try it yourself, is here. Since it’s written in AppleScript, it will work on Apple computers only—I’ve tested it on my PowerBook running iTunes 4.7.1 under OS X 10.3.8. To use it, unzip the file and drop the script in /Library/iTunes/Scripts/ (if you want it to be available to all users on your computer) or ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts/ (if not). Please note that I make no guarantees about the functionality or safety of this script, and you use it at your own risk.
Incidentally, everything I know about AppleScript I learned from Beginning AppleScript, and everything I know about controlling iTunes via AppleScript I learned from iPod and iTunes Hacks. If you’re interested in learning AppleScript and/or getting more out of iTunes and your iPod, you can help me out while helping yourself by buying a book through one of those links.
Update: I’ve added a couple of lines to the script so that if it does find tracks to delete, it automatically re-syncs the iPod, so you don’t have to do it yourself. If it doesn’t delete any tracks, there’s nothing new to synchronize, so it skips that step.
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03.10.05
Posted in Software at 3:21 pm by Nicholas
Update: Since writing this entry, I’ve received feedback from the developers of three of the programs mentioned below (two in the comments, and one by email). I’ve also noticed a couple other errors that no one had called me on yet. I’ve inserted updates inline based on the information they sent. Obviously, the fact that they took the time to get back to me about the issues I had and the features I wanted is a very good sign, and something I encourage my readers to consider when deciding on a podcast client (or any other software).
As you might guess from the new podcast category in the sidebar, I finally got bit by the podcast bug. It’s not enough that I have an RSS reader open all day bringing a few dozen feeds in on a regular basis; now I’m filling my iPod with even more blather from around the web. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, podcasts are like audio blogs—regularly-updated audio content that can be downloaded automatically via RSS feed and optionally sent to iTunes to be synchronized with an iPod (or, of course, just listened to at home). Some are professionally produced, like the BBC’s In Our Time, and some are just a guy in his bedroom with a plastic microphone, like the Singularity Podcast. Most fall somewhere in between.
But this new interest brought with it a dilemma: which Podcast client should I use? There are several clients available for OS X … and I’ve now tried most of them. This is my report.
I noticed, first of all, that iPodder seemed to be the default recommendation from a lot of people—due in part, I’m sure, to its status as one of the first clients, its cross-platform compatibility, and its price tag (free as in beer and free as in speech). I’m all about open source, but I must confess a certain bias against GUI applications based on scripting languages—too often it’s slow and fails to take advantage of the Cocoa libraries, leaving the user with a non-standardized interface. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, but in the end I decided to try it only as a last resort. Note: in the original version of this entry I confused iPodder with jPodder somehow (I guess they look kind of similar in certain fonts). iPodder is written in Python, while jPodder is written in Java. Sorry about that.
Next I turned to iPodderX—a very slick-looking piece of software that, unfortunately, failed to live up to its potential. I don’t know if it was something unique about my system that caused it, but iPodderX crashed on me a lot. When it worked it worked very well, but nearly every time I closed it, it failed to reopen unless I trashed the prefs. A couple times I managed to get it to work by just deleting some of the entries in the subscription and history files, but not always. Anyway, unacceptable. I moved on. One of the developers of iPodderX has commented on this, and I intend to get back to him to see if we can figure out what was causing this problem. I’ll keep you posted.
I was interested in trying PoddumFeeder partly because it’s entirely written in AppleScript Studio, and I’ve been curious lately about what could be done with that platform. PoddumFeeder is a good client with some excellent features—one that I particularly liked was the ability to automatically remove podcasts from the iTunes library after they’ve been listened to. Unfortunately, limitations in AppleScript itself make PoddumFeeder a lot less useful than it could be. For example, it can only handle one task at a time, meaning that while it’s updating, for example, none of its menus are accessible. You can’t even scroll down the list of feeds, and the only indication that it hasn’t locked up entirely is a spinning icon—there’s no progress bar. Once I tried to download a podcast from IT Conversations, walked away for three hours, and returned to find PoddumFeeder still trying to access the feed. I had to force-quit, and when I opened it up again it didn’t remember any of the feeds I’d already downloaded. Robust it most certainly is not.
Podcast Tuner bills itself as “Absolutely the best downloader for podcasts out there,” but again I found too many bugs for my comfort level. The bugs started with the integrated ipodder.org podcast directory—certain categories and feeds failed to load with a message telling me to reload or try again later, while others loaded without a problem. Maybe the XML parser is a little too strict. The software felt clunky to me, and again I had stability issues, so I gave up.
Finally, I decided to take a look at NetNewsWire 2.0 Beta, and at last I’d found a winner. This was a tough decision for me, because I’ve been an avid Shrook user for about a year now—but Shrook doesn’t do podcasts yet (Note: Graham says via email that podcast support is planned, but the top priority right now is improving performance) to give NNW a try. Although it’s labeled Beta software and the web page starts off with a big fat warning about “nasty, vicious bugs with great big, sharp teeth,” this was by far the most stable podcast client I tried—it hasn’t crashed on me once so far. Furthermore, it handles my text RSS (and Atom) feeds as well as Podcasts, so there’s no need to run separate clients for the two types of content. I do have a few complaints: there’s no way I could find to tell it to download, for example, only the most recent file from a feed, or only podcasts uploaded in the past week—options that are particularly useful when adding a new feed to the subscription list. And I’d really like to see NetNewsWire include PoddumFeeder’s option to automatically remove already-heard podcasts from the iTunes library (I’m planning on writing an AppleScript to handle this, but I shouldn’t have to). Overall, though, I found it to be exactly the sort of robust, stable, feature-packed software I’ve become accustomed to since switching to Mac a year and a half ago.
It’s important to remember that as of this writing, only version 2.0 Beta of NetNewsWire has the ability to download podcasts automatically. Previous versions also lacked Atom feed support, which was one of the reasons I chose Shrook over NNW when deciding on a feedreader last year. But in spite of being Beta software, and in spite of its relatively hefty $24.95 price tag, it’s the best option in its category for OS X right now. Highly recommended. (I originally had the wrong price in this paragraph—the Beta version is $24.95; it’s version 1.0 that’s $39.95. Sorry about the confusion—I’m waiting until I get paid on the fifteenth to register my copy, so I was just going by the first price I saw on the web site.)
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03.08.05
Posted in Music at 3:26 pm by Nicholas
The BBC reports that Russian prosecutors have decided not to take action against AllofMP3.com, so if you took my advice and used up your balance a while back, it should be safe to refill now.
Also, the best Metafilter comment in weeks comes from MillMan, who reasons, “Corporations can shop around the world for the lowest labor costs, and now I can shop my dollars around for the most favorable IP laws.”
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03.01.05
Posted in Food at 2:56 pm by Nicholas
Oh man, this is for me. Dagoba Organic Chocolate brand Xocolatl is a blend of authentic hot chocolate, cinnamon, and chile peppers. $8.60 for 12 ounces.
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