Matt O’ Rama

MUSIC

I just finished a perl program that polls my Bloglines account, checks all the feeds in my Music folder and downloads all the mp3s enclosed to my music folder. Awesome. As soon as I check it some more I’ll be releasing it but part of the cool thing is that it was super easy. It took me maybe 2 hours and less than 100 lines of code, including a feature to make sure I don’t download any songs more than once. Now I have a regularly updated feed of cool new music automatically downloaded to my system. I could pipe the mp3s to my ipod but since I have my badass new MythTV home media system I’ll be able to play them on my stereo. I’ll probably put them on the ipod as well but listening to them on the big stereo is well, so much bigger. I’ve already found 2 or 3 albums I’d like to buy and the best part is that the money goes to the artists, not to the studio.

On that note if you know of any sites podcasting music along the lines of what Indiefeed.com plays, please leave a comment.

PODCASTS

As I said in a recent post, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently. I had been using what seems like the semi-official podcast client called ipodder. Not any more. I’ve found a new and improved-in-all-ways podcast client I’m going to be recommending to anyone who will listen. It’s called Doppler Radio and it rocks. Compared to DR, ipodder seems like a proof of concept app whipped up to show the basics of podcasting. DR supports cool stuff like multi-threaded downloads so it downloads more than 1 podcast at a time, and things I would consider basic functionality that ipodder lacks like the ability to abort downloads if you’ve alread listened to something. It also has the genius feature of syncing your podcast RSS feeds with your account on Bloglines, the online RSS feed aggregator. So instead of putting a feed into ipodder and having no way of exporting the feed list (or even copying the URL to paste it somewhere else!) I can put all my feeds into Bloglines and it’ll read the list and download any podcasts included.

In a nutshell, there’s no reason to use ipodder and put up with its quirks and incompleteness. Switch to Doppler Radio. If you’re using ipodder now, you’ll thank me later.

FUTURE

“The 20th century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.”

– Arnold Toynbee

My corrolary to that idea is that the 21st century will be remembered as the era when moved to the next step and actually began achieving the welfare of the whole human race.

I’ve been thinking about Bruce Mau’s Massive Change project for awhile now and after listening to a speech of his (courtesy of the awesome IT Conversations website) I’m going to go find the book for the project this weekend. I recommend it for anyone who connects with the statements above in any way. Especially if you don’t believe it’s possible to think about improving the lot of the entire human race, the Massive Change project will give you some food for thought.

TECH

Podcasts have been on my radar for awhile (it’s only been around for a few months so take that as you may) but I’ve never felt the urge to actually listen to any. I’ve been listening to some and it’s really fascinating. It’s basically personalized pirate radio. Some of them are now essential listening (Reel Reviews) and others, not so much. I still want to find some new music casts with less early-blog-era style rambling but watching a new medium form is awesome. The thing that broke me from my blogging laziness is a recent cast from two of the founders of the medium, Adam Curry and Dave Winer.

Basically one of their favorite podcasts (Madge Weinstein of Yeast Radio) was revealed as a character, a sort of comedy show, instead of a real person. I had my suspicions from the start but apparently they did not. Adam even interviewed “her” on his podcast. The two of them are basically pissed off that they weren’t included on the joke and they felt “violated”. They thought they were the big insiders, the Founders Of Podcasting, and they should have been informed. Haha, sorry. Too bad. The real thing is that they are pissed that they weren’t included. They should have realized something important and they completely missed it. Their medium doesn’t need them. They aren’t Important. They aren’t in the inner circle anymore because there isn’t one. The medium has grown beyond them. They should be happy about this and instead they turn on their former favored child like angry 10 year olds whose parents just told them that wrestling isn’t real. If they really cared about podcasting as a medium and not as their personal playground they would encourage this sort of thing because it will help the medium. But that takes quite a bit more humility than these two seem to be capable of. In the spirit of sendoff from their “reveal” of the secret of Madge Weinstein: Fuck Adam Curry and Dave Winer.