Month: September 2005

I was up half the night last night with my little wakeful angel. Prospects for tonight were looking good until we heard a little rumble coming from her cradle. A quick diaper change and Kira’s now feeding with mom, so I thought I’d sneak away for a quick blog post. On tap for tomorrow is the annual apple picking expedition. I can’t wait. Hopefully the little one will zonk back out so the rest of us can catch up on some much needed sleep before our big day. One last thought. When I went to change Kira’s diaper, just as I was finishing…another rumble and another diaper to change. This repeated itself two more times. Like infants, sometimes life is full of discovery and wonder. Other times, well, there’s just a whole lot of poop.

Big congratulations to Julie Powell on launching her book, inspired by the Julie/Julia Project. Now that the book is out, I wonder if she’ll return to blogging? I’m still subscribed.

Also in the headphones: Sigur Ros. I picked up this CD at the same time as Lewis Taylor. It was a random purchase, the CD happened to be featured on one of the front shelves in the record store. It’s fantastic, sweet and delicious.

In the headphones: Lewis Taylor. Thanks to Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff at Pacific Coast Hellway for the excellent recommendation.

Confession: my wife and I are hooked on an oldies music video show called “We Are The 80s”. Inexplicably, I can’t find a link to the show on the VH1 web site. Check your listings, or better yet, TiVo it if you’ve joined the ranks of the dvr-enabled.

We’ve now seen over a million iPodders go out our doors.

Lessig: “Google’s use is fair use.”

There are new 2.2 beta iPodders up on Sourceforge: Windows, Mac. Most of the changes are under the covers, but lay the essential groundwork for a number of developments to come. Notable user-visible additions include support for password-protected feeds and Winamp support on Windows. Detailed change notes are posted on Sourceforge. Also, don’t miss the updated User Guide. (thanks, Pavlos!)

Over the summer I was asked by an editor at O’Reilly to write a couple of essays for an upcoming Hacks book. I’ve lost track of what’s happening with the book, but in any case part of the agreement was that I could publish the works to my own site. So without further ado…
RSS Powered Tivo To-do Lists (RPTTL) is about what happened when I decided to build an RSS reader into my TiVo. Pretty soon after getting the basic reader working, I realized that adding a few simple namespace extensions could open up the TiVo for others to add content. The result was Program My TiVo!, now written up in detail in the RPTTL essay.
iPodder Overview is a writeup of the iPodder software that I work on in my Copious Free Time(tm). It covers the basic idea of podcasting and has a section specifically for programmers that want to download our source code and have at it.
As a not so aside aside, one of the limitations of Program My TiVo! is that it takes quite a lot of specialized software and knowledge to get it running for yourself. But the basic idea of letting Person A add to Person B’s incoming media stream is general and ought to be available to anyone. Podcasting, wholly a child of the Internet, opens this capability up in a real and concrete way. GigaDial offers that capability for podcasting, opening up the Program My TiVo! idea to anyone with podcatching software. I haven’t written this one up for O’Reilly. Ssssh! Don’t tell!

Another story. I’m on my way back from the airport, having just dropped off a family member. There’s a 10-long line of cars in front of most of the toll lanes, but miraculously the lane I want is completely empty. The light above the toll booth is green, so I drive in. As I fumble for the $3 I say to the toll taker, “I thought you were closed, there’s nobody here.” He replies, without a trace of humor, “hurry up before they figure out that I’m open!”