Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainI really like to listen to BBC Radio programs. Unfortunately the BBC chooses to make their programs available in Real Audio format which I really dislike. Really, really, really dislike. It also means I can't put the programs on my MP3 player. Well, courtesy of Stuart we have a handy script for quickly and easily saving our favorite BBC Radio programs under Linux.
The only tricky part is extracting the proper RTSP URL. Thankfully Stuart provides us with an easy method to do this as well:
Obtaining the ram file is still pretty easy, in fact using the command line to get it is easier than copying the previous link. So on a Linux command prompt enter:
curl http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/genres/comedy/aod.shtml?radio4/nowshow | grep [.]ramWhere the link is a copy of the link to start playing the file. This should give one line on the console starting something like:
<a href="/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio4/nowshow.ram">
<img src="/radio/aod/images/ico_realplayer.gif" width="16" height="12" alt="" border="0" align="left" vspace="1" />Listen using stand-alone Real Player</a><br clear="left" />Put this link to the .ram file into my script ... [and] add the http://www.bbc.co.uk on the front, and this will create an mp3 or ogg file of the show.
I've mirrored Stuart's handy script, which he makes available under the GNU GPL, here just in case it should ever go missing. Use the attachment link at the bottom of this post to download it and rename to listenagain.sh.
I just happened to see on Slashdot that UC Berkeley is now making full lectures available on YouTube starting with over 300 hours of lectures in various subjects. You can see the videos divided up by course by viewing Berkeley's YouTube playlists. No psych or neuroscience in there although I did like the Physics For Future Presidents course. One can only hope this free service from Berkeley will blossom in future months. At least I think it's a fantastic thing. After all, considering the degree to which pseudoscience and the paranormal outweigh real science and fact in search engine listings it can't hurt to have one more avenue for solid information out there.
More than that though I think many adults are looking to expand their knowledge. Actually many kids are looking to go beyond the mediocre offerings of their schools too. Unfortunately in the past economic and geographic limitations have prevented those looking to increase their knowledge and skills in an academic arena from doing so. Berkeley's offering up of these lectures online is helping to eradicate those barriers. In my mind it's hard to see anything negative coming out of that.
The New York Times announced Monday that it is ending its paid subscription service Times Select.
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Recently there's been a lot of changes in my life. Mostly extraordinarily good ones, but a few clunkers along the way which is to be expected I suppose. In any case this has led me to reevaluate a lot of my priorities and one of them is this site. Oh, to be sure, we're not going away. Not any time soon. However, there will be changes.
Part of the reason for that is I want to expand on and develop my own writing further and thus I'd like to reduce the time overhead this site requires. Drupal has evolved into a fascinating and powerful platform but at this stage in my life I'm looking more and more for things that "just work". So while I'd wholeheartedly recommend Drupal as a tool to build your next feature-rich web application, I have to say that right now, on the whole, it's kinda overkill as a blogging platform. What I'm looking for is something with a little more simplicity and ease of use to it. Something where you don't have to spend days and weeks building the site up from scratch; where you don't feel as if you're constantly reinventing the wheel. Something that already has beautiful and stylish themes developed for it in droves. And to that end I'll be moving this site to a Wordpress install in a few weeks time.
But even though I'm valuing simplicity and ease of use these days over gee-whiz technowizardy, I am at heart a technophiliac. I love technology, that will never change, and I'm always looking to try or learn something new. Now, when something combines both those elements into one, when something strokes my love of technology, is simple to use, and it just happens to be free! I can't help but to gush over it. Such is the case with XAMPP for Windows. read more »
Save Internet Radio: Call your representatives today.Thousands of internet radio broadcasters are planning a mass protest on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 by going completely silent, or airing the sound of ocean waves or similar, to protest new draconian royalty rates established by the Copyright Royalty Board. The new rates, which are retroactive to January of 2006, are on a per listener basis versus previous per song royalty rates and will double over five years time. Just to give you an idea of how onerous the new rates are, current internet radio royalty rates are already double what sattelite radio broadcasters pay.
This will have the effect of driving most internet radio broadcasters out of business who will not be able to afford the new rates. It's important that artists be reimbursed for their efforts, but many independent artists need internet radio to gain the exposure that they are denied by mainstream broadcast radio. Internet radio serves a vital function in our society by introducing listeners to a variety of artists and viewpoints that are considered unviable by commercial sources. The new royalty structure will effectively kill off this vital medium.read more »
I've been slacking lately, but for good reason! I'm really, amazingly, incredibly, mind-numbingly busy right now. And I've got a lot of stuff to get done too. So as a sort of peace offering I offer you this little how-to, entirely adopted from a comment on Richard Dawkins' site by benh. Personally, I find this very handy. I hate RealAudio for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because it won't play on my mp3 player (which does a number of formats).
This one's for you Linux geeks, though you Mac heads should have no problem either. It could be done on Windows, but for the purpose of this how-to I'm going to assume you've got some form of *BSD/*nix and both mplayer and lame installed. Start out by opening up terminal window and then...
And that's all there is to it. Thanks to benh for concise and clear instructions. A great workaround to a truly inconvenient audio format!
Blogging will be really light for me this week. Don't worry, Pete at BogsBlog and I will still get out Carnival of the Liberals (well, Pete will be doing most of the work -- I just need to send out e-mails) but otherwise I'll be slacking off and posting videos here and there.
Today we have an educational film about the history of electronic music that can only be described as porn for music geeks. The oscilloscope shots are really hot and the Moog modular and Fairlight clips will leave you breathing heavy.
Seriously, I practically salivate at the images of all these classic synths and associated technology. I'm not a practicing musician (I can barely play the riff to Iron Man on guitar) but I grew up surrounded by both electronics and electronic musical instruments so I love watching old videos like this. While today's synths are just fantastic and our ability to create sound with them is practically unlimited, making music with them just isn't the same. There was something very personal and human about crafting music with these old synths. Perhaps because they were so primitive it was such a hands-on affair. It took really getting to know your instrument on a very intimate level to produce anything beyond mere blips and bleeps. I share similar affections for old computing technology.
Parts 2 and 3 are after the fold. If you have an antiquated technology fetish (musical instruments or otherwise), tell us about it in comments.read more »
Props go out to Uri Kalish for showing us how to do scrolling blogrolls (as seen on our front page sidebar now)! Yay! Thanks Uri! Who knew it could be this simple? While I'm not thrilled about the use of the non standards-compliant marquee tag it works and that's good enough for now. For those who wish to do standards compliant XHTML with CSS, one particularly good javascript marquee solution (in my eyes) appears here. You'd still need to figure out how to read your blogroll into an array (NG's blogrolls are through Blogrolling.com) but that's probably not too difficult (and someday I may actually summon up the energy to do it).
I saw this at Mojoey's Deep Thoughts and you can download the code snippet for free preconfigured with Mojoey's Giant Atheist Blogroll'O'Doom (now 220+ godless blogs strong). So thanks to you too Mojoey for collecting together so many atheist blogs in one place!
CDex screenshot: A free CD ripper based on LAME for WindowsI just wanted to take a couple of minutes and point out an informative post at one of the best music blogs around, The Sky Moves Sideways.
If you're at all like me then chances are you have a absolutely ginormous digital music collection. All ripped from CDs you've paid for out of your own pocket and have full rights to make copies of for your personal enjoyment, right? Right!? Of course you do. Anyhow, BlackWatchPlaid tells you what software to use to not only rip your CDs so they sound their best, but also how to make your digital media collection look good too.
The recommendations are Windows centric, but Mac and Linux users probably already know how to do this anyway. Well, the Linux users likely do. I don't know about you Mac people. Be sure to read the comments for even more great tips.
Building Stonehenge — This Man can Move Anything
Wally Wallington has shown that it would have been possible for neolithic man to not only build Stonehenge, but to build it with a far greater ease than one might think. In this video, Wally uses only himself, ingenuity and gravity to move and lift a 19,200 pound monolith into place. Why? Because Wally likes moving things. Really big things.
I love stuff like this. For instance, I remember a WGBH/PBS Nova special where Norm Abram, the master carpenter of This Old House fame showed how the Egyptian pyramids could have been built using only the tools and materials available in the 25th Century BC. Sure, neither Wally nor Norm can prove that their methods are how the pyramids or Stonehenge were actually built, but rather what they show is that humans are incredibly clever primates and there's no need to look any further than ambition and the human intellect to explain the construction of ancient monuments.
Like the pyramids, Stongehenge attracts a lot of woowoo explanations for its' construction, often invoking the supernatural or, in modern times, UFOs. It's really a curious form of soft-bigotry embedded in our culture. After all, we have no trouble believing the Ancient Greeks or Romans built the great architectural wonders of their civilizations yet for some reason we see other ancient peoples as incapable of carrying out such massive construction projects. Thanks to people like Wally, we can all see how silly these sorts of prejudices are. And how much fun it is to move a pole barn using just simple mechanical principles and your own muscle power!
You can find out more about Wally at his website The Forgotten Technology. Hat tip: Deeply Blasphemous.
Updated March 21, 2007 — We get a fact check from Rich of the podcast Bloodthirsty Vegetarians who e-mailed me to say that it was actually This Old House's stonemason Roger Hopkins who did the documentary on the technique he figured out to construct the pyramids and not Norm Abram as I mentioned. I'm sure my memory is flawed here, this was many years ago. Of course, that would mean conceding to Rich that he was right about a trivial matter, and that can never be. Sorry Rich. I still have vivid memories of Norm Abram building the pyramids (with Al Gore's help of course). 
Only a couple of months after I finally got Neural Gourmet upgraded to Drupal 4.7, the next major release of the little CMS that could, Drupal 5.0, is out the door and ready to do your bidding. It also happens to be Drupal's 6th birthday, and how Drupal has grown in this short time! Starting out as a simple personal project to power Dries Buytaert's bullentin board system, Drupal has grown in complexity and power and now stands behind such diverse and popular websites as The Onion, MTV UK, TWIT.tv and even NASA! To learn all about what's new in Drupal you'll want to be sure to check out Lullabot's videocasts.
I suppose it's more than ironic that Neural Gourmet would have serious issues today of all days. The World Wide Web is officially sixteen years old today. You can view some of the very first web pages referring to "The Project" as it was called. I particularly enjoyed the section on how you can help the web. There is also a slide show on the history of the internet and the web from the 10th anniversary of the web in Asia site.
Just a quickie before I head out to do early morning battle at Big Box Mart... Slashdot has a story on the Star Trek: The Next Generation LCARS theme being developed for the Nokia 770 tablet PC. While this rates very high on my coolness scale, I can't say I would find such a thing enjoyable. Don't get me wrong, Michael Okuda will probably go down in history for this bit of graphic design and I must admit that it's visually stunning. In fact, I'll go so far as to cop to having had a LCARS theme on my Windows box back in the Win 98 days but for everyday use it's just too visually cluttered. Judging by how many icons I see on the typical Windows user's desktop perhaps I'm abnormal in this perception.
The biggest drawback though is that every damn interface component emits a sound. Sure, in the heat of battle on a noisy starship I can see where this would be an advantage; giving audible feedback of an action. I would think though that in the 24th Century humans would have figured out how to give tactile feedback on touchscreen displays. However, here in the early 21st Century the constant stream of bleeps and bloops is just damn bloody annoying.
Still, even if I should not have been, the Slashdot blurb surprised me. Did you know there's an LCARS standards board? Which leads me to wonder... When will we see the Klingon computer interface standards board?
It's actually been out on the FTP servers for a while now (I've been using it since this afternoon) but sometime tomorrow (Tuesday) Mozilla will officially release Firefox 2.0. Most of the new features are not so much groundbreaking as they are the types of little niceties that make everything more pleasant. Notable improvements are the new built-in phishing protection, spell checking, RSS feed handling and session saver (if you close Firefox with tabs open it will remember them the next time you start Firefox). Oh, and the memory usage has been reduced while the browser has an overall "faster" feel to it (based on my subjective judgement).
One change some people might not like is that every browser tab has a close button on it now. If you want to revert Firefox back to its' traditional behavior it's easy to do. Type 'about:config' into your address bar. Find the 'browser.tabs.closeButtons' option (use the filter bar at the top of the page), double-click it, change the value to '3' and click 'OK'.
You might also want to check that your theme and extensions will work before upgrading. Fortunately for me I only had my theme and one critical extension that did not have newer versions at mozilla.org but I found Firefox 2.0 compatible versions at the theme developer's homepage.
Not even 24 hours after Internet Explorer 7.0, the long awaited improvement to Microsoft's web browser, was released a vulnerability has been found that could allow malicious websites to pose as other websites and potentially cause the user to disclose sensitive information such as bank or Paypal logins, and passwords. While this vulnerability is considered "less critical" by Secunia, it does not bode well for IE 7.0 which was supposed to be more secure than its' predecessor.
Should this be under the humor category too?
I've been a bit out of the news loop the past few days so I was really shocked to learn that Hans Reiser, creator of the innovative ReiserFS file system for Linux (of which I have long been enamored) has been arrested on suspicion of murder. His estranged wife Nina disappeared on September 3rd. Her minivan was found six days later. Ramon Reiser, Hans Reiser's father confirms that Reiser's company Namesys will continue development of ReiserFS. Nina's friends have started a website and are offering a reward for information on Nina's location.
"I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg."— Douglas Adams
In lieu of an actual blog post today I'd like to point out Chad Orzel's excellent series on teleportation (which has been in the news the past few days) over at Uncertain Principles. Of course, what we're talking about is quantum teleportation which is not at all like the transporters aboard the Enterprise (which often seem more trouble than they're worth anyway) but it's still amazing science. It's a shame that it in its' attempts to popularize it the press ends up minimizing the real value of the work. Chad's series helps clear away the quantum fog.
Well, I doubt this is going to interest many of our readers, but I know it'll tickle the fancy of at least a couple of you out there, and it interests me (which is what's really important right?). Mark Chu-Carroll continues his fun (and a lot more useful than you might think!) series on manual computing devices with an easy to follow how-to on taking Square Roots On The Abacus. Maybe someday I'll do a finger math series (if Mark doesn't beat me to it).
Via Slashdot, we find this Houston Chronicle story which informs us that Neil Armstrong in fact did not flub his lines in one of the most important, and brief, speeches ever made. [...]read more »
