Author Archives: Jeff Porten

Apparently, we need to get used to this.

Exceptionally long heat waves and other hot events could become commonplace in the United States in the next 30 years, according to a new study by Stanford University climate scientists.

“Using a large suite of climate model experiments, we see a clear emergence of much more intense, hot conditions in the U.S. within the next three decades,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, an assistant professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and the lead author of the study.

Definition of cognitive dissonance: when anything on Twitter provides instructions on how to stop procrastinating.

Addendum: the link is useless. You want to stop procrastinating? Read The Now Habit and Getting Things Done.

Listening to a BBC Documentary on the George W. Bush presidency, and it suddenly occurs to me: appointing John Bolton to be ambassador to anything is about as idiotic as appointing me to be ambassador to anything.

DISH Network says: “Fuck Big Bird.”

Benton.org: Satellite TV company DISH Network sued the Federal Communications Commission on July 1 in a bid to block enforcement of a law requiring it to carry the high definition programming of public television stations around the country.

Finland becomes first country to say broadband is a basic right

Benton.org: In Finland, the Ministry of Transport and Communications said that as of July 1 the country’s citizens have a basic right to broadband speeds of 1 Mbps and suggested that for operators who have to supply such a service a reasonable charge would be between 30 to 40 Euros ($36.70 and $48.90) per month. Finland also has an ambitious goal of connecting every citizen to a 100 Mbps connection by 2015. So should the U.S. follow suit?

Dear Consumer Electronics Association,

Too much to ask that your press releases do not fail utterly on my consumer electronics?

NPR: So close and yet so far

Posted on

I have simple rules for managing my list of podcasts—which, if you’re interested, you can peruse yourself in the White Noise section of the sidebar.

1. Subscribe to anything which sounds remotely interesting. In the last three days, I’ve downloaded nearly 40 hours of audio—this doesn’t include anything I’ve actually listened to in that time, so the number is probably closer to 50.

2. Ruthlessly skip any podcast which in fact is not interesting.

3. Run a series of insanely complicated AppleScripts which delete some podcasts after they’re a few days old, save other podcasts until I get to them, and subject most of them to manual review.

There is pretty much one cardinal rule: a podcast should be a single story, rather than a concatenation of a bunch of different stories which all get mucked together. So, fer’instance, the CBC science show Quirks and Quarks is available both as an hour-long show, or as each story in a separate file. I go with the latter. (Second best option: enhanced podcasts which bookmark each story in a show.)

NPR does not like breaking up its shows—if you want to subscribe to Fresh Air or Talk of the Nation, you’re going to get it in hour-long chunks. But if you sign up for the NPR programmer interface, you can use their API to get individual stories.

The sole exceptions: the single damn shows for which this would be most useful, Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Of course, you can download individual stories—just go to the NPR website, or subscribe to these shows’ RSS feeds, and all of the stories show up one after the other. Just click on the title, and download the file. This saves as an MP3 file. Which, in iTunes, looks like this.

The thing is, waaaaaaay back in 2002, I had an AppleScript which would parse the NPR feed, let me pick the stories I wanted, and then save them to prettier filenames. So I could at least see what the hell I was deleting without actually listening to them, which is the fate of most of my podcasts. And I don’t doubt I could do it again.

The question: why the hell do I have to? The information is there, so it’s not a licensing issue. It’s just that geeks are allowed to get access to this stuff with a little elbow grease, but everyone else can’t.

NPR, get with the program. This is seriously silly.

Macworld roundup 7/6

Posted on

SyncMate connects your Mac’s data to… everything

SyncMate synchronization software boasts a list of compatible devices and operating systems which includes anything more sophisticated than your blender.

The Onion adds paid download to the iTunes Store

Unfortunately, my editors killed this image with the article. “The Y! Phone uses Google’s operating system and should be on the market in 3 to 4 years.”

Republicans: a party of unemployment

From now until 2 November, the Republican party will be the party of unemployment. The logic is straightforward: the more people who are unemployed on election day, the better the prospects for Republicans in the fall election. They expect, with good cause, that voters will hold the Democrats responsible for the state of the economy. Therefore, anything that the Republicans can do to make the economy worse between now and then will help their election prospects.

While it may be bad taste to accuse a major national political party of deliberately wanting to throw people out of jobs, there is no other plausible explanation for the Republicans’ behaviour.

The federal government takedown of pirate Internet domain names succeeded… for a few hours. This site has an interesting review of the jurisdictional and legal issues raised by the case—and essentially concludes that government action is a complete waste of time.