Blog's from the Bush

ABC has some great radio programs available, including 24 hour news, if you don't live in a satellite black-hole.

As you would expect they even have live streams available over the internet. Unfortunately rather than use a popular open standard (say like Internet Radio) they have gone with two proprietary products (namely Windows Media and Real Audio). This sucks! Not only does it suck, the ABC won't even bother to acknowledge email on the subject.

Why does it suck, well lets see:

• I can’t use existing standards based software, I have to add proprietary software to my computer
• I can’t use it in iTunes
• I can’t easily listen to the stream without having to install Microsoft or Real software (which is handy since MS killed Media Player for Mac)
• I have to keep a browser open.

If it was served up as Internet Radio:

• I could use it in iTunes or a few dozen other peices of Jukebox software
• I would have all of the flexibility that they provide (like being able to play the audio from our Mac Mini media server to any room in the house thanks to iTunes).

Thankfully there are some things you can do, first of all to get your Mac listening you can install the Flip4Mac codec for Quicktime. This lets you get things going using the Windows Media stream, by basically extending the functionality of Quicktime to support the proprietary Windows Media stream. From my point of view, much better than installing a entire new eco-system of software ala Real.

Once you have Flip4Mac installed you can then listen in a browser to any of these Windows Media streams, and you can also listen to the Standalone Player streams. This bit isn’t as nice and straightforward as it should be because if you click on a link to one of these “asx” files you’ll actually get a new browser window playing the file back. What I’ve done is used a “Right-click” on the link and saved the file to the desktop - that gives me one of these:

Which when you double click will open QuickTime Player for you and give you one of these windows, instant Windows Media Player thanks to Apple and Flip4Mac. This is very useful for catching those immediate shows like AM, The World Today and PM where waiting for a Podcast hours later just doesn’t make sense!

Of course it’s not always that easy. So sites for example don’t list a separate link for a stand-alone player. In these cases the quickest way to get the “asx” file you need is to launch the browser based player. The ABC NewsRadio one looks like this:

When you don’t get a direct link for stand-alone players you can start the Windows Media stream playing and then use the little QuickTime menu (that’s the little downward point triangle on the very right of the standard QT controller). Click on that to get this menu:

When you select “Save As Source…” you can save out a file that includes a link to the audio stream. Typically they will end in “asf” or even “asx.asf” or “asx” - you can now double click these files to launch QuickTime player and connect directly to the stream without opening a browser. [Interesting side note - if you select "Save As QuickTime Movie..." you get a little audio movie file with the contents of the buffer...]

I like to check the news regularly so I’ve stuck the NewsRadio file in the dock and a simply click at any time gets me the news… naturally I have another one for Radio National... now all I've got to do is hack together a nice UI in a Widget and away we go!

Posted by craig at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I meant to post this one last week but things got busy. Anyway it's not to late to take advantage of this little bargain.

On the back of last week's Australia Post brochure (well it arrived in the mailbox last week) is the promotion shown in the scan below.

Until 16th September you can buy $40.00 worth of iTunes Gift cards (2 * $20.00) for only $30.00 and that my friend is a 25% discount! Great for those iPod carrying friends and family!

(Click for Larger Image)

Of course its not a bad deal even if you're just getting them for yourself!

Posted by craig at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently had occasion to revisit "Misspent Youth " by Peter. F. Hamilton. Why? Well because certain characters reappear in Peter Hamilton's new book "The Dreaming Void" and because I appear to have a mind like a sieve when it comes to fictional characters. Either that or I read it so long ago it's gone out of my short term storage...

If you're a fan of the Commonwealth Series then I can highly recommend this new book which picks up 1500 years after Judas Unchained. I should mention that I'm only about half way through TDV so I may not like it by the end - but I consider that to be highly unlikely at this point.

As you can imagine a lot happens in the 1500 years so Peter Hamilton has kindly provided a timeline to fill in the gap. So, rush out and grab your copy or follow this link to "The Dreaming Void" and make me a few cents richer - either way if you've read the previous Commonwealth books you'll want to read this one.

Books Referenced:

“Misspent Youth” (Peter F. Hamilton)

“Pandora’s Star” (Peter F. Hamilton)

“Judas Unchained” (Peter F. Hamilton)

“The Dreaming Void” (Peter F. Hamilton)

Posted by craig at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm one of those people that used to bring laptops to meetings and ended up weening myself off the process because I was missing important parts of the meeting. Unfortunately it wasn't a conscious action on my behalf, because if it had been I would have instituted a lap ban a long time ago, I probably would've killed off a weekly production meeting as well... Anyway this post, by Michael Lopp is worth reading for anyone that goes to meetings... and that is nearly all of us at some point or another.

Here's the start of it to wet your appetite...

I recently spoke at Yahoo! about the book, and, for this presentation, I adapted the Agenda Detection and Meeting Creatures chapters into a piece about how I assess agendas and people in the first 10 minutes of any meeting.

Early on in the presentation, I asked the audience, "What are the things you are supposed to do to make a successful meeting?" First hand: "Make sure everyone closes their laptop." Yes. Full agreement from me. If you're sitting in my meeting and your laptop is open, I promise, I swear -- you are giving me half of your attention. Maybe less.

The Yahoos couldn't drop the topic. In Q&A, the laptop question came up. In the post-presentation mingle it came up again. Everyone wanted to know if there was a situation where it was OK to whip out the laptop.

My answer, over and over again, is "No."

Now, this is religion and not reality because it's likely I'll bring my laptop to a couple of meetings this week, but I am ultimately fucking up by doing this. Here's why.

[Read on at The Laptop Herring]

Pass it around, to your team, to your clients to anyone you're going to have a meeting with...

Posted by craig at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)