It's all out there on the streets...
...you just gotta pick it up.
Well, last week I started this new blog series of mine: “Tools for fools”. Again, this is an effort to start writing some more posts on a more regular basis. Anyway, what’s the story behind it. In this series I’m trying to introduce pretty neat tools to my fellow readers. This time it’s about listening to podcasts while on the run for people without an iPod.
I have to admit that this iPod thing is pretty handy when it comes to listening to podcasts that have a certain length. Especially the feature to remember the position where you stopped listening for every single piece of media and synchronizing it between the device and a PC is really cool. But at what price? iTunes is crab, overload and for sure an information gathering tool for Apple comparable only to the Google empire. I know there are alternatives but then why should I carry an extra device around if I already have one that offers much more valueable features? Yes, now everybody’s saying: “Get the iPhone, dude”. Although I like being called “dude” I don’t like the iPhone. It’s ugly, too large and doesn’t even offer 3G. I guess the usability is Apple style again and it really rocks but 500 bucks? No way, I stick with my Sony Ericsson K750i (I know it’s 3G neither).
What a great mobile phone. I got a 1GB “Memory Stick Pro Duo” which is fairly enough for my needs. Besides making phone calls with it I mostly use it to listen to podcasts. I travel a lot by train and therefore I like long ones starting from 30 minutes up. And this is the only drawback of my K750i: the media player sucks. Why is that? Well, the fast forward/backward is non-adaptive. This means it seeks and rewinds with a constant speed and this speed is so slow it deadens your fingers. So if you are listening to a 90 minute podcast and you interrupt at 45 minutes you’re really fucked up. How are you gonna come back to that position?
My solution to the problem is called mp3splt. This nice little command line app let’s you split MP3 files w/o re-encoding. For my podcasts I like to split them into chunks of 15 minutes. I simply run a
mp3splt -t 15.00 [mp3 filename]
and off it goes. A file of a 60 minutes length will be splitted into four pieces. But that’s not all. A line like
mp3splt [mp3 filename] 05.00 58.00.23
will result in a file starting from minute five up to the 58th minute and 23 hundreds of a second. “Why would I wanna do that?” you ask again. This is where the next cool lil’ comline app comes into play: Streamripper. This tool lets you record an mp3 stream to your harddrive. Personally I use it to record radio plays from German radio stations. For example Deutschlandfunk broadcasts the “Mitternachtskrimi” (midnight crime thriller) every Saturday at 00:00 AM. On my “always-on” server I added a cron job with the following entry:
0 0 * * 6 streamripper http://dradio-live.mp3.t-bn.de/dlf_live -a -A -l 3600 -d /home/username/my_streamrips
This line starts Streamripper every Saturday at 00:00 AM and lets it record for 3600 seconds or one hour. The file is saved to the home directory of the user. I forgot the use of the other options but you will find out.
The result is a file with the news at 00:00 AM included. And not every radio play is exactly 50-55 minutes long. So I need a tool to cut it: mp3splt. We’ve come full circle.
Oh, one last thing. Both apps are available for Linux and Win. Now isn’t that something?
JEdit
Every once in a while I used to go on an odyssey trying to find a free alternative to IMHO one of the best editors out there: Ultra-Edit. When I discovered PSPad I thought I finally found home but… nope, PSPad simply is too buggy (endless loops when using RegExp find’n'replace, complete mess when switching between HEX and ASCII mode, block highlighting works but block insertion doesn’t, and and and). Anyway, I came across JEdit before but at the time the Java VM didn’t have the performance it has today and I didn’t really like the Swing interface. But then again this is only a question of habit (and of course there are many themes you can chose from).
JEdit is a modular plug-in based highly extensible application with a large community and lots of plug-ins already. In fact, many of the features you probably expect to be part of the core application are implemented as plug-ins. For example, I had a hard time finding out that the feature to sort the lines of a file requires the TextTools plug-in. Talking about plug-ins: the ones I currently use are TextTools, BufferTabs, and Console. Console I like a lot. Especially under Windows where the command histroy is kept even if you close the application. Not like the standard cmd.exe where all the commands you type are lost when you close the window.
No need to talk about the standard features. Regular Expressions, syntax highlighting, markers, folding, and macros. Its all there.
But there is no light w/o shade. So far, I am not very happy with the HEX plug-ins. But to be honest, I haven’t investigated all that much, yet. Another drawback is that it takes quite some time to get used to the user interface. I don’t like changing default configurations that much and up to now I haven’t found a practical way to use shortcuts for plug-ins. Another problem I have is that I use a German keyboard and many predefined shortcuts use special characters that need the [ALT] key on the German clavier. Thus, the shortcuts do not work. Anyone solved this already? Another problem seems to be RAM handling. If you want to edit large files you must run the Java VM with a special option. The JEdit FAQ is your friend ;-)
As a conclusion I would say that JEdit is almost as powerful as UltraEdit in some aspects even stronger. The Java interface is not everyones taste but you can get along with it. For the performance there is a “hidden” option which loads JEdit in the background where it stays until you kill the process. Starting a new JEdit window afterwards feels almost like launching a native application. Well, and probably the killer argument is that it is open source published under the GPLv2. My advise: check it out!
About
Originally this site was intended as a project site. The goal was to define standards for the perimeterless network using
open-source software. To be honest I simply do not have the time for such a thing. So what is left is a blog with sporadic
posts that are either helpful for myself or I think are helpful for others, too since I had a hard time finding information
on the Internet. Think of it as a knowledge base.
Ehm yes, somtimes I write down my two cents on any topic that may go through my mind at that point in time ;-)