Speed up your Podcasts

I listen to quite a few podcasts, probably a good five hours worth a week. Here’s how I save time doing that:

1. Open Windows Media Player

2. Enable the Speed Up Enhancement in Windows Media Player
Speed up 1

3. Play your file

4. Crank it up

Speed Up 2

I can listen to all my podcasts at 1.4 or 1.5 except Security Now with Steve Gibson and Leo Leporte, Steve talks a mile a minute and they really shove a lot of good content into their podcast.

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Folding @ Home

Folding@Home

Remember SETI@Home? Are you still running that?

Folding@Home studies how proteins fold and more importantly, why they fold improperly and cause cancer. Don’t you think this is a better use of your computer?

It uses your spare CPU so you’ll see your CPU at 100% all the time but it yields to all other applications so you will never notice that its running. Think of it as using your whole computer all the time instead of just sucking power while running the Flying Windows screensaver.

You can find the windows installer on the Folding@Home installer, If you’d like you can join our team using the team number 50606.

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Naming Your Computers

I like to give all my computers original, easy to remember names. I think people cop-out if their computer name is XP-PRO or LAPTOP or LINUX. Here’s a few ideas I’ve gathered for naming schemes. Make sure you leave yours in the comments.

  • The Seven Deadly Sins (My current naming scheme)
    • lust
    • gluttony
    • greed
    • sloth
    • wrath
    • envy
    • pride (hubris)
  • Mythical Creatures
    • gryphon
    • dragon
    • hydra
    • unicorn
    • pegasus
    • gargoyle
    • chimera
    • sphinx
    • phoenix
    • cerberus
    • kraken
    • leviathan
    • wyvern
  • Happy Words (thanks Carey)
    • abandonment
    • isolation
    • hate
    • despair
    • revenge
  • Trees
    • juniper
    • maple
    • oak
    • cedar
    • pine

Update: I thought of one other one:

  • alpha
  • bravo
  • charlie
  • delta
  • etc…

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Your Feed is on Probation

Google Reader Probation

I have quite a few RSS feeds in my reader that generate somewhere around 100 articles a day to process. When someone suggests a new blog or I stumble upon a good article and the website looks promising it goes in the probation category.

If it doesn’t generate enough interesting content within a month to appease me it gets deleted. I’ve found this is a great way sort out only the highest quality feeds and weed out the time wasters and the ones that generate no content.

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How to turn off Smilies in Wordpress

Smilies aren’t always a good thing, depending on the professional level of your blog, you might want to turn them off, here’s how.
In your wp-config.php file, below the database stuff, add this line:

[php]$wpsmiliestrans = array();[/php]

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How My Moleskine Saving Me $88

Moleskine Datebook + Notebook

In September my wife and I finally moved gyms to one that would be on the way home from work. This saved us from driving about a half hour in the wrong direction.

Our billing date was September 15th and I canceled on the 12th and was told that I wouldn’t get charged. Of course I was charged but I had everything written down in my Moleskine.

It rescued me because on the notebook half I had written down in detail who I had talked to and what they said, at what time and obviously the date. I’ve had too much trouble before with sort of thing so I’ve learned my lesson.

I wrote the gym a letter detailing my transactions with all these people plus including a copy of the cancellation letter and the fax receipt saying they received it. The next day I got a calling saying they would refund my money and sorry for the trouble. It’s very hard to argue when you can present a detailed time line.

Here’s a list of other things to write down:

  • Canceling anything, write down who you talked to and the time and your cancellation number (This saved me when I canceled DSL and they continued to charge me and didn’t refund the previous month of service, even though it didn’t work)
  • Ordering a major item or service
  • Bills paid and when you mailed them
  • Any inquiries you make about services - write down who told you, what they said and the price quote

If you think of any others, leave them in the comments.

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I :heart: Google Reader

Google Reader Screenshot

New Features:

Google made some major updates to Google Reader which makes it really usable. Before it was a bit awkward and didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Now it looks great and functions exactly how you think it should, here are the features I really like:

  • You can access it anywhere
  • Good HTML Support (you’d think this would be obvious but then you must not have used embedded IE)
  • Embedded mp3 Support - I have a lot of podcasts in my feeds, this makes it really handy to listen to the short ones as I process my articles
  • Keyboard shortcuts - this is probably the best feature - my hands don’t leave the keyboard

My Workflow:

Here’s how I work. I process first, I just determine whether the article is interesting and open it, I read later:

  • Shift + N -> Move to the next feed
  • Shift + O -> Open that feed
  • Spacebar -> page through the feed (Possibly doing a Shift + A to mark all read if it bores me)
  • v -> opens that articles link in a new tab (with Firefox obviously)

Summary:

Google Reader has replaced SharpReader which was my desktop feed reader for years (Rant: To mark all read in SharpReader its Ctrl+Shift+R - human hands weren’t meant to contort like that!) It’s a very efficient way of managing my current RSS feeds and has saved me quite a bit of time. Google always amazes me. I thought Reader was a very mediocre product but they really redeemed themselves and pulled off an excellent transformation with this release.

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Debian says Fork you, Firefox

IceWeasel Icon

Firefox has some very weird licensing going on with their artwork so you can’t patch Firefox and release it yourself with the original artwork. Debian’s solution was to create their own GPL’ed artwork and rename Firefox to IceWeasel. I really can’t blame Debian for forking it plus IceWeasel is a cool name. Some of the best software in the Open Source community has been created when one programmer saw a different direction to take a piece of software.

Here are 5 Reasons to Support IceWeasel.

And then 5 Reasons to Kill it.

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Summer Playing

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Unprotected m4a to mp3

Here’s a quick script that can convert m4a (AAC encoded music files) to mp3. This is a nice example of how powerful the command line can be.

It uses mplayer to write out the raw wave file, then uses lame to encode the mp3’s. After that it cleans up the file endings using sed. This script requires mplayer and lame to be installed.

It should work well on Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.

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