Steven
Hanley
About
email: sjh@svana.org
web: http://svana.org/sjh
Other online diaries:
Aaron Broughton,
Alison Russell,
Allan Bontjer,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Jeremy Kerr,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Carden,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Rusty Russell,
Tim Potter,
Tony Breeds,
Links:
Linux Weekly News,
XKCD,
Userfriendly,
Questionable Content,
Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
CORC,
Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.
planet sjh
(online feed aggrgator for all the diaries I read regularly)
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Fri, 24 Jun 2005
Woohoo for Radio National - 17:29
So I recalled Mikal
mentioning
Radio National
Podcasts a while back, this interests me, in the past I have
lamented the
lack of AM support in radio tuner cards for the exact reason that it would
rock to be able to record Radio
National shows and play them on a mobile device when ever you wanted to
listen to them.
I googled the other day and found the Radio National podcast page, they do indeed have a pretty good selection of shows available for download. I rang Crash to ask if he had been doing any of this podcasting radio national thing, he rides to work every day, a rather nice ~ 23 KM commute, listening to an mp3 player or a radio. Crash had indeed been engaging in this podcasting thing, downloading any new casts night at 3am. I asked what application he used to do this, a Gooey application would be kind of silly to use for this so I hoped there was a basic CLI application for the task.
Crash was able to point out this rather cool shell script, Bashpodder, to download all new/updated feeds from a list of feed URL's. Mikal, sfr and Rusty will I am sure be glad to see a very useful application, written in shell still rather than some other language, that it works reliably and the newer release even shrank from 76 lines of shell to 44 lines (now including more comments too).
I added all the RN feeds I wanted into the file one per line, ran the script and a few minutes later I had 800 MB of cool Radio National content in mp3 format ready for listening anywhere and anywhen. Now if only we could convince the government to fund the ABC and Radio National better so they can keep up the fantastic work well on into the future.
Region free in .au by law? - 11:40
I notice some discussion about purchasing Region free DVD players in .au.
Michael
and Mikal, AFAIR the
reason you should not be surprised at finding DVD players purchased in
Australia are region free is due to the Australian law on this.
From my recollection (I can not be bothered googling to see if I am smoking crack or if this is an accurate recollection) Australian law forbade region encoding. Most of the countries in the westernised world also forbade region encoding by law, only the US had (and probably still has) an allowance for this practice.
Originally he manufacturers made the DVD players for the US market and attempted to sell the region encoded players around the rest of the world. Eventually they realised they could not get away with that, for at least 5 or 6 years now almost all players sold in Australia were region encoding free. Now the amusing thing is the manufacturers to some extent got sick of it and now most DVD players being sold in the US are also not encumbered by region encoding.
There is one other unfortunate aspect here though, software, and hardware with that software, still often has region encoding issues, so Apple DVD drives, MacOSX, software on Windows to play DVD's etc, all of this stuff will often still be broken. Probably because it comes out of small minded US centric firms and in the case of software there is no production penalty or an easy legal penalty if produced in this damaged state.
