I listen to NPR off-and-on throughout the day. But I rarely listen to live radio — it almost entirely comes from podcasts that I download with iTunes. I want to listen to what I want, when I want, and be able to re-arrange the order of upcoming shows in any arbitrary order I please. But the two main daily shows that I’d like to listen to, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, don’t offer podcasts. I could play the shows directly from npr.org, but then I obviously can’t listen on my iPod, and have less control over how I use it.

So I did some searching and a do-it-yourself approach is far easier than I’d imagined thanks mainly to an open source program called streamripper. Binaries are available for Mac, Linux and Windows. It’s a command line program, so you have to give it some parameters and set it to a schedule, so I can record Morning Edition from my local affiliate, KUOW, by running this command at 5 a.m. each weekday:

streamripper http://128.208.34.80:8002/ -a morning_edition.mp3 -s -d /data -l 7200

To write id3 metadata tags to our new file (used by mp3 players like iTunes), I downloaded id3v2 and gave it the following command:

id3v2 -a “NPR” -t “Morning Edition” -y `date +%Y` -g “Podcast” morning_edition.mp3

I wrapped these commands in a shell script to make it more generic. It saves each show as a separate file such as “Morning_Edition_2007-12-14.mp3”. This will work on the Mac/Linux, but a similar .bat file will need to be created for a Windows environment.

#!/bin/sh

# Config variables
MINUTES=120
ARTIST=”NPR”
DESC=”Morning Edition”
DIR=”/data/podcasts”
GENRE=”Podcast”
SRC=”http://128.208.34.80:8002/”

# Script starts here
DATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
STUB=`echo “$DESC” | awk ‘{gsub(/\ /,”_”);print}’`
FILENAME=$DATE\_$STUB.mp3
/usr/bin/streamripper $SRC -a $FILENAME -s -d $DIR -l `expr $MINUTES \* 60` -r —quiet
/usr/bin/id3v2 -a “$ARTIST” -t “$DESC” -y `date +%Y` -g “$GENRE” $DIR/$FILENAME

I named the script “morningedition.sh” and put it in my crontab to fire up weekdays at 5a.m.:

0 5 * * 1,2,3,4,5 ~/morningedition.sh

And voilà, I have my podcast. Pair this with other media sources and you can record any NPR show you like.

I was planning on upgrading my Macbook to Leopard in the next month or two with the assumption that all of my essential applications would run fine. I mean, with the Universal PR that Apple has put out over the last couple years, I didn’t think it would be an issue. Then I happened across this notice from Adobe, which says that the Photoshop CS 2 that I bought a year ago won’t be supported with Leopard, and I’ll have to pay $599 to upgrade it.

Q. Will older versions of Adobe creative software—such as Creative Suite 2 and Macromedia Studio 8 software—support Mac OS X Leopard? A. While older Adobe applications may install and run on Mac OS X Leopard, they were designed, tested, and released to the public several years before this new operating system became available. You may, therefore, experience a variety of installation, stability, and reliability issues for which there is no resolution. Older versions of our creative software will not be updated to support Mac OS X Leopard.

Adobe CS3 was released on April 17, 2007, so if you bought CS2 in early 2007, it’s now already out of date a mere 8 months later. I’m not sure who to be more angry with — Adobe or Apple. I can see Adobe’s motivations, however ill-intended they may be, of trying to get users to upgrade. The amount of work required to release a patch would be minimal since Leopard is not drastically different than Tiger. So this must be a marketing decision, since most people have little need to upgrade an already stable, mature platform. But I’m stunned that Apple didn’t work out an agreement with Adobe to support this, or fix whatever the problem seems to be on the OS side. Isn’t poor support of older hardware and software the main problem facing Windows with Vista upgrades?

…is that by the Fake Steve Jobs.

It’s either sad or funny, I can’t decide. The overpaid spoiled morons who write all the shit that gets blasted out onto the TV networks want even more money for their piles of shit. What makes it beautiful is that the guys on the other side of the fight are even more overpaid and more moronic and more full of crap than the writers. It’s like watching two guys you really despise get into a barfight, and you don’t know which one you want to win and ultimately you just hope they both beat the daylights out of each other.

Apple released their iPhone television ads this week. That’s one incredibly sexy looking phone, but this marks the first time that I remember the ads containing a product demo. I’m just saying…

Since I’m down in San Francisco for work, I decided to stop by MacWorld on opening day and see what all the fuss was about. As I arrived at the Moscone Center, shortly after Steve Jobs had given his keynote address introducing Apple’s newest products, I heard several journalists/analysts/fans talking excitedly into their cellphones, “it’s about the size of a cigarette lighter” or, “it’s only about the size of a stack of 5 or 6 CDs”, referring to the new iPod shuffle and Mac mini computer.

Not knowing where to register, and not being able to read anything about the conference on any of the Apple sites, which were all flooded with traffic and unreachable all day long, I followed the hordes to the exhibit floor, nobody seemed to care that I hadn’t paid the entrance fee in all the chaos. The floor was jam-packed with Apple fans and journalists, and I even saw Robin Williams checking out some new products, giving the demonstraters a hard time in his wacky Robin Williams way. I was impressed by both the iPod Shuffle and Mac mini, if the only innovative thing about them is their compact size and their sleek minimalist product design. There is something about the joy of use that other manufacturers either haven’t picked up on or have failed to achieve. But I was most impressed with the demo of Tiger, the latest OS X version that comes out this year. The Dashboard (despite its controversy when it was introduced last year) and the new Spotlight search, if it performs as well as in the demo, are sure to please.

By evening, all of downtown San Francisco had been plastered with iPod Shuffle billboards. What an impressive logistical feat, to design and manufacture the product, produce the marketing materials and keep it fairly secret with the thousands of people involved.