The One with the Thoughts of Frans

I never really got into the whole podcast fad years ago. The available aggregators annoyed me, the available podcasts seemed generally uninteresting, and I didn’t have an MP3 player. Things change: I’ve had an MP3 player for a couple of years now. However, I only reevaluated my dislike for podcasts quite recently, when I discovered Wil Wheaton’s Memories of the Futurecast. I wanted a way to automate the process of getting it onto my MP3 player, and I found it: gPodder seems to do everything I want without getting in my way. Now I can do a quick sync with my MP3 player in the morning and I’ll have stuff to listen to while, among other things, going to and from the university.

All of that was about a month ago. I’ve only got a small selection of feeds in there so far, but since I’m still catching up on literally months of old material, that’s not an issue as of now. Aside from Wil Wheaton’s, my favorite podcast right now is Stuff You Should Know. But enough about that.

When I was younger, I usually listened to the radio news at 7 or 8 AM while eating breakfast. I have long since switched to doing some quick reading of my e-mails and feeds, but that’s not the ideal way to get a quick update on what’s currently going on. The radio news does a better job of that, but it just feels too much like a waste of time. Cue the podcast. I’ve known that Dutch public radio has had its broadcasts available as podcasts since 2005 or so. Selecting the podcast most relevant to me was easy: Radio Netherlands Worldwide, specifically the Nieuwslijn (news line) program. Of course there are competitors, such as BBC’s Global News and the German ARD Tagesschau, and I may have missed some other potentially interesting sources—which would presumably mostly mean American or Flemish—, but for now I’m sticking with this. Alas, there’s one small problem: there’s a news broadcast just about each two hours. This makes the new episodes available dialog look rather cluttered. I only want to listen to the news once a day.

That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in. When I start it, it complains about Opera, but I haven’t been able to discern any difference in functionality between Opera and Firefox on the site. In only a couple of minutes, I have something that only gives me the 8 o’clock news.

If I wanted, I could easily add the BBC and ARD feeds and also strip them to just one item a day. What I can’t do, however, is output the de facto standard <itunes:image href="http://some-picture" /> with the feed. Nevertheless, I can manually link up a picture in gPodder so it doesn’t look strange in the feed display list.

For things more complicated than such simplistic mash-ups, Yahoo Pipe’s graphical programming interface quickly becomes lacking, which is strange considering that it seems to aspire to be more than just a simple mash-up tool. Nevertheless, it certainly makes life a little easier.

Well, I surely don’t use this weblog to its full potential at this point in time. I suppose the main negative factor in my amount of writing is the lack of something that I feel is somehow important to share with the world.

Nevertheless, a couple of interesting things have happened. During the Christmas vacation I hung out with a few of my old friends, which was nice. I also went to the beach where I shot this video of a lone Sanderling on the beach. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen one on its own before.

My whole plan of learning Latin has more or less failed so far. I could only take along so many books to my parents during the vacation and the Latin books didn’t make the cut. Because I was quite busy during the two weeks prior to the vacation I hadn’t done anything about it then either, so by now I’ll have to start over again, because I’ve forgotten at least a third of the tenses by now already. On top of that my main reference and motivator was supposed to be the woman mentioned above.

The most important change in my life I haven’t mentioned yet, however. In half a year I’ll move to Utrecht to study English Language and Culture at the Utrecht University.

Another important change is that Clawfinger will exist in a different way from now on.

Maybe it’s time I got my hair cut.

Maybe I should try to post more.

Anyway, over the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing the introduction at the local rowing society and I think I’m going to become a member. It’s quite fun and all the stuff involved (also quite noticably the condition training) is good excercise.

I forgot I had a Wikipedia article on American cuisine open in Opera. When I saw notable chefs for some reason I managed to misread it as “notable chiefs” and was rather surprised to find a name like McDonald’s in there.

I quite like the autocomplete function in Write, but in Calc it was quickly driving me crazy. It wasn’t hard to find in the help, so I suppose the existence of weblog entries about OpenOffice.org autocomplete (like my own) are mainly about the sentiment rather than about an actual neccessity.

I think things like this are a lot easier to disable in Microsoft Office since XP. But on the other hand, where I tell Office to disable a dozen features the very first time I use it I’ve generally been able to use OpenOffice without disabling anything. In the end I just try to use OpenOffice as much as I can because I like OpenDocument. I don’t just mean the idea, I also think the XML structure and such is better than Microsoft’s competing Office Open XML.

Melantrys linked me to what is possibly the coolest casemod I have ever seen.

I decided my chatconversations are very interesting, so here you have another one.

Melantrys says (0:53):
‘trusten

Frenzie // Credo quia absurdum est says (0:54):
Night

Frenzie // Credo quia absurdum est says (0:54):
Nacht

Frenzie // Credo quia absurdum est says (0:54):
koelaeb mochroem

Frenzie // Credo quia absurdum est says (0:54):
^ improvised Arabic

Melantrys says (0:54):
tesbah ala khair

Frenzie // Credo quia absurdum est says (0:54):
I knew there was a k in it

Melantrys says (0:54):
*laughs*

As I was typing something in Microsoft Office Word 2007 I noticed a new feature. In the past you could put some kind of button on a bar, but you still had to click a button to update the wordcount, rendering it kind of useless. Funny, how a few years ago I thought it would be so nice if Word would gain such a feature, but it took me weeks to notice it between the page count and the language display.

Sunday last week a friend of a friend of a friend was arrested together with 32 other Iranian women while conducting a peaceful demonstration in front of the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran. They were expressing their solidarity with 5 other women who had been arrested during a previous peaceful demonstration conducted this past summer.

30 have been released since then, but it would still be nice if you signed the petition.

This photo reminded me I haven’t seen Sun for quite a while in Lost.