After a long hiatus (I moved and the CBC staff were on strike) I finally managed to record a new episode of Wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein. This episode is titled, “Of Man and Beast” (9.5 MB MP3).
My very kind mother got me a Sirius Satellite receiver for Christmas. After researching it for a while, I decided to ask her for it even though I had some apprehensions. After getting it set up and using it for a couple hours, I’m still not so sure that I’ll keep it around.
The receiver itself seems quite nice. It has a decent screen, built-in 44 minute cache, and decent controls.
Programming
It should be no surprise that my interest lies with the non-music programming. Sirius has made licensing deals with NPR and PRI, but the selection is pretty weak. Most notable is the absence of Morning Edition and All Things Considered. I have been on the lookout for a version that didn’t contain annoying local modifications. Most public radio stations hack these shows up, adding their own local content that is often not interesting. I was hoping that Sirius would provide a clean version. Not even available! I presume due to politics (NPR upsetting member stations for bypassing them.) So, as far as Public Radio content, there is nothing I can’t already get via the internet.
I’ll keep my mind open about music programming, but after a quick glance, the smaller independent music isn’t popping out at me.
Howard Stern and the Comedy channels will hopefully provide me with some adolescent entertainment.
Timeshifting
44 minute cache just doesn’t cut it. I’ve been recording public radio shows for several years now for transfer to my iPod and once you can listen to any show whenever you want, you never go back. Podcasting has just made this even easier.
No computer controlled receiever for Mac OS X
There are now a couple solutions for controlling and recording content with a computer. TimeTrax is a commercial solution for Windows.
A guy has created a “Sirius to RS232” board which allows you to connect a receiver designed for a car to your computer via the serial port.
The Audio::Radio::Sirius perl module has been created which will work with the above board. However, support under Mac OS X is unchartered territory. In theory it would work with a RS232 to USB converter. I emailed the creator of the board, and he said he hadn’t heard of anyone using it with Mac OS X.
Neither XM or Sirius is excited about a computer controlled recording solution for piracy reasons, but I’m sure someone will take the plunge and get this working on Mac OS X soon. I almost went for it, however, I just couldn’t justify the cost of the SIR-ALP1 receiver, the RS232 converter board, the RS232 to USB converter for something I wasn’t sure was going to work.
Reception
I’ve got a window in my office pointing directly west (the direction I was suppose to put the antenna) and the receiver was unable to get a signal requiring me to install the antenna outside which makes a bit of a mess.
Online streaming pretty crappy
Sirius offers on-line streams at a lower bitrate to subscribers. However, it is almost exclusively music channels. If it matched all their channels, I wouldn’t even bother with the receiver and just record the web streams. Of course they make that a pain too, using an embedded windows media plug-in that doesn’t work for me in Firefox. When I try it in Safari, it opens the stream using the external Windows Media Player application, says it is playing, but there is no sound.
Cables
The receiver is quite small, but it has these three annoying cables (antenna, audio out, and power) sticking out the left side. Not much they could do about it, but it is a mess.
Commericals
Cable TV promised subscribers that by subscribing, you would get to have a commercial free experience. Sirius has skipped that from the beginning. Music is said to be commercial free, but the talk channels all have commercials. The PRI station even has a commercial telling me to
Sound quality
I don’t particulary care (speech doesn’t require many bits) but Sirius has clearly sacrificed sound quality to squeeze more channels in.
I was at least aware of all the above issues before signing up, but decided to give it a go anyway. However, unless I’m surprised by content that I’ve yet to discover, $13 a month just isn’t justifiable.
So a while ago, I configured comments on this blog to require moderation. WordPress was suppose to email me whenever a comment was waiting for moderation. Apparently that was broken, because I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and noticed I had almost 8000 comments waiting for moderation. Oops. Sorry everyone who posted legitimate comments! It took me a while to sift through all the spam and approve the real comments that were hiding in the mess.
Once I finished that, the first thing I did was enable the Akismet plugin that comes with WordPress 2.0. It is created by the developer of WordPress and promises to greatly reduce post spam by checking comments against Akismet servers which run many tests.
My Christmas present to myself this year is the M-Audio Microtrack. It’s a tiny field recorder that uses standard Compact Flash cards. It can record MP3 and WAV and comes with a little stereo microphone that actually seems to work quite well, at least to my untrained ears.
There are a couple good reviews of the device. Here’s the Transom M-Audio Microtrack Review. And here’s the O’Reilly Review.
It arrived last night and I brought it along with me this morning on my commute. I’ve documented my commute with photographs, now it is time to do it with audio. However, I know next to nothing about editing, so it will likely be a while before I have something that isn’t a full hour and half long.
I also still have a ton of experimenting to do. Figuring out how to properly adjust levels etc. Until then, I give you a sneak peak. This 60 second piece is of two commuter rail trains. The first is an outgoing train passing by, followed immediately my inbound train. It clips a couple times… oops. I always thought that recording in stereo was useless, but you actually get the sense of a train passing by you which is really cool. Listen to commuter trains. (~ 1 MB MP3) Best when listened to with headphones.
Microsoft has been claiming to add Bird’s eye view arial photography service to counter Google Maps. Well they’ve finally stepped up and it is amazing (see local.live.com). The oblique aerial photos are provided by Pictometry. The interface still sort of stinks (I presume it works better in IE). Pictured is our house.
On a related note, AppleInsider reports that Google Earth for Mac OS X is still in the works.
The primary reason for my upgrade of Beyond TV to version 4 was the support for re-encoding the programs from MPEG2 to DivX. I thought this would allow me to do things like get my “Daily Show” fix while on the commuter train. Unfortunately it is fundamentally flawed. The DivX has the wrong aspect ratio. BeyondTV’s “Showsqueeze” is also very unpredictable. Shows weren’t being encoded on a regular basis.
My solution is, “TV Tranny”, a couple Perl scripts and other bits of glue I threw together, mostly while on the commuter train. I’ve decided to run this on my Mac Mini so that the transcoding doesn’t consume the processor on my PVR box. After running for 24 hours, it seems to actually be working. I’ve tried to use standard tools so that if I’d like to move it, it will run under Linux or Windows without too much hassle.
How it works:
It doesn’t yet clean up old recordings, and there is no auto-sync with my Laptop. I think simple cron entry that deletes files older than x days will take care of the first issue. And a script that creates a RSS feed with enclosures, or rsync will take care of the latter.
The only similar solution I found was AutoXvid, but will only run on Windows, and uses AutoGK which seems to have spyware in it. So in case anyone else is looking for a solution that allows you two tweak everything, you can use this kludge to get you started on your own solution: Download TV Tranny 0.1