HeightstoDepths

Today I’m saying goodbye to an old friend. It’s the old orange one-speed coaster brake.

I got ‘er off a local guy named Ajeet. It cost me about $20, a wireless internet card, and an hour of tinkering together from the mountain of parts in his garage. This bike sat you up so high you felt like flying. It’s been a good two years…

Favorite moments:

• exploring the Lansing area on a cool fall day when I moved here in 2006
• using it to teach 18 year old Andy Christopherson how to ride a bike
• whenever Michel Dahan would come home from his cross-town commute with greasy-chain fingers

Well, we had some good times orange one-speed, but this is goodbye. You just broke too many chains and your spokes are too rusty. I wonder where you’ll end up?

You all should get yourselves bikes and save some gas while getting exercise. It’s really a lot of fun.

Comment on this post.

Today, before a road trip up to Minnesota, Nico asked:

Labs and I are driving lots in the next 2 weeks. Got any recommended cool podcasts for us?

Let me just dig into my bookmarks…

A 1 hour history of the Detroit riots:
www.michiganradio.org/ashestohope.html

Radiolab, various length shows about pseudo-scientific stuff… well done:
www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/
I enjoyed this one on music:
www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/09/25

Old one-off mystery theater shows:
www.mysteryshows.com/
The CBS ones are popular:
Download the episodes: www.mysteryshows.com/CBS-Radio-Mystery-Theater/
Genre search within the above: web.otrdb.com/shows/cbs_rmt/pages/eps_search.php

There are 800+ free downloads at audible.com:
Hit their homepage, hit browse audio, then advanced search, and use the “Regular Price” dropdown to select free.

And, of course, I always enjoy This American Life, where you can download the latest episode free:
www.thisamericanlife.org/

Enjoy!
-Brian

Comment on this post.

Hello heightstodepths blog!

It’s been since September!?! Time flies. I’ve been telling myself to just post more often, especially when I run across a new hack that works well. Well here’s the latest hack.

Who uses RSS out there? It’s “Really Simple Syndication,” but I guess it’s not so simple since not so many people use it. But I use it and it’s fun.

The idea is that when you see the orange rss thing you can hit it and then you’ll stay up-to-date on that site’s new information. It’s a bit like my “subscribe by email to h2d” on the right, but it’s more user-friendly because you manage all your “feeds” in one spot. Confused yet?

How do I keep up-to-date on various RSS feeds?

I use FeedBlitz.com. It emails me once a day with a report of all the content of the posts from the websites to which I’m subscribed (currently 94 total, geesh). You can sign-up for free. That would be step 1.

Step 2 would be to set-up your browser (Firefox, of course) to show you a little orange rss thing in the address bar at the top whenever you’re browsing a site to which you could subscribe. You just hit that whenever you want to add the current site to your list. Here’s where the hack-part comes in:

1. In the Tools:Options… menu, you’ll find a tab called “Feeds.” Click that.
2. Then choose “Subscribe to the feed using…” and just choose Google for now. Hit OK.
3. Put “about:config” in the address bar of the browser, hit enter.
4. In the Filter: line put “browser.feeds.handlers.webservice” and hit enter.
5. You should see under “Value” on the right “http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=%”
6. Double click that and replace it with “http://www.feedblitz.com/f?Track=%s&email=your-email@dot.com” replacing “your-email@dot.com” with your email address. Hit OK.
7. Test it out on your favorite website by clicking the in the address bar at the top.

The hack part is that I added &email=your-email@dot.com to the line above… and whatnot. I couldn’t find out how to do this with Feedblitz anywhere out there, so I had to invent a hack. That’s a digression on the definition of a hack, though.

Maybe the instructions over here achieve the same thing, but there you go… www.feedblitz.com/downloads.asp

Comment on this post.

Here’s quote #2 from the bottom of my emails. It’s about faith and it’s from Augustine:

God is not a deceiver, that he should offer to support us,
and then, when we lean upon Him, should slip away from us.

Faith is a huge subject.

So all I will say is that this particular quote from Augustine reminds me of an image that I’ve heard to describe faith: it’s like the thing we do every time we sit down and put simple trust in a chair - especially when some of us lean back on a chair’s rear two legs.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”-Hebrews 11:1

That definition of faith in Hebrews comes before a long example list of people who exercised it. These men leaned on God to provide for promises that he made; the “things hoped for” and “not seen”.

Back to the quote from Augustine; May I lean on God, the creator of everything, for everything. May I not lean on myself or any thing to provide me with joy, direction, or fulfillment. I lean on God alone. He is not a deceiver. I know that; “He who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.” -1 Thessalonians 5:24

Comment on this post.

Around 7/24/07 Luisma and a few other SW brothers asked:

Do you know how I could record talks to mp3?

This is what I sent:

The key specifications that I was looking for in a talk recorder were:
-record directly to mp3 format
-run on a rechargeable lithium ion battery
-have a built-in microphone that captures good sound

Here’s the one that I bought to do that: Support Plus 512 MB SP-MP363A-0062. I found it for $28 dollars total and it arrived within a week. You can also find a 1GB model (black in color) for around $75 (check ebay). All I have to do is hit a record button on the side and then set it on the table in front of the person speaking. Voila!

Support Plus is sort-of an obscure brand, but their reputation is solid. There are a lot of choices out there for flash-based mp3 players with more of a name-brand. Many of them have a built-in microphone, but it’s real hard to tell if they’re going to be able to capture good quality sound. I picked this one originally because it encodes directly to MP3. It just turns out that the built-in mic is good, too.

Finally, as mentioned in a post on audio editors, you could download MP3directcut for free and just use your laptop to record direct to MP3.

-Brian LaLonde

Comment on this post. | View 1 comment.