Recording for posterity, because recreating Perl one-liners is a pain in the ass. If you’re on a *nix like system (including OS X), this will download all the MP3s linked from a given URL:
curl -s http://somemusicblog.com/goodsongs.html | perl -nle 'print $1 while /\<a\b[^\>"]*?\bhref=\"?([^\>"]*)\.mp3/g' | xargs -I {} curl -O {}.mp3UPDATE: This URL might be a good one to try it out on.
This is kind of pretty, but I have a vague feeling that it sounds exactly like some deeply embarrassing band from the 70s. I can’t yet put my finger on which one, though, so I might as well link to the MP3:
I put up a rather long post over at EchoDitto Labs about this, but here’s the teaser version: you can get routers from the FON project for very little money — sometimes free, or about $10 on Ebay. With some effort, you can load them with a custom firmware that gives you a Linux environment that can connect to wifi networks. This also gives you a set of four or five general purpose input/output pins and a (somewhat more accessible) serial port, all of which you can, in theory, connect to an Arduino. Put together, this equals a very cheap wifi interface for your microcontroller project — the fact that it comes with powerful Linux capabilities is just icing on the cake.
It’s pretty small, too. So aside from probably consuming electricity faster than a $125 wifi module designed for embedded systems would, it’s really a very, very slick solution.
Of course, this is all still kind of theoretical. I’ve gotten the wifi interface working, and am able to control an LED from the Linux shell. That’s enough to interface with the Arduino meaningfully, but I haven’t yet tackled the job of connecting it to the serial port.
Earlier tonight I was tuned to the Food Network, watching Emeril trudge mirthlessly toward whatever release it is that he has in mind (syndication? retirement? death?). Inevitably, the program cut to commercial. I was presented with a spot encouraging me to sign up for a Health Savings Account. There are savings to be had, apparently! They even had a former Bush administration official on hand to attest to this fact.
This is the website they were promoting. But I had a strangely hard time finding it just now, having forgotten the exact URL in the whiskey-filled hours between. Googling “HSA insight” didn’t turn up anything. They haven’t bought any Google Adwords. hsainsight.com is a parked domain. And the commercial itself was kind of cheap-looking and lame. Overall, it seems to be an awfully amateurish production.
So I’m confused. I thought that HSAs were being peddled by dishonest but well-funded rightwing ideologues anxious to have our health insurance system’s collective principal shuttled over to Wall Street for a quick one-time windfall (our nation’s hedge fund managers’ yachts are dangerously tasteful, after all). I expect them to have tons of cash on hand to help them achieve this goal.
But the half-assed nature of this campaign has turned everything on its head. Suddenly it looks like health savings accounts aren’t the risky, underclass-bilking investment vehicle that my favorite commentators had led me to believe. Apparently the HSA pimps couldn’t even afford Billy Mays! So what gives?
A few songs that I can’t stop listening to. They’ve been all over WOXY and the blogs, but if you’ve missed em you should give them a listen.
Bodies of Water – Doves Circle The Sky
The Raveonettes – Dead Sound
Ravens & Chimes – This Is Where We Are
As someone who has to think about how to write DCist Morning Roundup introductions on a somewhat regular basis, I feel that I can say this with confidence: there are only so many ways to whimsically express the idea that Washingtonians are bad at driving in snow. But that doesn’t make it the underlying fact any less true, as Amanda can attest.
I can attest to it, too. Riding my bike this morning, I coasted down the left-hand side of M Street, in the gap between the traffic and parked cars. The light was red but clearly about to change. Suddenly the driver’s side door of the car one length in front and to the right of me began to swing open, and a leg emerged. I skidded to a halt, cursed and glared at the driver.
But his face was totally blank, uncomprehending, and remained so as he slowly reversed his motions. Why shouldn’t he suddenly abandon his car and start wandering around as the light changed? It’s still locomotion, after all. And in this dumbfounding urban hallucination, where even frozen water can fall from the sky, who’s to say that one way of navigating the dreamscape is more valid than another?
Attention TechCrunch: flash VOIP phones have existed since at least 1999. I distinctly remember using Dialpad to make free domestic phone calls through my browser (Dialpad was subsequently made non-free and acquired by Yahoo). Now it’s almost a decade later and we’re getting excited about the same stupid technology and same stupid business model. No doubt they have an API and a Facebook application, though, so we can pretend it’s totally different.
God, the internet is stupid. If you’re not reading uncov, you’d really better start.
To all you kind, lovely people who follow user “DCist” on Twitter, helping me debug a project or just expressing an interest: I apologize. I’ve been working on a Ruby reincarnation of my LastCall service.
As part of that I’ve been using the jabber-bot Ruby Gem, which does most of the grunt work of setting up an IM bot. You define the patterns it recognizes, then it hands those off to your script. If it doesn’t recognize an incoming IM, it helpfully responds with a message saying “I’m sorry but I don’t recognize ‘<your message here>’. Type ‘help’ to get a list of the commands I do recognize.”
The second contributing factor is Twitter’s habit of sending a message saying “Whoops! Your message was too long. You can only send 140 characters at a time.” if you send overly long tweets.
The third was that Alex, in an attempt to make my debugging effort easier, was nice enough to whitelist the bot so that it’s not subject to any of Twitter’s abuse-prevention routines. See where this is going?
The bot was only up for about ten seconds, but in that time it sent an overly long message to Twitter, which responded with a message about how it couldn’t send a message that long, to which the bot responded that it didn’t understand a message of the format “your message is too long”. But of course that was also too long. And that’s when your cell phone went crazy.
So! Needless to say, I’ll be a little more careful going forward. Please don’t stop following DCist (I need you there for testing!), but please do turn off SMS updates from it until the app launches.
Troy: Enough with the elegiac moaning. Christ.
Of greater potential interest: Futurama (Bender’s Big Score) — disappointing! I’ve read the continuity-obsessed script described as an attempt to reward loyal fans, but it comes off more as an attempt by the (presumably) new writers to prove that they’ve watched the original series carefully. It’s great that they enjoyed those episodes. I did, too! But the invocation of their jokes often amounts to repetition. The whole experience reminded me of finding myself at a party, stuck listening to someone recite genuinely funny material that I could already recollect perfectly well without the benefit of a new, much worse performance.
On a more positive note, I should mention that there’s a sass-talking robot.
