Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Podcast / Record live stream on Mac

Thanks to Roychayen for the Hit 96.7. It is a live malayalam music radio ideal for away-from-home mallus like me. The quality is wow and is 24 x 7. Now I like to play these audio from my car and other places where there is no Internet (as of today !!).

Way to go would be to record this live stream as MP3 or Ogg and cut onto CD / DVD. Live streams are typically of formats friendly with iTunes, QuickTime, VLC, Windows Media Player and so on. But none of these allow recording. One yucky way would be to loopback Audio Out to Mic In and record using Audacity; that is the hardware way;

The software (and ideal) way is to use SoundFlower which installs a 2ch and a 16ch audio in and out ports. Set System Preferences to use either of SoundFlower ports as default output and use Audacity (with Recording source as SoundFlower port selected above) to record the stream and may be after 3-4 hours stop recording and export the recoding as MP3 or Ogg from Audacity.


Same procedure could be followed to record from Skype or any audio source and publish it as Podcast.

What a miss

Thursday, November 16, 2006

My Gadgets

  • At home
Marantz 5200 Receiver/Amplifier
DigiTec HD8710 Set Top Box
Momitsu V880N DVD Player with DVI
BenQ PE7700 Widescreen Projector
Samsung 32" (LA32S71BX) LCD TV.
Apple Powerbook 12" - Mac OS X 10.4

AdiumX
Skype
VLC Video Player
Gimp
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Thunderbird
  • In car
Parrot 3200 LS-COLOR Bluetooth handsfree
  • At work
Apple MacBook Pro 17", 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD - Mac OS X 10.4 & Win XP on Parallels Desktop
Dell Optiplex GX260 - Ubuntu LTS 6.06
Dell Optiplex GX260 - Microsoft Vista Trial
Sun Sparc Ultra 10 - Sun Solaris 5.6
Sun Sparc Ultra 10 - Ubuntu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft)

Eclipse 3.2
Oracle Database 10.2
Oracle SQL Developer
  • On me
Nokia 6280

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

How to schedule iSync on Mac ?

Now that I have a car with bluetooth handsfree, my mobile phone got its bluetooth always on (but NOT discoverable, for security reasons). Now it makes sense to schedule the iSync on my MacBook Pro to sync my Address Book and iCalendar with my phone automatically.

Initial thought was to use Mac's launchd as described at developer.apple.com but somehow I could not get it working :-(


So I got onto my unix comfort zone; so to use crond. There I have a script at ~/bin/iSync.scpt which contents as

tell application "iSync"
activate
synchronize
repeat
if not syncing then exit repeat
end repeat
quit
end tell
return input
end run
and a cron job added using "crontab -e" as below

#m h dom mon dow command
25 16 * * 1-5 osascript ~/bin/iSync.scpt
and seems to work just fine.

I am well fed with these !!