Disney World 2012

oPod Away to Cut Podcast Cord

So if you want to cut the cord, you can. - Scott Forstall

I wrote a little app called "oPod Away" because I love podcasts and I often travel which takes me away from my personal computer which is what my iPhone syncs with. Apple has been slowly making it easier and easier to use an iOS device without any need to connect it to a computer, but they are not there yet. One of the areas where they are failing is with podcast syncing. When I am traveling and not near my personal computer how do I get my latest and greatest podcasts onto my iPhone? The internet tells me I should be using Skitcher to solve this problem, but it doesn't have 100% of my podcasts and anything less than 100% is not enough.
I wrote server-side "oPod Away" a few years ago as a server-side Perl script that ran on my home server. The point was to go through my complete podcast OPML, pull down all the RSS feeds, and then show me the last updated stamp for each. So when I was on the road I could just open on the page, see what's been updated, and then tap on it to go over the iTunes Store on my phone and download. It works great - takes abou 30 seconds to run.

Since HTML5 is all the rage these days I decided to re-write the program using HTML5 and do it all client side. Sound great? I quickly ran into the problem of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. When I used XmlHttpRequest on a page on my server to pull the podcast RSS feed it would cause an origin error. I tried to think through creative solutions to this problem like using Yahoo Pipes, but wasn't able to get something like. I ended up throwing up a very simple proxy on Google App Engine. So now the whole application is written in HTML5 and can run on the phone. It takes about 3 seconds for a refresh and I can get my podcasts where ever I go.

Graphic Novels

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate - unlike most films. - Alan Moore

My frugality was my only defense against becoming a comic book collector growing up. Almost every week my brother would go to Tower Records to look at music. I was completely uninterested in spending money on music and would wonder to the neighboring Comics and Comics to look through the shelves. I looked. I was interested. I read. I barely bought anything while I was there. It seemed like the kind of thing I would get sucked into spending money on every week and I just didn't want to do that. I bought a few random X-Men comics that interested me and I own the TMNT graphics novels, but that's it. In college I received the start of The Sandman as well as Watchmen. I loved them, but better to received the fully bound and completed graphic novel as a gift than to get sucked into some model where I need to spend money every week or month to get another issue.
I listen to a podcast called The Incomparable which has a bunch of people who share my tastes in movies, music, TV, books and other cultural things. Sometimes they do a "comic book club" and talk about comic books. Last year they talked through Ex Machina and Y:The Last Man. Since I agree with most of their opinions of entertainment, I got and read both of those series. I thought Ex Machine was good and I absolutely loved Y:The Last Man. Loved it! You should read it. It was awesome.
Ever since then I have been patiently awaiting the group to do another comic book club and recommend more graphic novels to me. They have failed me! FAILED ME! I took a quick recommendation from a friend to read We3, but it was fast over. That got me thinking that instead of trusting random strangers from the wired (who have great taste), I should call out to my friends whose opinions I trust and demand they provide recommendations. I present them to you now. Read on!

• Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (from Gabe)
• Saga (from Damian)
• Fables (from Chris)
• Lieutenant Blueberry (from Chris)
• Forming (from Chris)
• Sleeper (from Chris)
• All Star Superman (from Chris)
• Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery (from Chris)

iPhone and Conference Call

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it. - Tom Hanks

I wrote an app to scratch an itch. I have this annoying little problem at work that my colleagues like to send me meeting invites that including a conference call number in a mode that makes it very hard for me to use. Prior to iOS5, if they put the phone number into the location field in the invite the iPhone would not let me tap it to call it, copy/paste it, or do anything useful with it. I worked hard to train my colleagues to put the phone number both in the location field and in the body of the meeting invite.
After iOS5 came out, the location field became a place where text was tappable to make calls or copy/paste, but many of my coworkers don't include the conference call number in a way where it will dial both the phone number and then the conference call entry code. For a while it was okay, where I could temporarily memorize the 6-digit entry code and then tap the number, but working recently switched to a new teleconference system that has a 10-digit entry code. I'll admit that I cannot temporarily memorize 10-digits.

I fixed this with a trivial little web app. Behold conference dialer! It has two text inputs - one for the phone number to be dialed and one for the entry code for the conference call. This way, when I get a meeting invite where the dialing is not properly formatted for the iPhone to recognize, I just copy-paste the phone number, copy-paste the entry code and hit the dial button. Simple. Elegant.

I added some local session HTML5 stuff so that it will remember the last number and entry code you had filled in. I was thinking about maybe having it remember the last 10 numbers you called or some such. We'll see where it takes me.

The Air Filter PEBKAC

Sometimes I find it helpful to be reminded that while I am expensively educated, I am not always smart. - Unknown Stanford Student

When I got an apartment in Sacramento a couple of years ago it tended to smell a little bit like cigarette smoke. The building owner smoked, and while he assured me he never smoked in the apartment, he did like to smoke on the patio outside and in his office which shared a wall (and I assume shared the ventilation system). My mother was kind enough to get me a super power HEPA filter machine and I would constantly run it to try and keep the air clean and beautiful.
I've probably had it for two years now, and we run it every night to create white noise and keep the air clean. Mrs.Chaos has been having a few respiratory problems in the morning and I thought, "ya know, I've never changed the HEPA filter in this thing. So it's probably useful, and might be doing more harm than good." I pulled down some new filters and opened up the device to put them in only to discover that I am an idiot. Inside the machine the actual filters were wrapped in plastic - and therefore had not been doing ANYTHING for the years I have owned it. I have had a very expensive fan.
I remember when I got the thing I read the instructions and it clearly said in the instructions, "remove all plastic before use." So I did remove all the plastic attached to the outside covering up the intake, the exhaust, the buttons, etc. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I needed to open it up and remove plastic from the internal filters. Why would you do this? There are already filters on the intake and exhaust? I mean, at least you should have packaged the filters separately from the device and made me put them in! Whatever. Sometimes I am stupid, and I guess it's useful to be reminded of that from time to time.

What's on Your TV?

They say the truth will set you free, but sometimes, not telling the truth can make you lots of money. - Christopher Elliott

When we got a house in late 2010 we weren't expecting have any kind of television other than the really old tube that Mrs.Chaos had, but as part of my family's dumping of extra stuff on us, I inherited my brother's ancient 50" plasma high definition television. It's a gorgeous Pioneer, but I call it ancient because it doesn't have any HDMI connections on it - just a combination of component and composite inputs.
We're true cord cutters - with no cable, satellite or even Netflix or Hulu+. Originally all we had hooked up was a Nintendo Wii and a first generation Apple TV. The AppleTV took a lot of curation to get it working as I was constantly re-encoding things to the proper format and adding them onto iTunes on the server. I did it - but boy am I lazy.
Not longer after, to my surprise, our mortgage company gave us a Bluray player and Google sent me a Logitech Revue. Both were HDMI, so I had the Bluray passthrough the GoogleTV's HDMI-passthru ports and then I bought a nice little HDMI-to-component. I ended up replacing my first generation AppleTV with the GoogleTV because GoogleTV let me stream off my computer using a DLNA server (MediaLink from Nullriver) in all sorts of formats without re-encoding or adding it into some content management system - I sure like having a nice cleanly formatted directory structure that's defined using a context free grammar. I had high hopes that the GoogleTV web browser would let me watch NBC.com and other stuff. Unfortunately we cannot watch any of the TV websites. They are all blocked by the networks for somewhat confusing reasons.
When GoogleTV finally got around to upgrading from the bizarre original OS to using Honeycomb and including the Google Play store things got better! I was able to download a player (GTVBox) which allowed me to load straight of my SMB shares - and that includes loading off my Drobo which hangs as an AirDisk. Additionally GTVBox lets me do AirPlay video - so I can play videos off my iPhone, iPad, etc. I sure wish I could do screen mirroring!
So what does the future hold for me? I don't know! When Mountain Lion comes out this summer and I'm able to screen share directly from my Desktop Mac it seems like I'll finally replace the GoogleTV with an AppleTV. Unless some wiley GoogleTV developer creates an app that supports AirMirroring. Get on it guys!

Book Club: The Night Circus

You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Reves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus. You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream. - Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)

As we prepared to host bookclub a few months ago I had to put together a list of four books for people to vote on. I had a variety of methods to select the books, but one of the books I put on the voting list I found by looking at the New York Times best seller list. We didn't pick the book at the time, but one of the other members saw the description with excitement and read the book for extra credit.
This past month was her turn to host book club and the book was selected. Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. A book about two aged magicians who pick apprentices and bind them against each other in competition. The venue of the latest round of competition was the Night Circus (Le Cirque des Rêves).
I really enjoy books about magic where the practitioners are called magicians (not wizards, mages, spell casters, ...) and I was really impressed with the magic as being truly magical an a fanciful, mysterious and imaginative way. It is such a wonderful contrast to the very pedestrian magic of the Harry Potter series in which the take on the magical world is similar to the Flinstone's take on the stone age world: take all the things modern man uses technology for and mindlessly replace it with a boring magical equivalent that has a latin-y word associated with it. This is not the magic of The Night Circus where there are cloud mazes, stories in bottles and gardens made entirely of ice. The magic is almost real. Almost.
The book was also full of little touches. One of the characters was the tarot card reader of the circus and she would often flip a few cards as part of other activities going on. I was intrigued that the author rarely explained what the cards meant. She just matter-of-factly described a card flipped as the querent, the card that covers and the card that crosses, and then provided no interpretation. I read tarot quite a lot during the end of high school and start of college and have a decent memory of the major arcana. I was constantly impressed. The author, clearly understanding tarot, would lay out major plot themes with the cards and leave the foreshadowing available only to someone who understand what the meant or maybe bothered to look it up. The Hanging Man, crossed by Temperance. Yes, I can see what lies in your future.
Fun read. Though, I think in the grand scheme of things, you should wait for the movie. Though I know it won't be, I would sure like to see Tim Burton do this with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. That would be quite a show.

The theme of the book, two magicians of different philosophies battling over which philosophy is better, reminded me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Overall I preferred Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but it falls victim to the problem of being an amazing five-hundred page book trapped in one-thousand pages. I remember during the second half of the book as I was devouring it, reading and anticipating and excited, that I kept saying to myself "now remember when you recommend this book to other how incredibly bored you were by it for the first half. Don't forget how incredibly bored by it you were for the first half." So fair warning that if you are up someone who can read giant volumes, this book is amazing - once you finish it. Definitely if you're a voracious reader, go for this one.