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I actually built something very similar to Skribe (a Scheme-based document construction languge) when I was a junior at Rice. Working with Shriram, I built Chisel, which could emit HTML or PostScript (by way of LAT_EX, naturally). It actually had a slightly friendlier syntax than Skribe (you didn’t have to know as much Scheme … or, more accurately, you didn’t have to knowingly know as much Scheme). I guess I should have released it, or something.

Seen recently on-campus:

Frickin’ ELECs.

Erin sez: “I’ve updated Lost, and I’ve introduced a new format, whereby I pull apart the current events from the backstory. It should make the episodes more straightforward to synopsize.”

A new Paul Graham essay, Made in USA, is out, in which American suburbs and cars are contrasted with American software and movies. And why 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA is actually, secretly, the street address of the Embassy of Japan.

So, I’m old-school, I guess. Instead of all these fancy podcasts, I use
RadioRecorder to schedule TiVo-like mp3 streams for my favorite radio shows. Now I can hear Morning Edition on my iPod, whenever.

Unfortunately, the iPod’s display is too narrow to disambiguate several recordings (in this case, Morning Edition from 11/16 and 11/17):

(Radio News)

Morning Edition – Nov 1

Morning Edition – Nov 1

I started poking around the (GPL) source to RadioRecorder to see if I could hack around this. What I discovered is that RadioRecorder uses [NSDate descriptionWithCalendarFormat:] on the text in the “Title Prefix” field (of the “Track Tags” tab), so you can pop any kind of strftime() compatible formatting codes in there to add date/time information to the beginning of your track names. No coding required!

The prefix I’ve selected begins with [%b %d], which will result in files named “[Nov 11] Morning Edition – Nov 11, 2004 05:00 AM”, which will be easy to distinguish on the iPod screen.

Just thought I’d share that.

To: People of Earth
From: God
Date: 11/17/2004
Subject: stop
 
knock it off, all of you
 
seriously, what the hell
 
-- God

Coming soon to the standalone TiVo OS: when you hit fast forward to skip past commercials, small banner ads will show up on your screen. You’ll be able to click them to get more info, see an informercial, or send your home address details to get more info about a product mailed to you.