When I bought my car, one of the first things I did was buy a fancy new Alpine head unit to replace the factory stereo. This gave me the ability to add an XM tuner and an iPod adapter. I ran the iPod cable into the glove compartment, so I could just connect the iPod in there and close the glove box when I hopped in the car.

I've got a reasonably interesting setup of MisterHouse (a nifty Perl-based home automation program) running on a Linux machine upstairs, that does stuff like turn on lights automatically when it's getting dark or when I enter a room, turn lights off when there hasn't been any activity in a room after a predefined time, and so forth. Maybe I'll post more on that later.

I recently decided that the reason I don't like any of the laptop bags I've ever tried to use is because they don't have enough pockets. Cables, adpaters, and everything else ends up in a big wad at the bottom of my bag, which drives me up the wall.

I made one that seemed to fit my somewhat picky specifications, and published a guide on how I made it. Hopefully it will come in handy to someone else out there who's as finicky about their bag as I am. (I hope they like Velcro.)

Using the ideas behind declan's blog post, I recently created unofficial podcasts for two of my favorite WPTF radio talk shows: Neal Boortz (a Libertarian, author of The FairTax Book) and Bill Handel (a true master of sarcasm, delivered in the context of legal advice to callers-in). Though I listen to the radio quite a bit during the day, those shows come on at inconvenient times. Truly, a technological solution could assist here, and declan's blog got me almost all the way there. Though his taste in radio obviously differs quite a bit from my own, our needs were the same in this regard. :-)

Here's an overview, for those impatient. I use a radioShark to schedule an automatic recording of the shows I am interested in. I wrote a Perl script which runs after the recordings finish that converts them into AAC files (with an m4b extension, to support bookmarking on an iPod) using a Nero encoder and sends them via FTP to my web server. A specific URL on my web site invokes a PHP script which scans the directory for those files and creates an on-the-fly RSS XML document. Then, using iTunes or whatever software you may prefer, you can register that URL to download new episodes as you feel the need.

Ready to see how it's done? Good. Let's go.

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