Adventures in Linux: Podcast Edition (Geek Alert!) 1

Many times, when I’m at the cooling tower place, I don’t spend all my time on the floor. Sometimes, I just sit in an office and write.

Friday, I dropped into the local Milford Radio Slum looking for a portable radio so I could listen to WSDL when I’m doing the writing thing.

Now, I already have a couple of portable radios. One I keep in the church office so I can listen to WHYY while I’m doing the Treasurer thing. One is in no shape to travel because the antenna no longer telescopes and it cannot be safely put in my travel bag.

And I came out of Radio Slum with an MP3 player which also contains an FM radio. It was on clearance and cost only $40.00.

The radio was not strong enough to pull the station that I wanted. (No surprise in a big steel building 70 miles from the station.)

So I decided to enter the wonderful world of podcasts.

The MP3 player has a USB connection.

I connected it to the box and, after a bit of mucking about, I realized that Slackware was seeing the MP3 Player as a SCSI drive and calling it “sdc1” (Linux seems to see everying except an IDE device as a SCSI device).

I got it to mount by entering the following line in my FSTAB.

/dev/sdc1 /media/player auto auto,user 0 0

(Instead of mounting to /mnt, like most other drives, including the CDROM and the DVD writer, it mounts to /media, because it is a media player).

I was then able to manipulate the player like any other drive.

I started nosing around for an aggregator that I could use to automate the downloading of podcasts, and I found Podracer. It works like a charm.

One hint, though: Podracer, like most other *nix programs, must be installed by root (for those poor folks who still use Windows, root is sort of like the Windows “Administrator,” only secure). Howsomever, when it’s run for the first time, it should be run by the user name of that you wish to use to run the program. If you run it the first time as “root,” it will not work for other users. The programmer advertises it as a very simple program, and that, my friends, is truth in packaging.

Right now, Podracer is running and happily downloading podcasts that I will listen to later.

You list the rss links to the podcasts you wish to download in a simple text file in this format (the number sign means that line is “remarked out,” that is, ignored:

# ChuckChat Freestyle
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChuckChat

The next step is to identify podcasts I want and to set up podracer as a cron job.

(I’ll leave out the part about calling Opie and having him point out the obvious to me, but my geek license is officially rescinded.)