Whimsy: November 2015 Archives

College Football Data Warehouse

Records of divsions, conferences, teams, players, bowl games, and playoffs from the early days of the sport to the present.

get_iplayer lives!

| | TrackBacks (0)

get_iplayer lives!

Capture network streams from BBC iPlayer (TV in the UK only; radio around the world) for later listening using this Perl application. It is up-to-date with the BBC's recent changes in streaming methods. It's a command-line tool -- no GUI. get_iplayer documentation can be found here.

For example:

get_iplayer --type=radio --get "Missing Hancocks" --modes=flashaaclow --aactomp3 --force

looks for any programme with Missing Hancocks in the title, looks for a flash AAC stream for the program, converts the received AAC stream to MP3 (the default is MP4), and the --force option overwrites any previous recording.

In lieu of --get followed by a title, you can specify a particular programme ID with an option of this form --PID=b06qht29, where the string after the equals sign is the eight-character programme ID that appears in the BBC iPlayer URL for that episode.

The Onion: Toyota Recalls 1993 Camry Due To Fact That Owners Really Should Have Bought Something New By Now

It's a joke, but it cuts close to home: "'We understand that the 1993 Camry was tremendously dependable, but, honestly, there's just no excuse for driving a 22-year-old car at this point,' said Toyota spokesman Haruki Kinoshita...."

Here's How Crazy-Long German Words are Made | Mental Floss

The animation at the link "takes you, step by step, through what's involved in creating Rhababerbarbarabarbarbarenbartbarbierbierbarbärbel, a completely valid (and probably never before uttered) word," which means "Barbie of the bar where the beer of the beard barber for the barbarians of Rhubarb Barbara's bar is sold." A commenter at Language Hat breaks the word down as follows: "Rhabarber-Barbara-Bar-Barbaren-Bart-Barbier-Bier-Bar-Bärbel." Further comments at that link discuss the use of "rhubarb" as a nonsense word for background noise in films, German use of "rhabarber" as we use "blah, blah, blah," and the Quebecois practice of growing rhubarb on compost heaps.

Novel Rocket: Tips for Writing Speculative Fiction

J. Wesley Bush, author of Knox's Irregulars, and several other writers of science fiction and fantasy talk about the work of creating a fictional world that provides an engaging and immersive environment for a story.