A long drive to Denver

I’m on a road trip for Ruby Conference in Denver and Astricon in Dallas. A bunch of people have asked me why i didn’t fly, one reason is was lazy and didn’t buy tickets in time, but the real reason is i have flown a lot lately and i kind of like driving. It gives me time to think about stuff with more focus than i can normally with the distractions of life. Also i gives me the time to listen to a lot of audio books, lectures, podcasts, and the like.

When searching for some new audio books for the trip i came across the Librivox free audio book project. They’ve got some great resources. But their podcast setup is pretty much useless. You just get the latest chapters which have been finished, without them being organized in any useful way. They’ve got good per book pages, like this one for Treasure Island by Robert Leuis Stevenson. They’ve got clean readable url’s for each book. Unfortunately they don’t offer a podcast feed for each book. I can download and unzip an archive of all the mp3’s, but that’s not good, zip can’t really compress mp3’s. And it involves a lot of steps.

So what i did was take each book i was interested in, and threw them in to Pod Pager to create podcast feeds for my own needs like this one: podpager.com/podcast/librivox.org/treasure-island-by-robert-louis-stevenson/. Then i took that and threw it in itunes. Now the book is organized, clearly labeled as a single thing, read to be played in order and downloaded directly in to my media player. It won’t pollute my music collection with random chapters of books.

I love microapps. Scratching an itch has never been easier.