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Timeshifting: Cram More Into Life
jimharris writes "The VCR started it - and then the DVR improved it, so now I want to apply the concept of timeshifting in other ways. I've always wanted an audio cassette player that worked like a VCR so I could listen to more radio talk shows. This morning's NY Times stirred my interest with After TiVo, Radio Rewound about a MP3 device that does just that. Better yet, is Replay Radio - software that is more flexible and you can download the results to a portable player.
I already use Audible.com to squeeze in more books in my life, by listening, rather than reading. I've completed 8 unabridged books in two months just by carrying around my Otis player when I get dressed in the morning, driving to and from work, doing housework, or when I exercise.
Now I'm wondering how I can timeshift even more."
Save more time by using software to strip out the pauses and slightly speed up the audio.. up to about 1.5x... That way you can watch an hour show in 30 minutes.. once you strip out the commercials, pauses and laugh track...
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
So is this like uh... a thinly disguised advert, or what?
(Yes, I checked out the site)
you mention that you listen to books while getting dressed, etc. this is not a good method. remember that speed reading fad a few years back? well it turns out that if you don't concentrate on the book's subject you will miss out details and simply forget everything but the most important facts.
like someone said after "speed reading" War and Peace when asked if he could review it.. "um.. it's about some war, and things."
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Ooold tech: we college students have been taping and timeshifting lectures for years.
iPod missed a great bit, though -- if they'd included the mp3-recording capabilities (something like the iRiver's hd recorder, or the Ripflash) then I bet that would've caught on VERY quickly. (You go to class today, I'll go tomorrow, we'll exchange mp3s tonight.)
I'd love to record my lectures, but I don't have $400 for an iRiver, and I can't find a minitape recorder that will last for 1.5 hours without stopping and flipping...
What i would like is a good eText to audio manager and a facility to covert my books easily from paper to electronic without having to use an OCR raeder page by page.
I wish the copy right law could be made more sensible so that Project gutenberg can have more and more of contemprorary literature.
Wanted : A Signature.
You're being so 'Type A' about your leisure time. It's leisure time... the whole point is to relax, not to 'squeeze in more'.
Does make me wish that the ipod had some more interactive features, though. Like, say, a wireless sync. That way I could just keep sending it new info (such as a text-to-speech version of an RSS feed) all day. Unlike an audio book, I wouldn't mind so much if the news turned into a background drone and I missed some of it.
The idea of taking off my ipod headphones when I set down at the desktop and putting a different set on (and then swapping everytime I want to get up from the machine) is not a good one. I dont even like putting it in the cradle because it's yet another thing I have to do before getting up and walking away.
A good Tivo timeshift trick somebody pointed out to me is to record the early news on a channel where they do one of those crawlers across the bottom of the screen. Then, watch on fast forward.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
No its not. Only the first episode. So 24 should be
60 + (44 * 23) minutes long = 17.87 hours
Another option would be to read books because you find it enjoyable. You're bound to have an ulcer by 35 if you keep up like this. Sometime I worry that I spend too much of my day ingesting data because I read so many websites, newsgroups, message boards, mailing lists, etc. and I certainly don't need to cram any more in while putting on my socks in the morning.
It's going to be interesting to see how this all plays out. We're the first generation to have this much data available to us at all times, but I don't think we've really started to see the true effects of it yet. Just think about how much more media (music, movies, books, etc) we're exposed to than previous generations-- I wonder what the implications of that will be.
I can already, as a musician, see a very big change to music and to how people interact with it. People spend so much less time actually appreciating music than they used to. Just think that, not that long ago, people used to sit down together and listen to a record and do nothing else. You rarely see anybody do anything like that anymore. Hell, most people I know barely finish listening to songs anymore now that they have access to MP3 players.
If you examine other areas of media (news, books, movies, etc), all of this is happening in much the same way. I digest easily 100 times the news in a day that somebody would've 50 years ago, I see at least five movies a week (thank you, Netflix and Suprnova!), etc. Not to mention how many ads I see in any given day.
I think that having all of this information at our fingertips is going to be a double-edged sword. Just like having MP3s around commoditized music, the same will go for all media. And just as search engines/data collection sites (say, for example, Slashdot or Metafilter-- sites that find data for you) became the "killer app" for the web, I guess these "timeshifting" devices, like TiVo, which allow you to collect the data you wish to collect from a given source (i.e. record all episodes of "Arrested Development," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and "The World Series of Poker"), will become the "killer app" of their respected medium. I just have to wonder how it will affect us as people and our society as a whole.
-- atomly
Personally, I have a TiVo that spends most of its day recording stuff from BBC7, a mixture of radio drama and comedy shows. I then have lots of late night listening for those boughts of insomnia. I would never bother listening to these shows if I had to wait for them to come on, the same way as I don't usallly watch any TV live these days. So it makes perfect sense for some radio, just not for recording the breakfast inane chatter every day... (shudder)
Rearrange your work schedule so you start at 7am and get off at 3pm or 4pm. By hitting the streets at semi- off hours you will cut your commute time by possibly half (less traffic.) Time saved : 1 hour per day on the average.
By hitting your seat at 7am when the office is empty and quiet you can get more productive sooner, and get more done between 7am and 9am than most people have done by noon.
Let a woman take you clothes shopping, throw out everything in your closet and replace it with whatever she suggests. Make sure everything matches everything else. Time saved : none, but nobody will know you got dressed in the dark before you had caffeine in your system.
Don't sleep in on weekends. Get up at your regular time instead of 11am and you have effectively doubled the number of hours of daylight you get on each weekend day. God I love to sleep in so I hate this one.
Get your news from FARK (www.fark.com) In the hour it takes to watch the news on TV you could have a synopsis of the important events around the globe from a hundred different news sources. If it is newsworthy, it's on FARK.
Cancel your MMORPG accounts (stop playing Everquest). This will give you back 1000 hours per year. Maybe more.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I think it's fair-use...
I dont always have the time or inclination to go to the movie rental store, and face the possibility that a movie I want to see has been rented by someone else already.
So whenever I happen to be near the store, I go browse the movies that interest me, and rent a few.
When I get home, if I dont have time to watch them within the rental time frame, I rip them to my HD until I can watch them, then I delete the rip.
It's all about willpower and the ceremony of the thing. If you turn something off, it's too easy to turn it back on based on pure reflex. If I make a big deal out of it, and make cheating a huge pain in the ass, I can spend my time doing other things. It's like a dieter living in a house full of candy. There are too many "on" buttons.
Also, at the end of the week when I get everything back, I'm so used to enjoying the quiet that I don't put it all back right away. I fish my cel phone out right away, but the tv remote languishes for a few days, the network cards and powercords come out, but the PDA and the game controllers sit a while longer.
Multitasking would be doing several things at once, such as listening to an audio book while jogging. This is pretty common, and anybody who has a busy job knows what it's like. A coworker follows you into the men's room to chat at the urinal. You print something out before getting up to go get coffee so that you can use the time while you wait for the printout to finish. And so on. Hardly a new idea.
Timeshifting would be manipulating one of those tasks that you might not have been able to in the past. Besides Tivo and ReplayRadio, I'd suggest that the whole RSS aggregator phenomenon fits into that category. You used to spend X minutes visiting Y sites every day. Now you spend 1/10th that time by putting them all under your nose simultaneously. It's not like you're doing 10 things at once, you're not visiting 10 sites at the same time -- you're cramming more valuable info into your web browsing time.
Or how about those elevators that have a CNN newsfeed in them? Sure, technically it's multitasking, giving you something to do with otherwise down time (or I suppose up time depending on which floor you're going to :)). But it's also time manipulation in that you used to be limited to "Watch news in the morning before going to work." Now you get to take it with you up to the office. Of course I could make the opposite argument that you're not manipulating it, as anybody that's seen this setup knows. It asks a trivia question, then you have to wait 30 seconds, and you end up on your floor before you see the answer and you get all cranky.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Total cost: $0.
It's been working now for about a week, and already I love it. I can listen to Car Talk and Marketplace whenever I please. I'm saving up a bunch of Fresh Air interviews to listen to on a car trip.
Since a modern hard drive can store about 5 years of compressed talk radio, I don't think I'll need to "change the tape" any time soon. ;-)
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Recently my cable modem AND router went out on me for five days. As reported above, the first two days were a little nervewracking, but the last three were quite exquisite. It was...freeing to know that I didn't know what the hell was going on in the world, and that I knew I didn't care. But it's back up now. THANK GOD! Crazy no-broadband-havin' savages out there....
If you want to cram EVEN MORE CRAP into your life (as I do) you are probably already timeshifting everything you can. So, what to do now to squeeze more episodes of "My Life as a Teenage Robot" into your busy life of sci-fi novels, gameboy programming and gamecube games?
Timestretching!! By cranking up the speed at which you watch something while keeping the audio pitch sane, you can drop a good 25% (or more, if you feel *X-TREME*) from your viewing time. And if you think I'm joking, check out this winDVD page where they outline their timestretching tech. Pop in a DVD, and use your choice of "finish by a specific time" or "finish within a certain amount of time." And voila, suddenly everything takes 25% less time. Which leaves you able to catch up on all those anime reruns your tivo has been accumulating while you were busy watching the Daily Show.
It's important, or something. Who knows.
1. I think the world would be better if people crammed more "life" into "stuff" rather than vice-versa. (That said, there needs to be an understanding of what constitutes "life" in this context.)
2. I would argue that it does matter how much non-edifying stuff you put in your life. Note I didn't say "non-productive", because productivity is not the issue here. The question is, how much do we put in our lives that can't improve the Condition of Man - and by that I don't mean better health care or "standard of living" (whatever the heck that's supposed to mean anyway). I mean things that don't give us a more hopeful outlook on our life and the lives of those around us. I don't mean "make people happy" either - I really do genuinely mean "give people hope."
That, I think, is the crux of the "does technology really improve people's lives" debate.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Using a PVR for talk radio makes about as much sense as printing hard copies of Slashdot discussions.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
If it weren't for the whole godawful obsession with time and deadlines and the whole ratrace thing, people would leave much healthier stress-free lives. Timeshifting is a great convenience, but it still is just a delay so the "megacorps" can use us as tools to their ends for longer hours, and with the timeshifted media to watch/listen to, we spend less and less times developing and nurturing relationships with other humans. And also.... is a book still a book if it's a tape? I think not. I think that a story is still a story, but a Book has a front and back cover, and pages, and is WAY WAY WAY better than any book on tape, because reading takes more concentration, therefore the imagery in your mind will be more detailed and vivid. Just listening can provoke the imagination, too, but for me stories on tape just don't quite have the same effect. Anyway, enough rambling on at the fingers.
If you can read this, you are most likely close enough.
I completely agree. The constant need to achive more, get more, buy more, do more, is a disease. It will shorten your life, and cause you mental ill.
I've been wanting a way to record LoveLine for the longest time. It's not available in my market, so I end up listening to an online stream ... but I haven't figured out a way to rip that particular streaming format. Anyone know of an online rippable stream that I could record, and listen to a day later? I can't keep staying up until 1:00am just for a silly radio show.
I like to watch movies but can only have time to catch the best of the best in the theater.
I find Netflix to be a cheap way of shifting all those movies I always meant to see. The service allows you me to load up my queue with 100's of movies in any order I like. Then they send me the movies. After I watch one and mail it back they send me another one. I am catching up on 10 - 20 movies a month this way.
The best aspects of time shifting in using netflix are that I can rent blockbusters and bombs at the same low cost. If I saw a trailer for a movie I thought would be good but never got around to, I can watch it while coding or eating dinner. I can also watch the bad movies in fast forward just to see what made it so bad. That saves alot of time (and money) compared to trying to catch every movie in the theater.
In 6 months with the service I have caught up on golden era classics, AFI top 100 flicks, explored anime titles oft mentioned on Slashdot, and seen all those big budget flops from recent years. And best of all, I saw them when I wanted to.
OK, I answered my own question (with a tiny bit of help from Google). Media Forte makes a couple of FM-tuner PCI cards and bundle software that records, too. The description says Linux-compatible (drivers?), though the bundled software looks Windows-only.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
I have the Nomad Zen Jukebox, and it does what you are describing. You can increase the playback speed without increasing the pitch. It is an excellent feature for listening to audiobooks.
How about instead of trying to do a bajillion things and worry so much about your time, you just simmer down and enjoy living in the now. Everybody is so uptight anymore. It's always gotta be GO GO GO. Nobody ever seems to want to take the time to just do NOTHING. I guess it's just embedded in our culture to try and be super-efficent and get as much done as possible. But maybe we need to change that and just learn how to relax a bit, and if we miss a radio or TV show, who cares. You're going to burn yourself out if you keep trying to do EVERYTHING, and then you will be hating life. Try time-shifting some time where you aren't doing anything.
I grab copies of my favorite radio shows, or just grab a few hours of music off any one station. Streamripper's ability to separate title tracks falls apart slightly at the beginning of the song, but it'll numerically order them.
Thus, any show, just about any format, can be sucked off a stream and stored for your listening convenience. And I'll stuff them onto a flash or hard disk player and haul them home. I'd guess someone else can figure out how to timeshift an mp3, I'm sure it's in here somewhere.
... grumble, grumble, grumble, mutter, mutter, Millenium... Hand... Shrimp, I tol' 'em, I tol' 'em.