Slashdot Mirror
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."
...or else people will be time-shifting sex, and God only knows that that will result in. ;)
libertarianswag.com
Tivo2 is supposed to add support for XM Radio in the 2nd half of 2004. Digital quality radio recording sounds like a great combination.
God forbid we sit and do nothing. It may cause us to think about our lives. Best to just keep ourselves busy all the time; flooding our ears with sound and our eyes with images. We must all do our part to keep introspection at bay, lest we realize things are not as perfect as they seem.
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)
Dontcha think it's possible to go a bit too far with the cramming?
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
I'd like to be able to timeshift my /. posts. Then I can always have "First Post"!
I have a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. One of the things I like about it is it has an effect to change the speed of the audio/mp3 you are listning to, up to 1.5x. I think it works by playing it faster, but it also lowers the pitch at the same time, so you don't get chipmunk voices. I also had a winamp plugin that did this awhile ago.
Someone is going to complain about cramming more stuff into life, so it may as well be me. Dead time is sweet time. There's nothing wrong with lying around, ignoring the phone, staring out the windows and contemplating your navel. Time shifting makes every waking moment seem like work. Chill.
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."
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
if you're a howard stern listener just use newsgroups.
alt.binaries.howard-stern has commercial free shows everyday. you can also find other popular radio talk shows on newsgroups daily. just have to look.
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...
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'.
>>so I could listen to more radio talk shows
There is something very, very wrong about this.
Step 1: Obtain DeLorean.
Step 2:: Invent Flux Capacitor.
Step 3: Timeshift.
"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."
Do you really absorb as much listening to something while you do other things as sitting down and reading? I have enough trouble getting it all to sink in and not skimming boring parts with a good ol' mass market paperback
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Mac users have a new timeshift option (if Griffin ever ships it); check out RadioShark. It records AM, FM, and Internet broadcasts into AIFF format. Upload to your MP3 player and away you go!
(Now just SHIP the darned thing, Griffin.)
After TiVo, Radio Rewound
Somewhat related to the topic. Before the internet, I wanted to record long radio programs in the morning/afternoon while I was away at work and was not allowed to listen to the radio. I needed a way to record radio programs that were 4-6 hours long, a cassette deck didn't cut it...
Ghetto engineering! I jacked my stereo through the back of a VCR's audio in, used a VHS tape set on SLP, program the VCR to start and stop recording at a predetermined time, and abracadabra: 6 hours of hassle free recording.
Glad to know that there are less ghetto ways of doing it now, the Griffin Technology RadioSHARK looks promising for OSX. www.griffintechnology.com
Once you get rid of that annoying sleep habit, you find the possibilities are limitless. I finished the entire "A la recherche du temps perdu" in 18 hours in the original and I don't even speak French. I think. Except for these damn spiders crawling up my arms, this is great. Just great!
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
Seriously. You need some perspective.
Once a year for a week I just force myself to unplug. I yank the network cards and modems out of my machines, unplug the controllers on my game systems, take my tv remote, monitor power cord, PDA and cel phone - put it all in a box and drop it off at a friend's house.
No radio, no news, no newspapers, no magazines, no tv, no nothing. I allow myself books, but only stuff that I've been planning to read for at least a year and putting off. The first few days are a little stressing, I start to get jittery and keep panicking that I'm missing something important. But by the end of the week I've got more perspective on life, more perspective on all those little electronic leashes that I impose on myself and generally a much much much lower tolerance for most of the info-garbage that I regularly consume.
Someone who's unironically posting a message seeking help on ways to more efficiently consume more media than he already does has to step back and think about that for a second. I don't mean to sound judgemental at all - really - but damn man, if your problem is that you can't figure out how to cram a little more media into your life then you need to step back for a minute and really give your life a good hard ponder.
I don't mean to sound all hippy zen on you, but when was the last time you felt grass on your bare feet? Best of luck, but no one ever said on their death bed, "If only I had listened to more talk radio..."
Published in 1970, yet still insightful today:
Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.
-kgj
-kgj
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
If you come home late TiVO's new iSpouse product will save your dinner in small plastic containers. This can then be re-heated and eaten at any time! Of course storage capacity (FridgeXT) limits the total amount of meals you can shift in this fashion.
Come play Moral Decay!
I saw a very funny and insightful study that was done.
/. while "taking care of business" in the bathroom in the morning, whatever. And if that allows you to better enjoy life, power to you!
People have been complaining about "not having enough free time - we used to have so much free time, but we don't anymore. We have too much work!" The theory was that we don't have as much leisure time as we once did - that work was somehow consuming it all.
So, they had these people record what they were doing for a few weeks.
They found that the people were correct in that the didn't have as much "free" (i.e. uncommitted) time. However, they had VASTLY more leisure time - it was just crammed full of leisure activities!
Yes, you can time shift/time compress TV and radio, listen to books on tape while you drive, read
But please, should you do this, don't bitch about not having enough "free" time - you chose to live that way, you have the problem with knowing what activities you cannot do without, YOU CONSUMED ALL YOUR FREE TIME!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Get a tape-to-headphone-jack adapter, the kind people used to use with portable CD players before everyone just got in-dash CD players. (If you can't find one in a store, surely someone you know will have one they're not using.) I use one with my Creative Nomad MuVo all the time, and the sound quality is excellent.
Dance like nobody's watching. Sing like you're in the shower. Fuck like you're being filmed.
I don't follow most if not all of these recommendations, but I've at least thought about them at one point.
speedread - If you pronounce words in your mind as you read them, you are forced to read much slower than if you learn to read without that habit. Supposedly one can read and fully comprehend a few thousand of words a minute.
abridged books - You claim to read unabridged books, but if you're wanting to absorb more, why not read the versions that get to the point quicker?
read/listen/watch only shows/stories/articles recommended by trusted sources - People you know recommend that you should read/watch/listen to certain things. Some turn out to be a waste time, but some turn out to be truly enjoyable. Only listen to those who have usually recommended the latter.
ask for paraphrasings of stories - Maybe you don't need to read/watch a story. Maybe it's not worth your time/interest to go through every word. Just get someone who's good at summarizing to explain the story to you within 2 minutes. Maybe that will be entertaining enough.
fast forward - If you liked Alvin and the Chipmunks, then try this. A friend of mine watches all of his anime at double speed. I think he's nuts, but it works for him.
switch to cell phone-only - Here's something I follow. If you only have a cell-phone, you have an excuse to hang up on people who talk too much, "Sorry, using up too much airtime. Gotta go."
pay someone else to do housework - A maid can clean your house for a reasonable fee once a week. Please don't hire an illegal alien though.
carpool - You might have to drive to work and do your Otis listening routine sometimes, but othertimes, you can sit in the back while you speedread. This works best if you can ignore your talkative buddies and maintain focus.
drink more coffee - Just make sure it doesn't interfere with the sleep you need. Most people need enough sleep to maintain most of their ability to pay attention to what they read/listen to/watch.
work less hours - depends on your priorities in life. If you're an independent contractor who's being paid a lot, maybe you can take off a day every other week to get more reading in.
become financially independent - or maybe you don't have to work at all after you've saved your money enough or started a business that runs itself.
raise your slashdot filter - Most of the posts here are crap. You shouldn't bother with anything less than a rating of 4 unless you're moderating.
I don't understand you people, who feel guilty for doing what they like to do. What the hell?
Why are we trying to cram all this stuff into our lives? When you multitask your entertainment, all it does is take some of the pleasure out of it. I'd rather *read* a single book in two months and really take it in than squeeze 8 of them into the little gaps of time during the day.
I subscribe to the field of thought that it's better to make priorities of what makes you happiest and go after a few of them full bore in the spare time you have, rather than spend a little time with each of them and get nowhere. Accept the fact that you can't possibly do everything you want, and take seriously the things you *can* do.
I just picked up an ATI ALL-IN-WONDER 9600 Pro it has both a built in TV tuner and an FM Radio tuner. You can time shift both TV and RADIO programs with the included ATI software.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
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.
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.
It's RealAudio, not Shoutcast, but hey, you can't have everything.
This kind of power gives you interesting abilities. For instance, on my friends mailing list we were joking around pinpointing the exact second at which ex-minister Clare Short realised quite what she'd done by exposing UK spying activity against the UN on the Radio 4 interview this morning.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Using a PVR for talk radio makes about as much sense as printing hard copies of Slashdot discussions.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Once you get rid of that annoying sleep habit... Just last week that thought occured to me: when humanity masters the workings of the brain and we unravel the regeneration secrets that sleep provides, you can bet your pillow that we'll start seeing "sleep supplements" or sleep substitutes to make our days longer and more productive. People will object to having a truly elongated 24hr day and being awake at night, but we could see radical changes in our job shifts, television schedules and even schools. Just so you remember you heard it here first.
So in those days when our descendants won't have to sleep to stay alive, what will they REALLY do with all the extra hours?
"Wireless : LAN
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 spend enough time multitasking at work. I would prefer to do less with my free time - not more...
Stop and smell the roses...sit in one place and daydream...meditate...lay in the sun streaming in through the screen door on a warm day and take a nap...watch an ant mound...observe the wind through the trees, and the fall of leaves.
I was far more creative and energetic when I spent more time doing those things than I am now, every waking moment crammed with some activity - either work or family oriented.
It is not the quantity, but the quality of the life you live that counts.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I find that for spoken word (such as audiobooks), I can increase the playback rate to as much as 150% and can understand and enjoy the material for an extended amount of time. If I am really paying attention, I can play back at 200% for shorter lengths of time & if I'm feeling "distracted," I may have only a ver small increasae in the rate.
I don't know what hardware currently has this feature (I'm sure other /.ers will know & hope they post it, as I'm in the market for a player), but the winamp plugin pacemaker works quite well in winamp or Xaudio.
Pick out your clothes the night before.
Do your homework the night before it is due, instead of the morning it is due.
And use a VCR to record the radio, it is possible, just leave the radio tuned to the right station and on, and program the VCR to record the Line in if possible.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
"He who thinks time is money understands neither time nor money"
How do you save time? How do you set aside 10 minutes a day to save for a summer holiday? Where do you deposit it? How can you make a redrawal?
"Saving time" means usually just how to make more things in same amount of time ie. to be more efficient. But do you have more time? I don't think so. With all the timesaving gadgets and tips people just feel busier than ever and that they don't have enough time. We westerners often consider time to be something that is useful only if it is spent some how productively. In some other culture time is something we create by doing nothing.
I recommend reading Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age by Thomas Hylland Eriksen
"The turn of the millennium is characterized by exponential growth in everything related to communication - from the Internet and email to air travel. "The Tyranny of the Moment" deals with some of the most perplexing paradoxes of this new information age. Who would have expected that apparently timesaving technology results in time being scarcer than ever? And has this seemingly limitless access to information led to confusion rather than enlightenment?
Thomas Eriksen argues that slow time - private periods where we are able to think and correspond coherently without interruption - is now one of the most precious resources we have, and it is becoming a major political issue. Since we are now theoretically "online" 24 hours a day, we must fight for the right to be unavailable - the right to live and think more slowly. It is not only that working hours have become longer - Eriksen also shows how the logic of this new information technology has, in the space of just a few years, permeated every area of our lives. This is equally true for those living in poorer parts of the globe usually depicted as outside the reaches of the information age, as well as those in the West.
Exploring phenomena such as the world wide web, WAP telephones, multi-channel television and email, "Tyranny of the Moment" examines this new, nonlinear and fragmented way of communicating to reveal the effect it has on working conditions in the new economy, changes in family life and, ultimately, personal identity. Eriksen argues that a culture lacking a sense of its past, and therefore of its future, is effectively static. Although solutions are suggested, he demonstrates that there is no easy way out. " - Book description from Amazon
Well, the basic concept of time shifting is to put yourself in the control of when you want to do things. So, in that regard, it shouldn't be to difficult to move some of the more restrictive items to times when they're convenient for you. Work It's a pain in the ass, we all know it. Ask your supervisor for flex time, or work from home If that doesn't work, start your own business, so that you can set your own hours Commute This is basically related to work, so see above. Alternatively, you can move closer to work, or just start sleeping under your desk. School For you, assuming you're an adult, you can attend distance learning classes in place of the regular college curriculum, or you can look to see if there are schools in your area that focus in adult education. You could start working for a university, as they tend to be flexible in allowing staff members to attend classes, and they're nearby, saving you from the need for seperate travel time. [you'll have to coordinate with your potential manager to make sure it's okay] For your children, you can use home schooling, so you don't have to worry about when their tests and vacations are when you're planning family trips. Relationship Let's face it, dating, marriage, or whatever is another major waste of time. You have two major options -- make enough money so that your SO doesn't have to work, and can be at your every beck and call, or soliciting prostitutes. Shopping With Amazon and other online retailers, there's no reason to go out shopping anymore. If you're not in an area supported by Peapod or a similar organization, you're going to have to find some place online that sells MREs. Food Between Shwanns, MREs, and a microwave, meal perperation shouldn't take more than a few minutes. Consumption, however, is another waste of time, and so I would suggest only buying mushy foods, to save on chewing. You may wish to switch to a diet high on Ensure, Carnation Instant Breakfast, and/or Slimfast [is there anyone still reading this?] Bathroom Breaks MREs prove salt peter which may allow you to time shift your bathroom breaks. You can also try Depends, or other incontience aids. [not quite to the punchline yet] Sleeping Doctors may recommend 10 hrs per night, but let's be serious -- 3L of Mt. Dew per day, and you can easily cut that back to 4hrs, so long as you perform relatively sedentary tasks for those 6 hrs that you lose, such as watching TV or playing video games. [are you still reading?] Friends Provided that you started your own company, you can then hire your friends to work with you, so you can get all of that companionship crap done while you're still at work, eliminating the need to waste time with extraneous interaction. [It's not that good of a joke] If you're an extrovert, and still have a need for other interaction, you're their boss, and can pressure them to do whatever you want, and/or hire extra yes-men to replace them. [it's rather dark humor, too] Life Unfortunately, I don't have a solution for this one, other than hoping that there really is reincarnation, and when you want a break, killing yourself, so that you can just come back to it later, when you have more time. However, if that one doesn't work, you're pretty much SOL, but the bright side, is you won't really notice that it didn't work, as you'll be dead. [hey, I told you it was dark, damnit] Now for the real advice -- get a life. Take up a hobby. Quit your job. Do something, but don't try to burn out early. I've already done that -- twice. There are things you can do to remove wasted time, but there are times when we really just need to relax, and do nothing important. [and that's what we have American sitcoms for -- no thought required, and no redeeming qualities]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
"... simply press the 'off' button and go outside."
Am I the only one who thinks modding up of comments like this is ignorant? "Don't do what you enjoy doing, instead, go outside because it's automatically better than using a computer for reasons I won't go into."
"Derp de derp."