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Sources of Intelligent Audio for Commute?
confusus writes "Trapped in the daily routine of commuting for 1-2 hours every day, I started to ponder different ways of recycling commute-time waste. I tried listening to the radio, but 9.9/10, it ends up being just 'duh-whatever.' Then, I tried listening to audio books: it is really hard to find audio books that are tailored toward nerds. Thus I decided to find audio of interesting/geeky/nerdy/sciency interviews, talks, lectures. What would be the websites which provide such content?" I'd really like to find more informative downloadable audio content, too. Perhaps informed commentary and self-guided tours of historical and other sites, like national parks and significant buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere, basically self-guided audio walking (or driving) tours. Can anyone recommend a source?
Here's a good source of podcasts
If you look around, you'll find plenty of what interests you available as a podcast. Should you not find what you're looking for, with any luck we'll see YOUR podcast up there soon too.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Then relive the glory on your way to work
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
There are lots of informative and geeky lectures available at:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html
http://tf2.digitaljedi.com
I found that getting the audio files of the Wall Street Journal and listening to them on the way to work was a very good way to keep abreast of the latest developments in the world. Sure it is dry and not nerdy, but if you work in corporate America it pays to be informed.
Check out the offerings distributed by Public Radio International. The archives of many of their shows are available to listen to for free. Specifically, check out This American Life , To the Best of Our Knowledge , and Sound & Spirit . If you're able to record these shows from the archives (using some sort of scheduled stream-ripper like iRecordMusic or WireTap Pro), or purchase them (through Audible or ITMS), they can make an hour-long commute feel like mere minutes.
And for your Monday morning commute, make sure you've got the latest installment of Wait Wait -- Don't Tell Me! , the NPR news quiz.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
A couple Christmases ago, I gave my brother the audio version of A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. I think it's around six hours long. At the time, he had a four hour daily commute, so he breezed through it pretty quickly, but he seemed to enjoy it. Amazon has it for under twenty bucks. Might be worth a shot.
http://mobile.wsj.com/mp3/
Seriously... I see way too many people that are doing who-knows-what behind the wheel, with visible evidence of the impact it has on the amount of attention they're paying to traffic. Weaving all over a lane, tailgating, running traffic lights, etcetera.
I want my in-car entertainment to be duh-whatever. If it's something that makes you think, then it's reducing the bandwidth you have to be putting towards the road.
Less is more.
BBC Radio 4 is pretty much my staple diet of commute audio. Most days it's the Today Programme, intelligent, topical, and responsible for breaking a lot of big stories, such as the David Kelly Iraq WMD story.
The last edition is always posted online at the above address as a 'Listen Again' stream - worth checking out.
Check out the content available from IT Conversations. Lots of geeky stuff from lots of geeky people (People like Cory Doctorow, Steve Wozniak, Bruce Schneier, etc.).
You may also want to try listening to podcasts. Check out ipodder.org to see a directory of them. There is more than enough content there to keep you occupied on a daily basis. Oh, I guess I'm also assuming you can listen to MP3 in your car...
If you commute 2 hours per day, 5 days
a week, 50 weeks a year (for a total of
two weeks "time off" for good behavior
each year), you pull in 500 hours/year
in a metal cage. If you do a decade of
work like this, that's about 208 days
in a car. Or, about the length of time
for a first-time non-violent felony
prison sentence, like robbery without a
real gun, grand theft auto (the real
thing, not the game), embezzlement,
and similar crimes. The difference
is that if you committed a real crime,
you'd at least have a chance of getting
away with it. But since you took this
crappy job, you're being sentenced to
a metal cage, without the benefit of
having potentially profitted from a crime.
Pray tell, what crime did you commit to
be sentenced to this metal cage that you
call "your commute"? Or do you not value
your freedom enough to demand or expect
something better out of life? (Don't be
ashamed if this is what you want for
yourself; the world does need cogs after all.)
Put a laptop with wireless Internet access in your car, hook it to your stereo, and install some software that speaks the text of websites. Then point your browser to Slashdot commentary.
You'll be laughing so hard that you'll drive into a telephone pole, and you won't have to worry about commuting for a while.
The coolest voice ever.
I downloaded MIT's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) lectures from here, and converted the audio portion to MP3 so I could play it on my iPod. Outside of that suggestion, I have the same question as you. I recently cancelled an Audible subscription because I had run out of books I was interested in hearing. The local library seems to have mostly fiction in audiobook.
As a bonus, you can even get it in Ogg.
yo.
A quote from their website:
"LugRadio contains language and topics that some may find offensive."
I guess they are talking about Perl?
http://radio.cbc.ca/programs/quirks/
This Canadian radio show has been running weekly since at least 1988, and covers a broad range of science news. I find they rarely dumb down their news, and often they will cover obscure and very interesting areas of research that you just won't hear about anywhere else in the news.
The website supports podcasting, realaudio, and you can download every weekly episode since 1988 right from their website. Pretty cool when you think about it.
This is definately superior news for the science nerd.
As probably the largest producer of English language spoken word material in the world, you could try looking at the BBC material.
:-)
On a factual note there is "This Sceptred Isle" series, a 2000 year history of the British Isles that is about 44 hours to start off with. They have plenty of other stuff as well.
On a SciFi note they have HitchHickers Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, Earth Search and a whole pile more as radio plays. As Fantasy they have the excellant Lord of the Rings dramatization, and a complete canon of Sherlock Holmes among others.
They also do a good range of comedy, though much of this does have a U.K. slant.
Outside the BBC there is a whole series of lectures by Feynman if that takes your fancy, try Amazon. If you are into Terry Pratchett, then try ISIS audio books for unabridged audio books of his Discworld novels.
Fortunately for me I live in the U.K. and I get much of this stuff piped directly into my house via digital radio straight onto my hard disk in MP2 format via the wonders of BBC7
The Fifth HOPE conference had some great lectures. Here's a link.
IT Conversations ;)
Talking History
These two have kept my train ride going for a while
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
It is a perfect setting - lots of free time, a CD player, and nobody else around. (You feel pretty stupid repeating words over and over again in a foreign language if you are around other people). All of the Pimsleur lessons are 30 minutes each.
Podcasting is made up of two parts. Part one is the show itself. This show is recorded in MP3 format and then posted on a site. This site then has an RSS feed that points to the MP3 file and has details about the current show. The second part is the client app. Some of the current apps are ipodder, ipodderX, doppler, jpodder, etc.
The client users makes the app subscribe to the RSS feed. The client app then checks the subscribed feeds on a regular basis and then if the RSS changes it will automatically download the new show. The client user can then setup the app to create a playlist and then import it into iTunes or onto your iPod (or any MP3 player).
Because the show is just an MP3 you don't have to get the client, you can just download the MP3 from the podcast site and listen to it or burn it if you want to.
Since this post does seem like a opp to pimp podcasting, I have to pimp mine...
http://www.fakescience.com/labreport.htm
The Lab Report covers the new digital music industry and highlights new underground and unsigned music. This week we have Rick Carr, formely of NPR, and he is talking about his new show TechnoPop and also about Sandy Pearlman's $0.05 song economy. Check it out!
-halon-
If you are into space related science you may wish to listen to MP3s of the SETI Radio Network broadcasts. The topics are generally much broader than just SETI and the interviews with scientists and researchers are actually pretty good. They only produce an hour a week, but it will at least cover one of your commutes to work.
It's going to sound lame, but you can get some reasonably good audio from 2600.
2600
Or Sun has their Java evangelists create real audio lectures.
Also, I purchased Verbal Advantage
Verbal Advantage
When going through DC I listen to C-SPAN Radio, or whenever available.
C-SPAN Radio
When available, I listen to NPR.
NPR
If it's the wee hours, I listen to Coast to Coast AM
Coast to Coast AM
I also like Neil Boortz.
I also purchased "Word Smart" and "Grammar Smart" on Amazon.com, which are published by the Princeton Review.
Westerns, detective stories, science fiction, comedy, you-name-it. Back before TV existed, radio was it, and a huge amount of quality drama was made for radio broadcast.
There are many binary newsgroups where oldtime radio is posted and it won't take you many days to download enough material to keep you listening for several years.
A lot of old time radio is amazingly good.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Richard Feynman, prominent physicist, Nobel laureate, and general renaissance man, was also a prolific and entertaining author, and many of his books are available as unabridged audio books. I find it hard to imagine that any geek would not find these interesting, insightful, and humorous (+5 on all scales, of course!)
Audible.com has them.
"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
"What Do You Care What Other People Think?"
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/nitf/273/
They provide a basis for our legal system, and reflect some pretty important times in our history. Plus, there are inevitably arguments for and against that I had never considered, (Can I mod justices +1 insightful?)
That's a no brainer. Download your topics of interest and record the dialup audio. Any real nerd knows that. Naturally, that requires learning binary -- at least the printable ascii characters. You shouldn't have any problem removing the parity bits, ACK/NAKs, and other overhead data from the audio stream by hand, or with a custom algorithm of your design. Since you're a beginner, you'll probably just want to start out at the oldschool 75bps. As you improve, you can step up to faster bitrates. Since modem speeds generally double, you might want to set the playback speed variably to give yourself more of a natural progression. Once you get up to 28.8kbps, you can listen to War and Peace in under 20 minutes. I would highly suggest you don't go beyond 33.3kbps though. One fellow tried to make it to 56k, and now he's locked away. Poor guy thinks he's a tangerine. Anytime someone opens their mouth to speak to him, he tries to flee in terror to avoid being eaten. It's even worse when he gets hungry himself. Naturally they have to keep him away from mirrors.
But I digress. Good listening to you!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
You could do all that manually, but I would recommend getting Sirius instead. You get NPR Talk, NPR Now, PRI, BBC, etc... etc... etc... Really great unbiased intelligent talk.
This and a number of other tips can be found on my blog.
Linux at home
or, say, jazz. just get some CDs and listen on your way. You can read about the composer/performer/particular piece beforehand. I've been doing it for quite a while. Even if you are familiar with either, there is always something new to learn. Like I've spent a couple of years listening (and learning) jazz of 60-70s, and now I'm focusing on pre-Bach time (early Baroque and Renaissance).
The Teaching Company [http://www.teach12.com] offers a wide variety of college lectures on CD. They are expensive but worth every penny... I just got through listening to a 48 CD lecture and was left wanting more.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets