Brainwagon Radio: Lost and Found, Gadgets, Software and Recipes!

Where your host rambles and meanders through the topics that seem appropriate on a Saturday. Links from the show:

  • I use lots of command-line tools to process and convert video files. Some of the more important ones are mplayer, transcode and ffmpeg. All three are useful and powerful, but have steep learning curves. Still, for mass conversion and ripping of video files, they annoy me much less than other alternatives, and they are all open-source.
  • Mark Tilden is the inventor of BEAM robotics and also the Robosapien, a cute remote controlled robot toy with surprisingly long battery life. You can look for other Robosapien hacks here.
  • Dave Slusher uses blosxom as his blogging software: a good choice. I use WordPress, and have recently begun testing the newest version at a mirror of my text weblog. Verdict: nice, but generates illegal RSS for enclosures (multiple enclosures per item).
  • Get ready for the holidays! Try these recipes from the web:

2 thoughts on “Brainwagon Radio: Lost and Found, Gadgets, Software and Recipes!

  1. Pingback: Evil Genius Chronicles - Impulsive

  2. Gordon Smith

    Hmmm, I’m not sure about the “illegal RSS for enclosures”. I have up to 7 enclosures per RSS2 (being one audio plus 6 .jpg). feedvalidator.org doesn’t complain about my feed, and even Dave Winer has said that the standard is silent on the issue of multiple tags per

    I would be happy if WordPress gave the user ability to choose which links were to be converted to via, say, a tick-the-box list.


    Editors note:

    While researching this question, I found this post by Dave Winer which suggests that we should interpret the spec as not allowing multiple enclosures per item. I agree that it does make some sense to make multiple enclosures be valid. I did not bother to check whether feedvalidator accepts them: I suppose if it does that’s good enough for me.

    Thanks for the comments!

  3. Dave

    DW had the opportunity to define the spec as 0 or 1 years ago, and he just didn’t. Since he released a spec into the wild silent on the issue of the cardinality of enclosures per item, I don’t think it makes sense for him to now say informally how he thinks people should interpret it. Revise the spec or not, but the spec is the spec. Telling people how to interpret things that aren’t actually in it just don’t cut it.

Comments are closed.