I’ve been looking around for a podcatcher for linux that can exist only in the background and still handle my feature expectations. I still have iPodder running, despite some sort of naming crisis going on, but I find that it has more GUI than I want or need¹. It happily runs in the background, and I never really use it beyond its scheduled download capabilities. I’ve seen listings that included cron-based podcatchers. It seems like a good idea to me.

I eventually saw a strong possibility with Peapod. It is a python-based command-line app that happily runs from cron. The website states that only python 2.4 is supported, but I haven’t yet run into problems with 2.3. The most attractive feature is that an external application may be spawned to manipulate any freshly downloaded enclosure. My first thought was to put together something to handle tag-rewriting, but that feature is already included, and is probably the second most attractive feature. That will leave me to put together some way to creatively assemble podcast playlists, probably based on prioritised queues.

There are a couple downsides that I’ve found early on, but nothing that seems difficult to overcome:

*Running an application with —help should not reach out and touch the configuration file.
*Path names are whitespace-sanitised, which annoys me and can easily be configurable.

I’m half way through reading the source, and it’s pretty understandable, so I might actually get around to submitting a patch or two along the way.

¹ Having said that, I think that PenguinTV looks pretty slick.

For a long time, my guitar has been a toy. I’d pick it up, and patterns would come out of my fingers. There was always musicality to it, but nothing original or interesting. Something triggered me to get past that yesterday, and I spent a couple hours with a mixture of technical exercises and actual musical playing. The results were far from spectacular, but the process was fascinating all over again.

My phone is set to display the current cell site on its display, but the middle of the phone display has been blank since Saturday. What has Vodafone done this time?