The Academic Geek The geeky side of academia (is there any other?)

TiVo Desktop/iTunes/LAME Hack [updated]

The well-heeled geek of course streams music from iTunes to their stereo via Apple’s AirPort Express/AirTunes gadgetry. An alternative is to stream music to your TiVo box using TiVo Desktop, which installs as a System Preference Pane on OS X. This works well — you can show slideshows of your photos in your iPhoto collection and stream MP3s from iTunes. The problem is that even the newest version of TiVo Desktop (1.9.3 for OS X) doesn’t handle AAC-encoded music, but that’s the default format that you get when you rip CDs into iTunes. It’s also the format that you get when you buy music from the iTunes Store. One can tell iTunes to rip music into MP3s but there is another option.

If you install LAME, which is an open source MP3 (en/de)coder, TiVo Desktop will use it to convert AAC files into MP3s on the fly and stream them to the TiVo box. One can get the latest source for LAME from the SourceForge site for the project. It compiles out of the box (I think) with the usual encantations (./configure and make and sudo make install). One can also find OS X binaries, but what I did is to have installed by the MacPorts system.

Once the program was installed (MacPorts install into /opt/local/bin/lame, but TiVo expects it in /usr/local/bin/lame, so I had to create a symlink), I could stream my ripped music to the TiVo box. This still doesn’t let you stream music bought from the iTunes Store but it’s a start.

I found this tip on MacGeekery where it was posted without acknowledging the source but the hack seems to have been discovered by Dennis Wilkinson as posted to the TiVo Community forums.

One last hitch: the first time I did this on my Intel MacBook Pro, all I got was static. The solution was to save the following script as /Library/Application Support/TiVo/lame and make it executable:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/bin/lame -x $*

Cyber Despair?

The Master writes:

Wanted: A Name For High-Tech Grief

A rapidly spreading kind of trauma now affects millions of people every day, but the English language hasn’t yet been extended to deal with it.

Well-known neologisms like jet lag' androad rage’ describe well-known phenomena. But what do we call the combination of helplessness and agony that affects us when our computers or computer-based appliances do inexplicable things, for which there’s no apparent workaround?

TG Daily - Man throws his computer out the window, police sympathize

I’ve often seen secretaries in tears when they’re trying to cope with name-brand operating systems. My computer-savvy friends tell me that their vacations with relatives tend to be occupied mostly by the need to fix hardware and software glitches. I myself have often cried out for help to colleagues who have generously made house calls, in order to unwedge my highly customized Linux system.

Recent discussions with friends have led to several good suggestions, including:

• cyber despair (David Eisenbud, Talin)
• technitis (Chuck McManis)
• compu-terror (Steve Diamond)
• cyber burned or cyburned (Betsy Zeller, Dave Marvit)
• digital dread (Aza Raskin)
• techno angst (Jono DiCarlo)
• irritable bit syndrome (Charles Merriam)

In a few random conversations I found that the first of these was most likely to provoke instant recognition and a lively response. But my sample size has been small.

What to do? I suggest that, the next time you’re attacked by this malady, you run through the list above and see which term best characterizes your feelings. Then blog about it. The best term should soon rise to the top, and become integrated into our common vocabulary.

I like “cyber despair” (or more generally, techno-despair), especially I am going through two instances of it right now: a flaky wireless router and an annoying communications problem between my TiVo and the Comcast cable box.

Leopard

The new version of the Mac OS X operating system is now available. Normally, I’m a very early adopter with new software like this. But this time, I’m just too busy with work and will need to wait for the winter break. I can’t wait! In the mean time, John Siracusa’s review at Ars Technica is a great read.

LaTeX Graphics Companion, 2nd Edition

There is a much expanded second edition of The LaTeX Graphics Companion. It has a chapter on Beamer presentations, which I look forward to reading, even though the Beamer manual is itself a great piece of work. It doesn’t seem to treat PGF and TikZ, which would be my choice, if I had to produce heavy duty graphics.

The book apparently was threatening to burst at the seams, so the two chapters on PostScript fonts and PostScript drivers and tools, updated and expanded with information on TrueType, Opentype fonts, and PDF utilities, are freely available online. A quick look shows some really good information on fonts in LaTeX.

JSTOR DOIs

JSTOR now has DOIs for some of the articles they archive. For example, check out http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3327064. This is a great service, especially since the old way of citing articles at JSTOR was hopelessly cumbersome (the article linked to above used to have to be linked to as

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-2638%28196312%2924%3A2%3C33%3ACIADL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E,

which is hardly an easy to deal with link).

The annoying thing is that if your internet connection comes from an institution that subscribes to JSTOR, you can’t see what the DOI for an article is. The DOI is only exposed if you’re not recognized as a subscriber. How backward is that? I asked JSTOR tech support about this and they said that they are working on a better way of exposing the DOIs. For now, they recommend that one check whether an article has a DOI by entering the bibliographic info into the DOI finder at CrossRef, which is a bit finicky and also requires one to prove that one is human by filling out one of those captcha thingies.

LaTeX style: section box

[Old post retrieved for Thony:]

There is a LaTeX package at CTAN that might be useful for class handouts etc.: sectionbox.

This collection of files contains a LaTeX package for sections surrounded by fancy boxes, primarily intended for use within posters (e.g. made with sciposter.cls). A (pdf) manual is included as well.

TextExpander on Sale

TextExpander, the typing utility that helps users save time and keystrokes by typing short abbreviations that expand into frequently used text snippets, is on sale (regular price: $29.95, with special 40% academic discount: $17.97). Highly recommended.

Lucida LaTeX Fonts on Sale

Among the alternatives to the LaTeX default font Computer Modern, one of the nicest is the Lucida family.

The TeX user group has offered the fonts at a discount for members for a while now. They charge $90 for members for the complete set (the non-member price is $140).

An alternative vendor is PCTeX, who normally charge $129 for the complete set of Lucida fonts. PCTeX has an “academic price” of $99, which is almost as good as the TUG-membership price.

But what occasioned this particular post is that PCTeX is offering a special sale right now: $79 as the academic price for the complete set of Lucida fonts.

[I already have the fonts and use them for some projects, e.g. the circulation manuscript of this paper.]

Force Mail.app to send UTF-8

A new Mac OS X hint suggests the following defaults change:

defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "UTF-8"

Why? Because Windows email clients may display messages originating from Apple Mail much more faithfully. And in any case, everybody should be using UTF-8 anyway.

Fancy Turnstiles in LaTeX

Turnstiles are symbols used often in logic and related fields. LaTeX typically makes available a rudimentary set of such symbols: \vdash and \models. Now, there is a new package called “turnstile” with much more fine-grained control over the type-setting of turnstile symbols.