I am slowly being converted to the opinion that the bandwidth complaint is a fundraising ploy. If they were really concerned about the cost of bandwidth they would attempt to minimize the use of bandwidth.  But the bandwidth Jeremiahs are the same folks who apparently take no care to reduce their own footprint, putting out excessively, needlessly large audiofiles.  YES it’s their podcast and their content and they can put it out however they wish, but if you want to beg for donations to cover your costs then I will expect you to attempt to minimize your costs.

Consider these ideas for reducing bandwidth;  they take a bit of up-front scripting to make it work programatically, then it just motors along with zero added effort from the podcaster:

1. Make a bittorrent feed available.  Your listeners will happily donate bandwidth to keep your content flowing.
2. Publish two podcast feeds:  a feed with all the bells/whistles and a low-bandwidth feed.
3. use a lower sampling rate.  44.1 is CD quality. Does your spoken word podcast require better-than-CD sampling?  For our purposes, the Nyquist Rate predicts sampling should be 2x the highest audio frequency.    Since the human ear hears roughly 20-20,000Hz, this explains the 44.1k sampling rate of CDs.  If your podcast does not contain high frequencies at the extremes of human hearing then it does not need a high samping rate.
4. use Variable Bit Rate (VBR) rather than Constant Bit Rate (CBR).  This ensures no frame uses excessive bitrate to encode the audio.
5. if you must use CBR, use a lower bitrate.
6. if your podcast is mono, then encode as mono rather than stereo.  Joint stereo reduced some of the waste when distributing mono in stereo encodes, but it’s still a waste.
7. Consider voice presets in your favorite encoder.  See the lame voice preset result below.  This single change would probably make the biggest difference in podcasting bandwidth for most content producers.
8. Consider other formats.  If you insist on high bitrates, .ogg can shave a bit off the filesize (see below).   If are really serious, use a speech-specific format like speex.

A specific example

Here’s the last file I downloaded from the feed of FreedomainRadio, your friendly neighborhood anarcho-capitalist (recommended, btw):

$ file FDR_2096_Sunday_Show_19_Feb_2012.mp3
FDR_2096_Sunday_Show_19_Feb_2012.mp3: Audio file with ID3 version 2.3.0, contains: MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1, 128 kbps, 48 kHz, Monaural

101097  FDR_2096_Sunday_Show_19_Feb_2012.mp3

100576 Feb 21 01:14 fdrtest-lamevbr-noresample.mp3
 97379 Feb 21 01:28 fdrtest.lamevbr-resample.mp3
 53812 Feb 21 00:48 fdrtest-lame-voice-preset.mp3

68536 Feb 21 01:08 fdrtest.ogg

50746 fdrtest.48k-original-sample.speex
 14498  fdrtest.08k.speex
 26394 fdrtest.16k.speex
 33830 fdrtest.32k.speex

Had a little left over so pressed it into a bowl and upturned onto a plate like I’ve seen done at some local Japanese restaurants.  Sprinkled on a bit of something I found at the local Asian market.  I will swing by the market on the way to work and pick up some pickled veggies, etc, to populate the innards of the roll.

Tip:  those little bamboo mats are exceptionally functional.  My rolls went from hideously mis-shapen to somewhat amusingly  mis-shapen but recognizable as sushi-like.

Note:  I think these rolled things might be a pathetic example of the  Futomaki type of Makizushi.  IOW, fat sushi rolls.  Futomaki is “often vegetarian”, which I did not know.    I will tag the posts “sushi” and maybe futomaki if I remember that word.  Forgive my ignorance if I offend.

Note that I eat leftovers for my “lunch” at 2am, so I actually had 6 veggie meals during that week.

1.  red beans, cornbread, and the all-powerful sriracha sauce.

Part of the reason Americans are habituated to cheap (or not-cheap) bad food is there are no corporations blasting ads about how to eat well and inexpensively by cooking simple foods at home.

Just spent 1.25hrs on trying to get something done in icewm+ROX (wife’s Dell laptop) that finally took <60secs in lxde (openbox).

I guess antiX defaults to that gawdawful setup to help out the low end boxen, but ARRGGGGHHH.

I’ve set up pcmanfm in lxde to open files/dirs with singleclick, which is chiefly why she liked the rox filer.  So maybe she’ll move over to something more easily maintainable (by me).

Prior to WWII, the overwhelming majority of Americans knew the wisdom of stocking up. Houses were build with larders. Nicer houses also had a carriage house where you boarded your horse, and sometimes there was a small apartment over the carriage house for at least one household servant. But after WWII, the new normal became suburbia. Millions of Cape Cod cottages were built across the USA with tiny yards, usually no garages, sometimes no basements, and no room to let you expand by building a barn or a shed of some kind. If you did build a shed, it was for your lawn mower. Some families stocked up during the 1950′s and onward (and the fear of nuclear bombs did inspire quite a lot of food storing) but there was yet another social force which discouraged the stocking of food: television.

Television depicted wholesome visions of what the American family “should” be as dictated by Hollywood screenwriters and their producers. June Cleaver never canned pickles, she bought them from the supermarket. Donna Reed never rotated her larder because she didn’t have one. And the only gardens those ladies ever grew were flower gardens for the sheer aesthetics they provided.  Those make believe housewives had their own cars (separate from their husbands’ cars) and drove everywhere to get whatever they needed. There were no blackouts. No gas shortages. No overwhelming snow storms. The 1960′s and 1970′s conditioned American TV viewers to think THAT was the superior way to live.

The house building industry from the 1950′s onward continued to offer Americans few choices beyond the three bedrooms on a quarter acre with a detached garage. When new visions of the ideal American home kept getting reincarnated every year, the focus was on huge living rooms. As for the kitchens — the true selling point of any house — they were designed to have as many gadgets as possible, and to be a luxurious domain of Mother and her desire to feed her family in the same way she saw families being fed on TV. A lovely dining room just off the kitchen was a valuable prize. And a butler’s pantry connecting the two meant you had truly arrived. Long term food storage was not part of the plan.

We also put a man on the moon during the 1960′s, and instant food became fashionable. Tang was the drinnk the astronaughts drank. Just add water. Frozan TV dinners were now utterly normal. The era of pre-packaged food had arrived.

The 1970′s saw house building trends shift toward energy efficiency and insulation. But even then, pantries were not places for long term food storage, just for all your gadegts. Fondue parties became a huge hit. Food had become a focus of entertainment.

Then the mid-1980′s ushered in a new era of prosperity, and houses began to get REALLY big at that point. The “lawyer foyer” and the two-car attached garage were all the rage. Pasta parties were the new craze –yet more food-based entertainment.

By the 1990′s. the “media room” emerged as the place for a giant TV with a VCR (or the new DVD players). Whole rooms were being devoted to mere entertainment. The kitchen was a showpiece for parties, not for preparing your family for a temporary period of regional food scarcity.

Here in the 2000′s, we are now facing three generations of the anti-prepper brainwashing of an entire nation — and techncially the entire world because American entertainment has been the global standard for over 80 years now.  (People in every nation on the planet know who Bart Simpson is.) I will not claim anti-prepper was the goal, merely the result. And people cannot conceive of houses built any other way than with TV/media entertainment as the main focus of the “family room,” and the kitchen as a place for “fun foods” to amuse themselves with. Anything you could desire is able to be gotten in just one afternoon via a quick trip to the local Wal-Mart. Stocking up is pointless.

In the mind of a modern American, long term food storage harkens back to the fears of the 1950′s, and only crazy people are seen as thinking a nuclear attack can be survived. Frankly, I myself do not believe a nuclear attack can be survived. But there are still far too many other possibilities other than just nukes to prepare for. In the event of a regional pandemic, or a sudden nationwide lack of petroleum, your “media room” and your fondue sets won’t be able to help you.

The box, destined for use as a Zoneminder server, was immediately upgraded to lubuntu.

As it happens, I have a piece of legacy Windoze software that doesn’t work so well under Wine.  It makes extensive use of the parallel port and pegs the CPU. And the author has recently “upgraded” to a .NET 2.0 infrastructure which is another stumbling block.

So I decided to install XP as a VirtualBox guest under Lubuntu on the same box where it was originally installed.  If that makes sense.

The install itself wasn’t terrible; it ran nicely under VirtualBox.  I did the Windows Genuine Advantage thing (typing in strings of tiny chars off a sticker) awhich blew up immediately with no indication why.  Failed and sent you to the MS WGA site, which loaded up some little applet that promptly whitescreened and hung.  Yay, payware.

I googled for WGA white screen and sifted through the possibilities.  Turns out the guest’s clock was off and that was enough to crash WGA.  Nice.  So the model is:

1. charge for the product
2. make the customer prove they are not a criminal
3. do not bother to make the proof system robust
4. and do not provide useful information if it fails.

I do not understand why people put up with this crap.  Why businesses buy into the constant cycle of needless upgrades and upsells.  Why we think virus incubation and excessive hardware requirements are acceptable.

High points:

• featured download method is by .torrent; this is optimal for all parties concerned.
• based on debian
• the graphical install is clean and lovely.  No crap, no bling, just clear information
• default is openbox, which is a great choice for a clean distro
• post-install script is simple and useful
• What is that lovely, lightweight panel?  Read the autostart to learn it’s tint2.    I think fbpanel might lose out to tint2 on my desktops…
• And while reading configs to learn the above, I found the ~/.config/openbox/autostart file to be meaningfully commented, and that the distro maintainer had the forethought to name his wrapper scripts with the prefix cb-, which I suppose stands for crunchbang.

This is great stuff.  I think at this point the only thing I would change is lightdm instead of slim for desktop manager functions because the latter is (AFAIK) no longer under active development.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

And, in one of those weird internet klein jar experiences:

this morning I listened to an HPR episode about crunchbang…

then accidentally wandered into the #! blog entry about the HPR show…

and in the blog entry the maintainer mentions my HPR chicken episode.  Srsly.

Also thawed out some falafel I had cooked (last month?) and frozen.  Will heat those up, too.