Business - Justin Foell

With all new Apple i-devices moving to the lightning connector, I’ve found my alarm clock with it’s 30-pin dock connector has reverted to it’s 20th century radio-only state of use. I suppose I could use an adapter, but it seems like a great way to break something (by adding a longer lever).

Then I remembered I have a 6th generation iPod nano sitting in a drawer. You know, the one that looks like this:

But with older iPods that exist outside of the “App” and jailbreak realm, there a beast to contend with: iTunes. Continue reading →

With the Minnesota Orchestra back in business (and now with their music director re-hired), Jessi and I purchased a subscription package of concerts to attend. With the orchestra pulling out all the stops on their repertoire, we wanted to attend almost all of the concerts. But that was unrealistic.

So when we couldn’t attend concerts that we wanted to hear, we could listen to them on the radio. And if we couldn’t listen in, there is the radio stream, which I could capture.

Radio stations have for the most part made streaming easy. Some have made attempts to secure their streams from easily being captured by using proprietary protocols like RTMP. But it remains that a stream is still a stream, and it can always be saved. It may just take a greater or lesser degree of difficulty.

Continue reading →

Luckily, many stations opt for the tried-and-true streaming MP3 delivery method that every device can support without special hardware or software. My local classical affiliate is no exception. I found the address to the stream in apmplayer-all.min.js file (I used Chrome to un-minify it).

Then I put together a script that would save the stream…

First, I created a script, and saved it to /home/justin/bin/record_orchestra.sh on my system:

#!/bin/sh

DATE=`date +%Y%m%d`
STREAM='http://cms.stream.publicradio.org/cms.mp3'
DESTINATION="/home/justin/Music/mnorch_$DATE.mp3"
STOP='22:30'

cvlc --demux dump --demuxdump-file $DESTINATION $STREAM &
PID=$!
echo "kill $PID" | at $STOP

The script needs to be added to the crontab of my unix system to kick it off at 8PM on every Friday.

$ crontab -e
# m h dom mon dow command
0 20 * * fri /home/justin/bin/record_orchestra.sh

Script, explained

A little explanation of what’s going on in the script:

I’m using the date command to help me name the files. mnorch_20140214.mp3 for example is Valentines Day – Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Holst’s Planets 😎

I’m using VLC to capture the stream. cvlc is just a wrapper that’s included with VLC. It runs in a “headless” mode where nothing displays – perfect for a cron job. I’m telling it to do a raw dump of the incoming stream so the file doesn’t get transcoded, just saved exactly as it was streamed from the station. The ampersand (&) at the end of the cvlc command makes it run in the background.

Using the $! shell variable, the script saves the process ID of VLC. Then using the at daemon, we tell it to stop VLC “at 10:30PM,” when the show is likely over.

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Research shows that humans like variety. But we also relish the routine. It’s sometimes good to have a regular schedule so we can “get into a groove.” This goes for children and adults alike. While I enjoy the occasional personal day off, sometimes I wish I could just escape the constant barrage of wind chill, blizzards, partially recognized holidays, influenza, and streptococcus that this season has wrought upon us.

Sometimes I just want a normal 5 day work week (or two) to get s#*t done.

Continue reading →

While this list is partly an exercise in self-serving historic proclamation, it may also serve as notice to anyone who works at home, has kids, and is simultaneously trying to maintain their sanity. My son goes to day care at a facility that is part of the school district. So when school is closed, day care is closed as well. These are days that really grind all work to a halt.

Here’s a chronicle of exactly how far back the irregularity in my work-from-home schedule goes, sorted by week:

Dec. 9, 2013 – I got the flu. I was the first recorded case of Influenza A at my clinic. Not a statistic I’m proud of.

Dec. 16 – Despite the doctor’s recommendation, I still traveled to Nevada for WordCamp Vegas. Besides losing work to sickness, I added travel on top if it.

Dec. 23 – Christmas

Dec. 30 – New Years

Jan. 6, 2014 – School canceled Monday and Tuesday by the Minnesota Governor due to dangerously low temperatures. If you watch the news video, you’ll also get to see the snow sculpture that is up the street from my house.

Jan. 13 – On Tuesday I had a doctor’s appointment at a clinic 25 minutes away. I left 45 minutes before I needed to get there, but it took 1.5 hours. I drove all they way in 1st or 2nd gear on the freeway. I lamented the fact that I probably could have made it there and back faster if I had traveled by bicycle. Jessi remarked that it would have been slower with the trailer, since my daughter was with me. Even being an hour late, the doctor saw me, but I had pretty much spent my entire morning stuck in traffic.

Jan. 20 – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on Monday, school canceled on Thursday due to dangerous weather conditions.

Jan. 27 – School canceled Monday and Tuesday due to low temperatures and wind chill.

Feb. 3 – No school on Friday for staff development.

Feb. 10 – ONE WEEK OF NORMALCY AMIDST A SEA OF CHAOS. Truth be told, Monday was just as cold as any of the other school closure days, but the district is out of available make up days. Sorry kids, get a hat!

Feb. 17 – Presidents Day on Monday and then a school closing on Friday due to weather. Thursday night rain turned to sleet, which turned to heavy snow which turned to huge amounts of blowing snow. The snow plows were able to remove the top layer of snow only to reveal a thick layer of ice beneath:

694_ice — Friday morning rush hour (the smart ones stayed home)

Feb. 24 – Jules got strep throat 🙁 Will the madness ever end?!?

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Chris Rock, as the illustrious SNL character “Nat X,” once hilariously shamed The Man for his assignment of February as Black History Month:

I just want to say that February is Black History Month. Isn’t that nice? The Man gives us February because it’s the shortest month of the year! Now, I’m not complaining, but I think we deserve at least a thirty-day month.

But instead of looking for a better, longer black history month, let’s instead normalize the months. Introducing the Stevadorian Calendar!

Continue reading →

Forced upgrades and planned obsolescence – almost all companies do it, but Apple has really advanced it from a science to an art form. I was holding onto iOS5 with my cold, Minnesota frost-bitten hands because I liked Google Maps as the default mapping app – you know, one that will actually deliver correct directions. But there were a couple of apps I wanted to install that required iOS6. Too bad I waited too long, once iOS7 was released, upgrading to iOS6 was no longer possible. At one point, iOS6 users were automatically upgraded to iOS7 “over the air” – meaning it happened automatically without user approval or intervention. Then there was a lawsuit which quickly stopped OTA updates. None-the-less, iOS6 is a memory, and while I thought I would only have to deal with Apple Maps and iOS7 generally grinding my “old” iPhone to a halt, it turns out there are many more bugs to be discovered.

Continue reading →

iOS7 is full of several major changes. I can handle the UI overhaul in iOS7. My dad says it looks like all the icons were redrawn by a kindergartener, but I’ll quickly get over that part. What I can’t handle is when there are serious issues with the functionality of the software. Despite knowing all of this, I still clicked that update button, and it seemed to go swimmingly.

Post Upgrade Calendar Blues

As soon as I upgraded iOS, I had like 27 apps that also wanted to upgrade. When I started the iOS upgrade process I had at least a gigabyte of free space on my phone, so I figured everything was kosher. The iOS update went fine, but when I tried updating my apps, I was informed that I had no free space left to work with. When I went to the usage screen, I was surprised to see “Calendars & Reminders” at the top of the list with 1.8GB. Normally it’s either photos or music (understandably), so WTF was going on?

I did some searching and was glad and annoyed that I wasn’t alone. I was glad since others were having the same problem, there was likely a known cause, and hopefully a solution. This guy with a 64GB iPhone had his calendar usage balloon up to 25GB! This other guy made a graph of his usage over time.

I was annoyed because I feel that if Steve Jobs were still around, he would have found the developers responsible for the terrible iOS7 calendar and said to them “One more thing… you’re fired!” He would have then put his best guys in there to fix the bug. But here I was 4 point releases into iOS7 and clearly this remains an issue.

The Problem

It seems iOS7 was copying all of my subscribed calendars to the phone. And since several of them have recurring events with no end date, it just kept copying them ad infinitum. I deleted some photos and some music and the calendar storage usage just went up to 2GB. So I deleted some more photos and some more music. I tried a couple of suggestions (see below), but before anything could take effect, it just kept ballooning up.

The Solution?

So I tried going into Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Subscribed Calendars and setting them all to “inactive” by toggling off each calendar’s “Account” switch. Strangely the usage size did not diminish and there were several of the same subscribed calendars still showing up in the calendar app.

I left the subscribed calendars “inactive” and went into the calendar app and tried to delete the very calendars I had marked inactive. In the calendar app, click “Calendars” then click the “i” icon next to a subscribed calendar, scroll to the bottom then choose “Delete Calendar.” This, in theory, would delete all of the subscribed events that have been (stupidly) copied to the phone.

I don’t know if I was getting impatient or what, but my phone was still hemorrhaging memory. I tried several other things:

Putting the phone into airplane mode so it couldn’t download anymore data (was it downloading or calculating dates until the end of time?)
Going to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Subscribed Calendars and actually deleting suspected large calendars (re-adding is easy enough)
Closing all apps (including the calendar) and then restarting the phone

I’m not sure which of these straws actually broke the camel’s back, but I suspect I could have skipped the deleting of the subscribed calendars and had a little more patience. If you’re having this issue, I recommend doing the normal “Delete Calendar” from the calendar app just before you go to bed, while your phone is charging. Then in the morning, close the all apps and restart the phone.

Where ever you are now Steve, we could use some of that classic Jobs incessant attention to detail that has been lost.

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Justin Foell

Technology, Bicycling, Hobbies, Kids, Life.

Category Archives: Business

Adding music to iPod Nano 6G in Ubuntu

libhashab.so binary – trusted?

It Works

Record a streaming radio program

Script, explained

Achieving Normalcy

Stevadorian Calendar

Steveadorian?

By the numbers

Month (re)names

iOS7 Calendar Storage Space

Post Upgrade Calendar Blues

The Problem

The Solution?