The joys and pains of enjoying podcasts

One of the things I’ve come to love about having my digital media player is being able to snag podcasts and enjoy them when I’m away from my computer. I know this is nothing new to most people but I didn’t do much with podcasts before due to a somewhat limited amount of time I spend at my computer every day. I used to snag some tech podcasts, especially the podcasts from the Ubuntu UK podcast team and the Ubuntu Podcasts from Josh Chase and Nick Ali from the Ubuntu Georgia Local Community (LoCo) team. I ended up dropping the two Ubuntu podcasts when I stopped being a GNOME user since they had too little KDE content that I could find. I also listened to the Full Circle Magazine podcast but I found the format too painful to listen to and dropped it. (Sorry guys, but it’s the truth.) I’ll look for some KDE-related podcasts one of these days but as of this writing I have no clue what’s out there.

I haven’t stopped enjoying podcasts though.Now I snag podcasts of NPR shows every weekend, as well as for shows during the week that I was unable to hear when it was originally broadcast. I do podcasts on the weekend mostly because my commute routine has changed so they’re on when I’m on the subway, plus my local NPR station, WBUR, has juggled the schedule for some of my favorite shows and I’m unable to hear them when I used to. For those interested, the shows I enjoy via podcast are:

• Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson. Their website calls the show ” public radio’s smart and surprising guide to what’s happening in pop culture and the arts.” Produced by PRI and WNYC, I can’t believe I let myself forget how much I enjoy the show.
• The Moth. Real stories from real people, told with no notes and always enjoyable and entertaining. The Moth runs storytelling nights in New York, LA, Chicago and Detroit, with shows in other cities when the Moth goes on tour. The Moth Radio Hour isn’t aired all year long, but it’s always good news when PRX.org has new shows. Luckily there are podcasts even when the show is on hiatus.
• Radiolab. Radiolab isn’t your ordinary radio show and I found it when I stumbled across it on WBUR. I was hooked from the first show. Another production from WNYC, their website says, “Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we’ll feed it with possibility.” I’m glad they put it that way because I honestly couldn’t find the words to try and describe they show. It’s that different, and that’s a very good thing.
• Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. The NPR news quiz, it combines current events with humor and the chance to win a damned nice prize. Hosted by Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell and with three celebrity panelists each week, with most shows recorded at Chicago’s Chase Auditorium, I dare you to listen to a single show without laughing. And be careful, as Fat Albert used to say, you might learn something.

There are other shows I may snag downloads for if I miss enough of the broadcast, like OnPoint, Radio Boston, The Splendid Table, Fresh Air and Car Talk.

The title of this post mentions pains, and unfortunately there are two things that can be a bit of a pain to enjoying podcasts. Of course you have to download them, but there are a number of apps you can use that will grab the podcasts you want with little hassle, although I tend to simply download them and manually move them over to my media player. It’s not that big a deal for me since I have my player set to simply use a directory structure and don’t have to worry about where my app puts my podcasts. The other advantage to doing it this way is that I can archive podcasts that I really enjoy and save them for later.

But there’s one more things that’s more annoying than anything else about listening to NPR shows on podcasts. “Wait Wait…” is a great example. Earlier this year the time for it’s last weekly airing on WBUR was changed so that I tend to hear the show start before going underground on the subway between Community College and North Station, and then I can hear the end of the show once I get to Jackson Square or so on the southern end of the Orange Line. What I end up doing now is to hear the broadcast of the show’s teaser and the top of the hour news break, then go to the podcast until I get down to Forrest Hills. At that point there’s 20-30 minutes of show left and while I end up hearing part of the show twice it tends to work out pretty well. I usually go back to WBUR in time for the Listener Limerick Challenge or the final Lightning Fill In The Blank round.

The problem is the way the show ends. Peter Sagal always ends the show by saying, “This is NPR,” and the podcast ends. But as this clip recorded at the end of this morning’s first broadcast shows, I’m very used to something else following the end of the show.

As I’ve said on Facebook, it just seems weird to hear Peter close “Wait Wait…” with “This is NPR” and not hear the local station ID. What about you guys? Do you have things like this with podcasts you listen to regularly? What are the podcasts you just have to snag every week or so? Let us know in the comments, and please include links to the podcasts’ websites so we can check them out as well.

Creating and using a list of packages you have installed

After doing a fresh install of Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx last month, I was told a week or two later that I’d be getting a new second-hand computer. Great timing, right? I think it has a slightly better CPU, plus it has more RAM than my current IceBox and a pair of 80GB hard drives so it’s just a matter of figuring out how I’m migrating my old drives over and whether I want to do another fresh install, especially since I finally have Mint 9 KDE available on a flash drive for an installation. (It turns out my second burned DVD was borked after all.)

Either way I end up going, I definitely wanted to chase down a command I discovered a year or so back to generate a list of apps I now have installed. Silly me, if I made a note of where I got the info before I don’t know where it is so I had to do some searching today. It’s a good thing, actually, because in the process I got even more information than I remember seeing when I last created my installed app list.

In short, if you want to create a list of packages you have installed on your system simply open a terminal and give your system a little cleaning by running sudo apt-get autoremove. That will uninstall any packages that you had installed and no longer need. If you have tried programs that you ended up disliking enough to remove later, running autoremove you will uninstall any old dependencies that you no longer need. There’s really no reason to have those old dependencies in your installed applications list. Now run

dpkg --get-selections > package.list

That will create a file called package.list in your home directory. To have the file created in a different place simply navigate to that place in the terminal before you run the command. Of course you can also specify a different path or filename when you run the command. For example, if you run dpkg --get-selections > ~/Documents/installed_package.list it will create the list in a file called installed_package.list in your Documents directory..

If you want to install all of those packages on a fresher installation you would run

sudo dpkg --set-selections < package.list
sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

The one problem with this method is that it will also install any older versions of the Linux kernel that you had installed. It also won’t install any applications that you installed from locally saved packages or apps you installed from source code but hopefully you will see which applications didn’t get reinstalled and be able to install them fairly easily..

If you have any applications installed from PPAs or repositories outside of your distribution’s system, say apps from Google or Opera, you will get errors when you run sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade. To avoid these problems you will want to back up your /etc/apt directory as part of your backup process. Save it to your flash drive and before you run sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade copy the /etc/apt back to the root (“/“) directory. Some people may suggest merely backing up /etc/apt/sources.list, and while it will let you use your list of repositories but if you just backup that one file you’ll lose all of your GPG keys. Trust me, that’s a pain in the rear to have to go back and re-add all those keys, especially if you use a handful of nonstandard repos or PPAs. By backing up the entire folder you will save your trusted.gpg file. Although I’m seeing the best way to bring these keys back into your system is to make sure you back up /etc/apt/trusted.gpg and then import it into the new installation by running this from the command line:

apt-key add <path-to-backed-up>/trusted.gpg

For further information you can use the two posts on the Ubuntu Forums that I used to write this post.

• [ubuntu] Obtain list of installed packages
• HowTo: Create a list of installed packages

The second thread also has bash scripts you can use to automate some of this process, You can also see the article Backup and Restore Package Lists in Ubuntu on SavvyAdmin.com.