It’s not often that Santa Clara University makes the front page of Yahoo! Sports, but I guess that’s what beating a #4 team will do for you. Go Broncos!

Cory Doctorow has just published a new short story on Salon.com — Anda’s Game. I haven’t read it yet, but based on Cory’s previous works, I’m sure it will be interesting. A unique twist is the licensing of the story under Creative Commons, making it redistributable in different forms.

Along those lines, I dusted off my knowledge of the old Peanut Press / Palm Digital Media eBook maker and created an eReader version of the book for reading on my Palm: Anda’s Game, eReader for Palm OS format (57 KB).

If you can’t track down the free reader (which is hard to find from the eReader website), here’s a direct link: eReader Free.

Not quite “real time” posting, but I finally uploaded some of the pictures I took at the NASCAR race in Phoenix, AZ last weekend. Grace and I spent five days down there and had a blast. We made it out to the track (Phoenix International Raceway, or PIR) for all four days and got to see lots of behind-the-scenes action. Not to mention a sizable amount of souvenir shopping and beer drinking.

The one thing that surprised me about PIR was how big the place is. We walked several miles the first couple of days, checking everything out. Our seats were one section away from the start finish line, so we had a great view of the front stretch and the pits. If I go again, I’d buy tickets sooner to get higher up (we were in row 12). Next year Phoenix will have two race weekend (April and November), so this area is really benefiting from NASCAR.

Pictures uploaded to Flickr: NASCAR Phoenix

Jeff from Writing on Your Palm recently wrote a “howto” for Palmcasting — basically explaining what Podcasts are and how to download them to a Palm device. This is a nice summary of the steps involved and references Pocket Tunes which is shaping up to be the best media player for Palm OS.

I’ve written before about Zodcasting with the Zodiac device. There’s a lot of potential here for PDAs as mobile audio players for podcasts. The achille’s heel is that last step of pushing MP3 files down to the device. I need to do some more experimenting in this area, but there’s probably an opportunity for some software to help automate that process, whether it’s a conduit or a better hook through Windows Media Player.

A couple weeks ago I put together a way to create S5 slideshows from CityDesk. Shortly thereafter, Christophe Ducamp wrote to tell me he created a French translation of the same: CityDesk Slideshows in French. Very cool!

Incidentally, my page was linked on both CityDesk News and Joel On Software which generated a sizable jump in traffic for a week or so which was nice. Joel even referred to me as a “CityDesk expert” which is very flattering (btw, I would classify myself as “experienced” with CityDesk, but probably not an expert…).

The end of the line is almost here for the Sony CLIÉ. Following the announcement this summer that Sony was exiting the US PDA market, I just received this message from the CLIÉ Handheld Developer Support website:

Sony Electronics Inc. hereby announces pursuant to the CLIE(R) Handheld Development Membership Agreement that the CLIE Handheld Developer Website and all related services shall terminate effective December 31, 2004. After this date, the CLIE Handheld Developer Website, Developer Tools, and related Services will no longer be available for use/download, and Sony shall provide no further support. Sony would like to thank to great number of dedicated developers who have supported the CLIE Handheld platform the past several years.

I’ve always found useful the State of California election results page, in particular their live scrolling election results (a Java application, I believe).

Today I noticed they also have a special page formatted for PDAs or small screens. Cool!

It was just announced that my employer has hired Lloyd Braun, previously head of programming at ABC:

Lloyd Braun, who was behind shows such as “The Sopranos” on HBO and “Lost” on ABC, will try to convince movie, TV and music companies to distribute more content exclusively on Yahoo, company officials said Monday. (Yahoo! News)

Overall this should be a Good Thing as Yahoo becomes more and more media-focused, but isn’t this the studio head that turned down Seinfeld in the early days? (Thus causing one of the more memorable characters to be named after him.) Serenity Now!

I just published my “Bloglines enclosure downloader” script. This started as an experiment with the Bloglines service APIs. As other applications (in particular, Doppler) continued to advance, I put this on hold. Doppler had promised support for Bloglines support in version 1, so I waited. Once the final Doppler came out, I realized it wasn’t quite the way I wanted.

So, I did some more hacking on my little Perl script to create a 340-liner that works for me and might work for others.

This script has the key features I’m looking for, in particular the automatic association with a designated folder in the Bloglines service. You don’t need to load up my script with feed URLs, just point it to a single Bloglines folder and it’ll do the rest.

The script will automatically download audio files, tag them if needed, and create an M3U-format playlist. It doesn’t yet set up the files for automatic transfer to a media player, but that can certainly be added in.

If anyone finds this useful or has ideas for changes, please let me know!

Project: Bloglines Enclosure Download

I’ve been finding more and more podcasts out there and listening to as many as possible on my new Zen Touch. The problem — as others have pointed out — is not having enough hours in the day to listen to all of this. In Bloglines I subscribe to about 180 feeds, but I do a lot of skimming which lets me keep up. With audio, I’ve realized I need to be more selective on the feeds I follow.

With that in mind, here are podcasts that I’ve found consistently interesting:

• Brainwagon is Mark VandeWettering talking about a variety of tech subjects and some insight from his work at Pixar Animation Studios.
• GeekNewsCentral is Todd Cochrane’s site covering all sorts of technical content. One of Todd’s earlier podcasts explained his move from the early BBS days to weblogs in part because of the people and the interesting ideas that are exchanged.
• Treo Podcast is another technical podcast, but is recorded completely on a Treo 600. Lots of good Treo tips as you’d expect.
• MWGblog is something non-tech for a change — Michael Geoghegan giving in-depth movie reviews. This one could be bad for the bank account; I’ve already put a few DVDs on my Amazon wishlist.