I’m reading the comments and am trying to respond to them in an organized way.

* You are a jerk for revealing the cool secret I discovered! Now they will ruin it for EVERYBODY!
** Sorry. I think they give this stuff away. It’s their servers. If they want to, they have that right. Let’s give them a chance to be awesome instead of expecting them to be jerks. Take some comfort in the fact that if the links get obfuscated it will affect me (sob), just as it will when someone else beats the obfuscation (yay).
** Tell all your friends you were doing it way back when. Show them file creation dates to prove it. They’ll be totally wowed. Don’t mention how you didn’t share the idea with your community.

* You are a jerk for stealing from public radio.
** It’s public radio. They give this away over the airwaves. They give it away over the internet. They want you to listen to it. Feel free to donate directly to the station or to NPR in general. I hope more people listen to this stuff and give them money, but not so much that they can retire in luxury from their job of making cool stuff for me to listen to.

* You are a jerk for using up all the bandwidth of WBEZ.org
** Actually, I only created this script after reading Mark‘s review of the RadioShark in the last issue of Make. I told him about the trick and told him I’d try to whip up a greasemonkey for it. I then gave him a link to the script and he blogged it on boingboing. So he’s a awful nasty man for telling all of you about it. Pledge that you’ll never read his awful nasty blog again for what they did to wbez’s servers.
** I have also taken a suggestion from the comments and put in the coral cache address. That’s so hot, I love it. Wish I’d thought of it in the beginning.
** Turn: I’m saving them bandwidth. If you listen to the same stream twice you download it twice. If you download it once each subsequent listen is FREE to wbez.

* You are a jerk for your crappy blog design.
** I apologize. It’s definitely not ready for prime time – but I think it is just the pre tag blogger put in when I pasted the greasemonkey script in. In my defence I think any long line in this particular template with that tag will overlap the sidepanel. Can’t be helped unless I take down my flickr panel. That ain’t happening.

* Thanks!
** You’re welcome! It feels good to be able to give even something tiny back to the internerds who’ve given me tons of cool stuff. Gift economies rock. Now go do wonderful things.

BTW – this website is no longer active, so you can take the domain name!

Not only can you use the modest “Modest Needs” box on the sidebar, but you can also support my two pals in their run against leukemia and lymphoma. Leukemia is represented by Jess. Lymphoma is represented by Leigh. They are both fine people doing a fine thing.
And by fine I mean fine.

I love greasemonkey. It’s sort of a uber extension for firefox that lets you have hacky control over how pages display and what they do. The scripts for it are amazing.

So I wrote one.
This American Life is a radio show about everything and it is really smart and awesome – if you haven’t listened to it you totally should.

Number 61 called “Fiasco” is my favorite.

They have a links to buy cd’s from audible.com and they have links to realaudio streams that are free.
Unforunately, I like to listen to them on my pocket pc.
Here’s a greasemonkey script that changes all the stream links to download links.
Install greasemonkey.
I don’t have separate hosting, so just copy and paste this into a file and open it in firefox.
Then go to tools, and install user script.
Open thislife.org – all ram links should point to the actual .rm files now for downloading.

Please feel free to improve on this. It might be nice if it offered you a separate link for downloading as opposed to streaming.

Why doesn’t it work?!
Thanks for your input! Please let me know how it isn’t working.

I am in the main page, none of the sub pages have the links converted.
You’ve got an old version! The new version works better better, sometimes. Thanks much to Rhett Sutphin for this!
Basically, it’s having trouble with the frames – on the page rightclick-this frame->open in new tab. This new tab will have all the links convereted

Why is thislife.org CRAWLING right now?
I had no idea so many people would use the script and the first version hit their servers directly.
I’m putting up a new version that hits the coral cache of it. Thanks Jaime Alesso!

If you know how to fix this, let me know, I’m looking at it.
Please email me if you can host the script, thanks.
update: fixed to work with firefox 1.5/greasemonkey 0.64

from here

// This Mobile life
// version 0.4 BETA!
// 2005-05-19
// Copyright (c) 2005, Matt Katz
// Released under the GPL license
// http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
//
// --------------------------------------------------------------------
//
// This is a Greasemonkey user script.
//
// To install, you need Greasemonkey: http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
// Then restart Firefox and revisit this script.
// Under Tools, there will be a new menu item to "Install User Script".
// Accept the default configuration and install.
//
// To uninstall, go to Tools/Manage User Scripts,
// select "This Mobile Life", and click Uninstall.
//
// --------------------------------------------------------------------
//
// ==UserScript==
// @name          This Mobile Life
// @namespace     http://snarkhunt.blogspot.com
// @description   Changes all This American Life ra stream links to link to the .rm file to download
// @include   http://thislife.org/*
// @include       http://*.thislife.org/*
// ==/UserScript==




var allLinks = unsafeWindow.document.getElementsByTagName("a");

for (i = 0; i < allLinks.length; i++)
{ 
 
  var href = allLinks[i].href;
  if (href.match(/ra\/([0-9]+).ram$/i) )
  {
   
//   alert('Hello world!');
   var episode = href.match(/([0-9]+)/i);
   
   //get the number to get the episode number
  if(episode){
    allLinks[i].setAttribute("href", "http://wbez.org.nyud.net:8090/ta/" + episode[1] + ".rm");
   }
   
   
  }
}

I’ve been using slickrun to automate getting to some programs and folders. It’s handy and it has autocomplete.
Adam at work showed me a cheap way to get similar functionality.

1. Create a folder for shortcuts – I used c:\cuts
2. Right click on My Computer and choose properties.
3. Click the advanced tab.
4. Click on Environment Variables.
5. Under system variables, scroll down to one labeled “Path”.
6. Edit it and add a semicolon after the last variable and add in your shortcut folder path.
7. Create a shortcut for any program you want to be able to get to quickly and put it in there. Try giving it a short 2 or 3 letter name.

Now you can run any shortcut you drag there by just typing windows-r and typing in the name. After the first time you run it, the run box will autocomplete.

Perhaps you could make put your desktop in your path… Then as programs install, they will add a shortcut automatically for you. Perhaps you could put your quicklaunch folder in.

Copynight is a calendar of copyright related events. I went to the inaugural event at the horrible Bar 9 and had a good discussion with Peter Tolmach of WellGoodLLC. He’s working on a very interesting charity website that hopefully I can help betatest.

Also met Esthr who is definitely the most Flickr enthused person I’ve ever met.

The best game ever apparently has a version for pocketpc – I’m so psyched. More carnage and things to do than GTA ever dreamed of.

I spent a lot of time in mom’s office stuck there because I was suspended or somesuch, and, since her workplace was for work, there were no games there. When she was out of the office I would sit at her Mac and use the graphing calculator to create new and interesting shapes, playing with the equations to get it to do more and more interesting things.

Turns out the story behind the development of the program is even more interesting!

via wired

I was reading Cool Tools(rss), when I discovered this website called Modest Needs. It’s a great idea. Small-scale philanthropy for people who aren’t wealthy. If you’ve partnered with paypal you can easily make an automated donation. They give out very small grants to people who need to get through a tough time. $200 bucks at the right time can mean a whole hell of a lot.

They operate on a tiny budget, spending $0 on advertising, $0 on fundraising and disbursing grants within 72 hours of approval.

I like this.