Sorry to visitors in the past few hours who had their connection assaulted by every single post ever appearing on the front page. I guess there’s a plugin conflict in Wordpress; it was only meant to be displaying posts from the last 7 days - changed this morning from the most recent 25 posts. It’s fixed now.

The BBC Radio Player is great, but has its faults. Firstly, it’s in Realplayer format. I can’t stand Realplayer for historical reasons, and it has a habit of dropping the connection for me. Secondly, the recordings are only available for a week or so. Thirdly, you have to be sitting at your computer to listen to them. This is the most aggravating for me, as I like to be able to wander like I would with a normal radio. Ideally, you want to be able to play the shows from your iPod / other player. You could record it in realtime using Audacity, but that seems a little backward. I figured out a way, but I’d guess it’s against various BBC website terms of use. What you do with the following information is up to you…

1. Download and install Streambox VCR 1.0 beta 3.1. You may have trouble finding a copy of this as Real nuked the original downloads a while back, but a bit of googling should find it.
2. I’m going to use the Jonathan Ross show as an example, as he’s my favourite presenter. Open the BBC Radio Player and load up a show you want to download. View the source of the radio player window at this point (it may be within a frame). You’re looking for the embed src= line. In this case, it’s embed src=”/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio2/ross.rpm”….
3. Note the relative path to this .rpm file, then open it in a new browser window, adding http://www.bbc.co.uk at the beginning. So I open http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio2/ross.rpm. Download this .rpm file, then open it in Notepad.
4. You’ll see a path beginning with rtsp:// and ending with a .ra file. Copy this.
5. Next, run Streambox VCR. I use “vcr_31turbo.exe” but I don’t really know what the difference is. Hit the second button on the toolbar - it’s a globe with a + next to it, and the ‘New Item’ window will appear. If you copied the rstp:// location it’ll appear automatically in the ‘location’ box. Select an appropriate download location and hit ok. The .ra file will then be downloaded. In Mr Ross’ case, it’s about 40mb.
6. Once this has downloaded, run the ‘StreamboxRipper’ program that came with StreamboxVCR. I think you need Realplayer installed for it to work. Click ‘Load’ and select your .ra file, then hit ‘Convert’. The options window will appear, and you can select to copy to MP3 / wav, and whether to use an equalizer etc. I tend to turn off the equalizer option and export it as a wav, then use LAME to encode the MP3, but it’s really up to you. Hit ok when you’re done. If you have any .dll issues, be sure to read the text file in the StreamboxRipper folder.
7. Once you have an MP3, drag and drop it into iTunes, change the ID3 tags to something appropriate, and you’re done. If anybody knows a way to make the file bookmarkable without marking it as ‘audiobook’, please let me know.

Hopefully somebody will find this useful…

I just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I enjoyed very much. The ridiculous number of wankers willing to spoil the ending made me read it faster than I’d have liked, but there was no way around that. I managed to avoid direct knowledge of the conclusion through backing out of websites very quickly, turning off the radio etc., but I had my suspicions based on various subtle hints from around the web. Still, it could have been worse, and I was on tenterhooks for the last fifth of the novel. Just another two / three years to wait until the necessarily explosive conclusion to the series, now…

• Caption This!: Shiny Naked People Holding Hands - Work-safe There’s a guy on the far-right taking a peek at the woman in front of him. As they say: Busted. Via Life in Broadfield Village
• BBC NEWS | Digital Citizens: The activist - BBC profile of Cory Doctorow
• BBC NEWS | Quiz: Are you a digital citizen? - 9/10 - didn’t know the napster guy.
• International dialing codes - How to dial any country from any other country. Much clearer than countrycallingcodes.com

It took far, far longer than I’d expected, but The Ghostly Case of the Haunted Amusement Park is now up for sale at Kids’ Mysteries. It’s for 9-12 year olds and, as you may guess from the title, concerns ghostly goings on at a fairground (renamed to amusement park as the main market is in the US). I’m most chuffed to have had a second mystery accepted for ‘publication’. I started writing it a few months ago, but with exams and all the things going on it took me a long time to complete the final draft. I’m very grateful to the owner of the site for putting up with my delays!

Anybody in Orkut and feel like inviting me? You can’t join without a recommendation from an existing member, which is cool except when you’re on the outside and want to get in I admit this piece reminded me of the site, but that’s all the relation it has - really

Various news agencies are reporting shots fired at Stockwell Underground station this morning at 1000. Sky and ITV are speculating that it was another suicide bomber, the BBC are being more cautious. Eyewitness accounts have said it was ‘plain-clothes armed officers’, which is interesting. Could they have had a tip-off? Or are there plain-clothes officers all over the Underground this morning? There are reports that he was shot while on the ground, which seems odd at first, but if he was about to detonate a bomb then I guess there’s just no choice.

1130: There are also reports of police surrounding an (actually the) East London mosque, with dogs (presumably sniffer dogs) being sent inside. Harry’s Place say there was a bomb alert.

• Scotty’s ashes to hit outer space - You could make a lot of jokes, but I don’t think they’re necessary.
• The Brick Testament - The bible in lego format. See particularly the section on ‘rape in a town’, for which both participants must be stoned to death - the woman clearly did not cry out for help, for in a town somebody would have heard her. Via Bloggers4Labour.

More explosions in London have been reported, although they look to be relatively minor. There are currently reports of one injury. Wikinews is doing a stunning job of keeping up with the latest developments - see their major story here. I can’t help much with the reporting, but I’m tidying up grammar and spelling as news comes in. Such is the advantage of wikis: everybody can be of some use.

• Flickr: Photos from gezahorv - Fantastic macro insect photography. Not for the squeamish.
• Inactive Cobranded Google Search - Search google without the ads. Can’t think this’ll last long
• The Most Beautiful Machine, 2003 - As somebody (could have been Carl Sagan) said, there’s something creepy about a machine that has no function other than to turn itself off.
• Where do you get your ideas? - Interesting essay
• Wired News: Mind May Affect Machines - This seemed quite interesting until this: "Jahn thinks that critics err in expecting the phenomena to follow the usual rules of cause and effect". Indeed, how unreasonable of them

I got onto the FeedLounge alpha! Woohoo! I happened to be at my computer when the ‘first 100 people to reply get to become alpha testers’ email arrived, which was pretty lucky. There’s no confidentiality so I can post screenshots etc. all I like. Funky. Only slight downer is that it only supports Firefox right now, but hopefully Opera’ll be just around the corner (update: ‘course, if you get Opera to pretend it’s Firefox, things seem to work perfectly…) I’ll let you know how it goes.

I don’t like it when the phone rings between 2300 and 0800; it’s never good news. My sister woke up today to find that the house she shares with her boyfriend was burgled while they were sleeping. The burglars came in through a road-facing window and stole the car plus anything electronic, but not, thankfully, the dog. They certainly went upstairs and into one of the bedrooms, and Jane says that this morning their bedroom door was open when it shouldn’t have been. Megan sleeps in the bedroom and started barking at one point, I guess when she heard them upstairs, and we think this probably scared them away. The police were round within half an hour of it being reported, and by 1000 they’d recovered the power tools that were in the car - it looks like they were tossed out of the window.

Not a very pleasant discovery, but I’m rather glad she slept through the whole thing. Cars and computers are replaceable, after all.

I admit I have a bee in my bonnet about ITV being quite so crap…but here’s more proof, should you need it. Note the second half of ‘The Guru’ tonight. It’s silly enough that films get split around the news anyway, but 20 minutes?!

Using NASA imagery. In 10 years it‘ll have to be renamed Google Solar System. Update: As pointed out by waxy, zooming in all the way reveals detail that hitherto was mere speculation.

• Chainsaw controller for PS2 - Oh. Oh dear. Sick as it is…I’d like to try it out.