Will audio books displace text?

See also, will dictation replace typing, will podcasts replace blogs, will VOIP replace email and instant messaging/email, ad nauseum.

The answer to each and every one of them is absolutely not and here's why.
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I'd like your input on what you'd like to see as future topics for postings, longer articles, podcasts, screencasts, tips, etc. I really want to hear what you are interested in and, as an incentive to encourage suggestions, tips and questions, I'm giving away a brand new, in the package Palm Tungsten E ($200 new) to a randomly selected person from the pool of suggestions.

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I was unaware of this and assume that most others in the state are as well. MN has a program whereby an individual can contribute $50 (couples $100) to "a Minnesota political party, a candidate for state office, or candidates for the Minnesota Legislature" can get an outright refund of that contribution. That's right, you can, for FREE, support the political party of your choice in Minnesota. Read the rules and get the right forms on the MN Dept of Revenue page. If you're unsure about your political affliations or haven't ever really thought about it, all of the myriad of options are hanging out at the state fair this week and would LOVE to talk to you about their opinions.

If you're not in Minnesota, you should see if your state does something similar. Regardless of your political leanings, it is critically important that a representative democracy/republic have participation of the voters. Only through having the full range of opinions involved in the debate can the results truly be representative. So, vote and get involved.

Speaking of .bat wrappers and wget, I recently started using a script I based on one from this article. I was using it to download the sound effects cited as being part of Leo Laporte's library of SFX and figured I'd post it.

I modified it to handle a filetype and URL as inputs, put it in my .bat "holding pen" and now can grab all of a given filetype from a URL easily.

Here's the contents of the filefetch.bat file (see the article for explanations of the switches):

wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -w5 -A.%1 -erobots=off %2


It can be run like this:


filefetch mp3 http://sitename


Run this from the directory you want the mp3's downloaded to. The first argument is the file extension, so using mp3, gif, jpg, png, avi, etc. The second is the URL to start from. Make sure you pay attention to the -w5 setting, which spaces out your requests by 5 seconds. You only want the files, not to hammer the server into oblivion.

I get sick of adding another entry to my system path for every single commandline program I add as the path ends up being REALLY long after a while. So, I frequently use .bat files that ARE on my system path as wrappers around those commands. I put them all in c:/software and put that one path on my system path.

These .bat files are really simple. All they are is the full path to the real exe and a wildcard. That bit means that any of the extras are passed along transparently. Here's my .bat for wget.


C:\software\wget\wget.exe %*


You can then easily run just "wget" from any command prompt and it will work just like running the full path to wget.exe would.

This can also be used to create quick aliases, shortcuts, etc. to make your computing life easier. Keeping all of the .bat files in a single directory lets you easily clean them up or edit them from a single location easily.

[EDIT] Followup info. If you're looking to pass just specific parameters to a script, you can do that as well. An example would be to set 5 out of 7 options the same every time, but 2 change. To do that, instead of the big wildcard, use %1, %2, etc. as variables to pass along the 1st, 2nd, etc. command after the .bat name. So, running

fetch.bat mp3 http://sitename

would put "mp3" into the %1 variable and "http://sitename" into %2. Put those variable placeholders in your batch file like this and it will get you this other way of doing it.


C:\software\wget\wget.exe -w5 -R %1 %2