Photo: Jackie

As I was growing up, I always had access to a big sandbox. When I was really young, it was a literal sandbox, usually something on the order of 8 or 10 feet on a side.

My siblings and I would build large cities, populated with GI Joe and Lego action figures all to be washed away by the giant flood that unleashing the garden hose created.

As I grew older and outgrew playing in actual sandboxes, I still had access to metaphorical sandboxes. My dad was, in varying percentages over the years, a taxidermist and a farmer. We always had workshops, tools, materials and opportunities for "sandbox" activities.

When you're a kid, you don't get the reasons a sandbox is so great. However, as an adult, you can see that a sandbox offers permission to experiment. In the sandbox, there's no fear of failure. If something you try to build doesn't work, you can try 10 times and then try something else without it being a problem.

Thankfully, my parents extended that idea of the sandbox into every area of life. My siblings and I learned about biology/anatomy, business skills, chemistry, electricity, engineering/construction, cooking, hunting, fishing, etc. by being handed the knife/hammer/airbrush/chemicals and told to give it a shot.

And, I most certainly ruined some stuff. I wasted materials. I cut myself, burned myself, got carbon monoxide poisoning, nearly electrocuted myself and otherwise caused minor injury. I made messes.

Along the way, I learned a great deal. That's because none of those failures were a reason to stop. They were a reason to try a different way, but they certainly weren't the end of the road.

When I got older, I started to realize what an opportunity I'd been given to learn those things and to experience the entire world being my sandbox. When faced with a new challenge or an idea that I wanted to try, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to do it.

That's not because my parents continually told me that "you can do anything you set your mind to". Rather, it's because they provided me with the environment to try and fail and try again.

I think that's one of the reasons I like working with computers so much. They're a giant sandbox, even if many of the people using them don't realize it. It always makes me sad to see someone who's afraid to try stuff with their computer because they're afraid of "screwing it up". 

Personally, I think the very best thing that could accompany each new computer is a DVD explaining how to make sure their documents and data are safe and how to start over with the computer. Most people would learn the rest on their own. Freed from the fear of failure, they'd try stuff. I'm sure they'd mess up. However, when you know you can start over, that's no big deal. Heck, that's why the "Undo" function gets so much use in most people's software.

There's a video from the TED conference that you may have seen (it got passed around quite a bit over the last few weeks) that emphasizes these kinds of ideas and how kids need to be provided with opportunities to do some of these "dangerous" things.

The speaker lists 5:

1) Playing with Fire
2) Own a Pocket Knife
3) Throw a spear
4) Deconstruct an appliance
5) Drive a car

I think those are a great start. And, once in that "mode", many of the other things that are related start popping up as well. Personally, I think that everyone should be exposed to and have an experiential knowledge of things like where their food comes from (both plant and animal), building something (doghouse, garage, playhouse), destroying something (remodeling demolition, etc.), making something that moves (go cart, bicycle maintenance) and lots of other stuff.

Kids need a bit of guidance and some boundaries, but otherwise learn tremendously from being allowed to and encouraged to make mistakes. And, when you learn those lessons, you're more likely to both believe you have the skills necessarily to tackle whatever you have the energy and desire to take on and to have the humility to believe that you're not somehow better than someone else for having crossed the finish line for a given task.

All in all, good life lessons for everyone to pick up.

Back a couple of weeks before Christmas, an unfortunate series of events resulted in my 4GB iPod nano going through the washing machine. And, as is the case with many such incidents, it rendered the device entirely non-functional.

I bit the bullet and picked up a replacement because it's fairly critical to my mental well-being. I need to be able to throw on a bit of music or a podcast when I'm driving or need to drown out the outside world. So, I ordered a new 4GB nano video.

Then, a couple of days after getting that nano and using it, the consulting company that I'm subcontracting through gave all of the consultants on my project a 30GB Zune.

That, of course, caused a quick re-org of my portable media strategy. I ended up making the nano a purely podcast and audiobook device and moved all of my music (and hopefully some video when I get it cooperating) to the Zune.

Unfortunately, revisiting nearly any process in one's life can quickly shine a light on previously ignored problems and make you re-question your solution. Such was the case with my podcasting listening. When I switched over to the nano, I missed the ability to listen at faster-than-normal speeds for spoken word podcasts. However, the other benefits outweighed that downside, so I moved on.

However, last night, I wondered if I couldn't just convert some of those podcasts into iPod audiobooks (the ones with .m4b as the extension). Several of the podcasts already distribute in that format and you get things like bookmarking of where you were in the audio as well as the ability to speed things up.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what I think about a device that allows only the speeding up of a specific class of audio files to the exclusion of other classes of audio files.

Regardless, I checked if the Swiss Army knife of audio/video: ffmpeg would be able to handle it and was happy to see it would. So, I wrote a really simple C# console app to convert these .mp3 files into .m4b files. The workflow is still a bit lacking as it doesn't easily tie in to the iPod/iTunes functionality of putting "the 1 latest unplayed" podcast from each feed on the device, but I can quit hoping that the people speaking would just hurry the hell up.

There were a couple of oddities that needed to be coded around. Most noteable is the proper quoting of file paths (which still might not work in all cases) and the fact that you need to actually convert from MP3 to M4A and then rename that M4A to M4B in order to be done.

At any rate, the code is below the fold if you would like to mess with it yourself. You call it by running

MP3toMB.exe input.mp3 128

It also works if you just drag an MP3 onto the exe by assuming a 96kbps bitrate. Obviously, this is coded for Windows, but the same principle could easily be accomplished on Mac with Applescript or Linux with shell scripting or just batch files on Windows given a commandline copy of ffmpeg.

I've also got a Windows app that combines lots of MP3's into a single audiobook file, but I wanted something that I could use to automate and run on a more nightly basis to convert stuff, which this gives me.
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