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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I seriously dig Dean Koontz' writing and have enjoyed pretty much everything he writes (though the ending to The Taking pissed me off). He does the suspense/thriller thing as well as anyone. Of course, that's not too unique. The shelves are full of thrilling plots.

However, Dean actually has a mastery of the English language that many of the other books lumped in with his are just lacking. That's particularly noticable when you listen to thrillers as unabridged audiobooks. For instance, while I like the characters and stories of Patricia Cornwell, the "micro" level of her writing gets irritating when you hear every word. Koontz doesn't suffer from that.

A while back, I ran across a series of audio recordings by Dean Koontz, released as a podcast. In that series, he talked about his new book, The Husband. As a bit of a writer, I really dug the behind the scenes look at writing from someone who seems fairly accessible.

Based on the bits he talked about specifically related to The Husband, I new I probably wanted to read it, so, I added it to my SimplyAudiobooks, which brings me to today.

I'm sitting with headphones on, and the audio only paused to quickly write this up, listening to The Husband, wanting very much to stay hooked up until this thing plays out. The premise: holding an ordinary man's wife hostage, because a man who *doesn't* have access to $2 million, but loves his wife is more likely to be willing to do whatever they're asked. The actual book itself fleshes that out in seriously creepy ways.

Definitely worth the read if you're the least bit into the thriller genre. And, if you're into audiobooks, the narrators on pretty much all of his that I've listened to are pretty good, capturing the subtle differences between characters.

Well, it took me a couple of weeks from recording the conversation to actually putting it out on the site this morning before leaving for work, but it is finally up. This is the first podcast I recorded with the split channel setup in PowerGramo. This simultaneously let me fix some things that have been a problem in the past, including noise from the side of the conversation where the person is being silent and overlap due to cellphone lag and caused some problems of its own. I spent too much time trying to fix stuff and probably missed glaring problems while getting lost in the minutae.

It also wasn't as easy to cut this conversation down as others have been. In other episodes, I've just cut whole 20 minute segments out because it made sense. In this one, I cut out 30 of the original 60 minutes in lots of 1 minute chunks and 3-10 second slices. I'm much happier with many of the new bits, but still want to make improvements on future episodes. I also need a better way to end these recordings. It's all just a process and I'll just keep moving on.

Episode 7 of The Glass is Too Big is an interview with Dave Gray, who is the CEO of XPLANE, the visual thinking company.

Show Notes or Download the MP3

Photo: Julian Rodriguez Orihuela

I wasn't planning on this episode, but when Ed Batista from AttentionTrust asked if he could chat with me about my attention experiments, I took the opportunity. Since Ed was having difficulty recording the conversation, I asked if he'd be OK with me recording it and we'd dual-purpose the audio. He could slant the conversation to the purposes he needed for AttentionTrust and I'd edit toward explaining AT to listeners and focusing on Ed's portion of the conversation.

So, Episode 6 was born unexpectedly, but I'm pleased with the result.

At any rate, it was a pretty good conversation and Ed makes one of the more concise explanations of the different dimensions to attention that I've heard. I'm definitely considering attending the Attention Conference in San Francisco that he's putting together for this fall.

This one's just over 30 minutes (I'm really pushing hard to keep episodes relatively short) and can be grabbed over at GlassTooBig.com.

And, if you've been digging the show, head over to AmigoFish and give the show the big thumb's up.

I just finished pulling together episode 5 of The Glass is Too Big podcast.

I talk to Dave Seah, information designer and author of the Printable CEO, a productivity management tool. Dave and I had a 2 hour conversation that ranged from his Printable CEO work to motivations in doing free stuff to philosophical discussion of how short life is. I pulled about a half hour out of it and that's what you get today.

Show Notes - Listen Now