Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for November 3 2023 – Fully Committed to the Pencil World

In this episode I play a song by Chrissy Zebby Tembo; I am retiring from my day job; getting laid off in the “dot-bomb bust” put me on this path; the new podcasting machine is still getting the toolchain set up; I am moving from Dropbox to Syncthing; my digital and physical lives are about throwing things in boxes and never looking again; I gave in and bought an Ember mug; I am fighting that voice in my head that resists me doing anything; grampa continues to drive me crazy; I joined the American Pencil Collector Society and now I have octogenarian pen pals; let’s go to the pencil convention in 2025!
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Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, November 3 2023.

Links mentioned in this episode:

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for May 23, 2014 – “The Cloud is Raining on Me”

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, March 23, 2014.

In this episode I discuss my problems integrating the various cloud services into my life and work and I cast an appeal for help. Dropbox, Box, Google Docs, Evernote – I live in a cloud based tower of babel. What do I do?

You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

  • Auphonic podcast production tool is so good!
  • Dog Days of Podcasting
  • New Sponsor: Audible.com! Go to audiblepodcast.com/egc for your free trial and free download!
  • Hover.com is now was our sponsor: (Still) Use coupon code EGC to save 10% on domain registrations
  • Theme song provided by the Gentle Readers
  • My Google+
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  • Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for November 18, 2013 – “Next Exit One Mile”

    Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, November 18, 2013.

    I talk in more specifics about my life changes; I discuss being an older parent and the differential of fear; I talk about how I have changed my podcast creation workflow a little more; I discuss how Dropbox has become a de facto internet protocol.

    You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

    Links mentioned in this episode:

    My Current Webcomics Reader

    Some time ago on Google Plus I cast a net for an idea of a new sort of webcomics reader. Because my reading is in fits and starts and often can go weeks between sessions, Google Reader is no longer a reasonable way to read the feeds. If there are up to 20 strips of each comic, all in reverse chronological order, it requires me to scroll all the way down and then read from the bottom up as a number of my strips have some kind of continuity.

    I have arrived at a solution that seems to be working for me. It is truly a hack of hacks, but like the best hacks is effectively solving a problem for me. Unfortunately, also like hacks it might not be very robust or transferrable to other people. I achieved my goal with a custom IFTTT rule:

    http://ifttt.com/recipes/45673

    This has prerequisites. You need an IFTTT account, a linked Dropbox account and a linked Google Reader account. You also need to have the RSS feeds for all webcomics you subscribe to in a single folder or with a consistent tag. In my rule, it is a folder named “Webcomics” but it can be named anything, it just has to match the rule you have. If you are interested in using it, you can go to the above link and clone the rule to your own account and modify it from there.

    Here’s how it works. Every feed in my Google Reader’s “Webcomics” folder gets written to a file in my Dropbox. When I have time for webcomics, I open the file in my browser and then delete it. The next time I look, the top of the page will be the oldest strips I haven’t yet read. There is a quirk of the IFTTT -> Dropbox integration, in that the action to append to a text file forces it to have a .txt extension even though the content of what I’m appending is HTML. This was orignally a bug to me, but now I think of it as a feature. Because the file can get so big that I don’t read it in a single setting, effectively when I change the extension from webcomics.html.txt to webcomics.html is the point at which I freeze the file. I can read it until I finish, even if it takes a few days or weeks. Meanwhile, it will create a new webcomics.html.txt file and be happily appending that whole time period.

    This is not a perfect solution. It requires that you have an internet connection as nothing is saving the comic strips to any local machine, it’s a little fugly in the page generated and has none of the management features of even the most rudimentary RSS reader. It’s on you to know what you have read, and if you have to close your browser in the middle there is no way to return to the previous point.

    On the upside, all of the features I wanted in my original post are there. It preserves all the links from the original post, so if there are ads in the feed or store links or any other monetization, those are preserved in the file I read. I’ve never wanted to cheat the cartoonists out of their monetization.

    I’ve been using this system since July. In that time, some of the strips I orignally followed have ended, like Kris Straub’s Starslip Crisis, and others like Scott Kurtz’ PVP have switched to not including images in the feed. Those were two of the strips that were the original impetus because both had storylines that required reading them forwards. Que sera, things live and die and change.

    I’m curious if this system will be effective for anyone else that is not me. Try it out and let me know your experiences, positive or negative.

    Pragmatic Programmers Black Friday Sale – Now with Dropbox Support!

    On Friday, here’s a Black Friday sale you can take advantage of without having to find a parking place. Pragmatic Programmers will be having 40% off of all their books for that one day only. I’ve been a customer of theirs for some time, having bought a number of Ruby books that I have read on my Kindle. If you purchase either the ebook or ebook/paper combo, you can get the books in DRM-free ePub or MOBI. Use them with whatever device you might happen to have.

    I recently made an order with no coupon, so I’m pretty good on their books at the moment. However, I think I’ll buy Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby: Control Your Computer, Simplify Your Life by David Bryant Copeland. I am doing an ever larger set of command line Ruby scripting, mostly without any sort of automated testing at all just eyeball verification. If I get get out of this book some best practices for testing these scripts, that would be well worth the $12 it will cost after coupon.

    Also, in going to the site to assemble these links I just learned something completely new and cool. Pragmatic Programmers now has Dropbox support. They periodically update books that you have purchased, and you can configure your account to have them update your books via Dropbox whenever a newer version is available. That is a killer feature. I’m off to set that up right now.

    Evil Genius Chronicles Podcast for July 4, 2011 – “Good Times Dad Times”

    Here is the direct MP3 download for the EGC clambake for July 4, 2011. I play an acoustic song from J Mascis; I talk about being a new dad; did you know that lemon cake is particularly sad?; I play a song from George Hrab and Phil Plait; I discuss my growing disdain for all forms of cults of personality; I discuss the Dropbox terms of service fiasco in the writing community; I play a song by Low and head back to the diaper pail.

    You can subscribe to this podcast feed via RSS. To sponsor the show, contact BackBeat Media. Don’t forget, you can fly your EGC flag by buying the stuff package. This show as a whole is Creative Commons licensed Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5. Bandwidth for this episode is provided by Cachefly.

    Links mentioned in this episode: