Monthly Archives: February 2006

My new podcast: The Sound of History

General

Well, it’s finally time to announce my new podcast, Sound of History!

The Sound of History is a weekly podcast featuring full-length, unedited, and uncut historic audio. You’ll hear speeches, broadcasts, and events from around the world. Sometimes you’ll hear famous people, sometimes not.

Episode 1 is up now. On this episode, you’ll find John F. Kennedy cracking jokes about Marx in front of a bunch of newspaper publishers, Ronald Reagan talking about the Challenger, some blues from 1922, and an Edison recording from 1902.

Thanks to Cliff for mentioning that Reagan speech in a comment. That prompted me to go find it.

I’m finding material for this podcast from around the Internet. Some of that music comes from archive.org, and there are various sources for presidential speeches.

I’d like to find some British prime minister’s speeches as well, but I’m having difficulty with that. If any of you Brits reading this know of a good site for uncut audio, accessible to Americans, please do let me know.

Cliff, This Link’s For You

Society

I haven’t had a chance to check this out much yet, but it sounds interesting, and I think Cliff would love it:

The Fray is a site where people tell stories and others comment on those stories, and once a year there are worldwide gatherings to do open-mic storytelling live. (from a post on the Creative Commons blog)

UPDATE: I should have linked directly to the audio archive, which looks like the really interesting part of the site, and the one that CC linked to.

Today’s Pet Peeve: Stupid GTK File-Open Dialogs

Software

Have you noticed the incredibly annoying dialogs appearing in new Gnome/GTK apps in sid? They no longer allow you to use the keyboard to enter a filename. Not only that, but they are *incredibly* slow when working with large directories. You better go get some caffeine when if you need to open something under /usr/share/doc.

Here’s an example from Firefox:

Other apps, such as Gimp, also have this problem.

I have one thing to say to these people: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

The keyboard is still a useful part of a computer, and I have absolutely no inclination to wait 45 seconds for some annoyingly slow dialog to populate because you prefered to remove the ability for me to enter a filename in a dialog box myself.