You can download it for free or buy a paper copy for £13, either of them via Lulu.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Usage:
#  backup-google-reader-opml file-to-write-to.opml google.user.name@domain google-password
 
use strict;
use warnings;
 
use WWW::Mechanize;
 
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
 
$mech->get("http://reader.google.com")
    or die "Cannot reach Google Reader Homepage";
 
$mech->submit_form(
    form_number => 1,
    fields =>
    {
        Email => $ARGV[1],
        Passwd => $ARGV[2]
    }
)
    or die "Cannot submit form";
 
$mech->get("http://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export");
$mech->save_content($ARGV[0]);

However, I recently wrote another script (this time Python) that then takes this OPML, parses out all the URLs that are tagged with ‘podcast’, and outputs a serverlist file for podget (an automated console-based podcast downloader). This enables me to subscribe to a podcast in Google Reader, and have the podcast automatically added to the download list. The script looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/python
#
# Pass in the OPML file as the first command-line parameter. Will output the
# podget serverlist on stdout.
 
import re
import sys
import xml.dom.minidom
 
doc = xml.dom.minidom.parse(sys.argv[1])
 
body = doc.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]
 
p = re.compile('^\W+')
 
for outline in doc.getElementsByTagName("outline"):
    if outline.getAttribute("text") == "podcast":
        for subOutlines in outline.getElementsByTagName("outline"):
            title = subOutlines.getAttribute("title")
            title = p.sub("", title)
            print subOutlines.getAttribute("xmlUrl") + " NoCategory " + title

Feel free to use and adapt to your needs.

So I wrote a Yahoo Pipe that fixes up the stream - by removing the exact geographic locations and any items that describe activities and not the trip. Feel free to use it if it’s helpful - the single parameter for the pipe is the URL of your TripIt Personal Calendar Feed, and you’ll want to grab the URL of the pipe as an iCal feed to specify in your Dopplr account.

Report back to me when … I dunno … when it makes sense.

It’s definitely worth the price of admission, and is a Coen brothers pic I actually like (they vary a lot). Brad Pitt and George Clooney both do a good job of playing bozos (Brad’s attempt to blackmail John Malkovich is hilarious), and J.K. Simmons as the aforementioned CIA officer is also very funny.

This is pretty excellent customer service. I struggle to see this happening in the UK.

The game was certainly entertaining (everything the Telegraph says about attention deficit disorder is true), even though I know little about basketball. It gave me a chance to try out my (new to me) telephoto lens. I was a little disappointed with the results once I pulled them off the camera - I had trouble sucking in enough light whilst getting stable shots - but I still ended up with one or two reasonable ones, although mostly not of the game itself.

• Making a hot copy of your entire drive onto a USB hard disk with VMWare Converter beforehand is a great idea. This basically means you have your entire previous installation still bootable, so you can rescue any data or settings you forgot about, after you’ve done the reformat and reinstall. VMWare Converter is free.
• Windows XP won’t install if the BIOS has the SATA controller set to AHCI mode - it won’t find the HD to install to. Read the install instructions for the SATA driver before installing Windows. Doing this without a floppy drive involves installing Service Pack 2 first (see below).
• Windows, surprisingly, does not contain a driver that can work with the Ethernet controller. Have a copy of it ready on a USB stick.
• The redistributable version of Service Pack 3 isn’t standalone, despite claims to the contrary; it pre-reqs. at least Service Pack 1. Windows Update won’t take you the whole way there, so it’s easiest to get the SP2 and SP3 standalones.
• The USB ports will not operate at high speed until you install the Intel Chipset Device Software.

If you’ve never watched it, it’s definitely worth a peek. Jon Stewart is pretty funny, and although it has an obvious leftist bias, it has an even greater bias for ridiculing deserving politicans. Kinda the American Have I Got News For You, without the panel-game element.

Now to try and guess analyse the best place for my money.

Did you mean: lost in translation ?

But it doesn’t.

They should fix this.

Oh, and get this blog comment and response.

Update 16:58: Then, of course, you read this.

Why don’t economists get any respect?

1. Try it. If you travel a lot it’s invaluable.
2. It’s free.
3. It’s better than Dopplr.
4. Er… that’s it.

Nevertheless, as my job now takes me onto an aeroplane more than I before, I’m curious and so I read the summary from the Competition Commission’s provisional report. I’m not sure I’m any the wiser, but there were some interesting facts and statistics embedded within:

• Gatwick’s proportion of business travellers is a mere 18%, far lower than I would imagine (I know it’s not strong on the transfer front, but normally appears to have many terminating flights to useful places, from what I’ve seen). By comparison, Heathrow’s is 40%.
• From the set of BAA-owned airports, only Heathrow and Aberdeen have above 20% of transferring passengers, with 34% and 21% respectively. Heathrow’s reputation as a hub is clearly deserved.
• BAA’s airports account for 60% of UK air passengers, but 90% in south-east England, and 84% in Scotland. Maybe there could be a local monopoly at work here, at least?

It’s interesting that the Competition Commission makes lots of slights about poor service, lack of responsiveness to the market, high prices, and so on. This seems a bit unfair. I’ve often wondered how one can gauge the degree of monopoly exploitation fairly, partly there’s rarely an accurate enough free-market alternative implementation to compare it to. The theory does dictate that a monopoly might happen, given some of the stats above, but saying that there is one is a much bigger stretch. This does make me think that perhaps a bit more laissez-faire might go a long way in keeping things market fair - although, as I think they hint at, a bit less regulation would help even things out too.

But what’s going on here? And why are TfL incapable of communicating with me when it does?

After doing a bit of hunting around yesterday, and noticing that at least one other person had the same problem, I came to the conclusion that it was power-saving based - my suspicion is that the refresh rate is reduced under some power-saving circumstances.

The following set of steps seems to remove the problem (or, to be more exact, I haven’t seen the problem return since following them):

• Open the NVIDIA control panel (from the Start Menu or the system tray).
• Navigate to Mobile / Change PowerMizer settings.
• Select Not manage my power consumption (Disable PowerMizer).

Hope this helps someone else.

Then delicious went and released a new version and this trick broke.

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve found a reasonable alternative. feed.informer will take any RSS feed and turn it into fairly plain HTML. So take your RSS feed, which might look something like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/andrewferrier/mtag?count=100

(the count increases the maximum number of items in the feed to 100)

Now plug it into feed.informer, and edit the options to make the result look how you want (hint: I modify the template, and set the Per-Item Template to <a href=”%URL%”>%TITLE%</a><br />, leaving the rest of the template blank - this prints one bookmark per line). You’ll also need to sign up and create a feed.informer account whilst you’re doing this (assuming you don’t already have one).

Once done, just view the ‘HTML’ version of the digest you created, and set that as your mobile homepage. Bingo.

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.

They should clearly be banned.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I ventured a bit further up to Notting Hill this evening and found the Black and Blue. A basic but incredibly juicy steak definitely made my evening. Much better than yet another so-so Indian meal (the Bombay Bicycle Club is definitely over-rated). It’s re-affirmed my faith in moderately-budgeted expense accounts.