BBC Radio on the iPhone

Yea, I don’t know how to do it yet either…

BBC Radio has about 80 different channels of content, from the big dozen or so national feeds to zillions of local feeds across the UK. Unfortunately, the BBC is tied up heavily with Real Audio and has recently done (a heavily criticized) deal with Windows for their content.

What this means is that iPhone users, who can handle streaming mp3 content, are currently out of luck for BBC streaming radio on their iPhone.

This is really quite annoying. Granted mp3 is technically a proprietary format as well, but it’s a standard that works on Real and Windows media players (not to mention Winamp, Shoutcast, VLC and nearly all other audio software programs). That the BBC (and NPR and other public radio stations) continue to utilize these locked up formats is a considerable pain, especially as more and more devices and mobile phones have improved playback for mp3 streams.

The BBC has their podcasts in mp3, and they have built a version of the iPlayer that works with the iPhone (alas US people cannot access the videos though). I think it is only a matter of time before the Beeb comes out with an application to put their content on the iPhone and iPod touch.

But wait! There might be hope. Some folks have found a way to create a BBC 1 relay that converts the stream to an mp3 stream.

http://blog.garryrenshall.co.uk/bbc-radio-1-stream-on-the-iphone

Unfortunately I just tested it and it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.

We’ll keep monitoring this one.

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German companies to sue so they can pollute the Olympics

Yea, I don’t get it either.

But the Spiegel is reporting that several German companies with factories outside of Beijing are considering legal action so they do not have to close their operations during the Olympics. The Chinese government has ordered nearly 1,000 factories to halt production during the games in a last ditch attempt to provide clean air over the city, but the Germans are having none of that.

The five companies are among some 1,100 businesses, many of them located up to an hour away from the city center, which will have to put production on hold for the duration of the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games immediately following. In addition to Beijing closures, some 267 companies in the industrial city of Tangshan north of the city will have to cease operations and 40 factories in the nearby port city of Tianjin are closing, according to Reuters. Factories in three other provinces will also have to shut down.

Of course, only Americans and Chinese are polluters in the world. The Germans probably have some excuse why they should be allowed to operate whereas the rest need to shut down. I wait for yet another example of European “Do as I say not as I do.”

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Friendfeed and the Hong Kong effect

Friendfeed is the newest new thing out in Silicon Valley that has hockey stick growth in only a few weeks. Seen by many as a refuge from Twitter and the constant ‘fail whale’, Friendfeed’s growth is just going out of control. (Friendfeed, for those not in the know, is a micro-blogging platform that lets you put up quick notes to your ‘core regular’ followers, i.e. friends. Twitter was the original, but simply cannot keep up with the growth, leading to a fail message of a big whale picture).

Anyway, I’m following a few tech luminaries and that shows me what their friends are posting, but I’m starting to notice something that I call the ‘Hong Kong effect’ with postings.

When I was living in Hong Kong, the Internet, quite frankly, was pretty boring. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it until I thought about it for a bit and realized I was accessing all of my normal sites each day (Washington Post, NY Times, Silicon Valley sites, etc) at what turned out to be night time in the USA. Websites don’t really get updated at 1 in the morning, and in fact many go into maintenance mode at say 4 am (i.e. slower, etc). So the page I saw at the Washington Post when I woke up in Hong Kong (8am HK/8pm DC) was pretty much the same page I saw when I was having dinner later that night (6pm HK/6am DC).

The same sort of thing is happening with Friendfeed. With its userbase primarily in Silicon Valley, it seems that I’ll wake up in the morning in DC (7am) and there will be a few stories posted from after I went to bed, but I won’t really see any new content until about 1 or 2 pm this afternoon, when most of the Silicon Valley crowd gets up and starts chatting.

I guess I should start following more folks in Europe (I have a few) but the heavy users (and their friends) still seem to be living and posting on West Coast time.

We’ll see if I can change that in the next few days. It’s an interesting site (though I don’t like visually how the comment section appears) and I suspect it will have a very good future, so long as we don’t see the big whale appear on the homepage.

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Is the best guy on the Orioles groundskeeper Mike Palulis?

He is a fan favorite, and he runs with an energy (and speed) that actually gets the crowd standing up and cheering. Did a quick search and there is no video on Youtube yet. There is a general one of the crew doing a ‘drag’ of the base lines but not sure if he is in it. There is also a picture on the homepage but not sure how long it will be there. We’ll see what the other bloggers come up with over the day. ]]>

Russians to deploy nuclear bombers to Cuba

Nope, it’s not a 1962 headline, but one you might read shortly.

Leaks are dripping out of a Kremlin-friendly news organizations in Europe that are suggesting Russia may soon stage nuclear-capable bombers in Cuba, so reports the Washington Post.

Some Russian experts dismissed the possibility of a new Cuban crisis. “It’s very silly psychological warfare,” said Alexander Golts, an independent military analyst, in a telephone interview. “Putin and Medvedev are very militant in words but very cautious in practical issues. They have not taken any step that can be seen as a real threat to the West, and I cannot see any reason to raise this threat against the U.S.”

But “if it’s true, it looks like a repetition of the Caribbean crisis” he said, using the common Russian term for the Cuban missile crisis.

Maybe the Russians are just doing this to make Obama look more like JFK.

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Time to Watch the Tour de France is now.

Ok, if you’ve been uninterested or unmotivated to watch the Tour de France up to this point, the time is now to tune in. Coverage starts most days at about 8:30am on the Versus channel, which was formerly known as Outdoor Life Nework.

Yesterday the Tour started up in the Alps, where it will be for the next two days. The three top leaders are separated by all of about 10 seconds, and it is in the mountains that time shifts are the most vast. Tuesday and Wednesday see them up in the Alps, and this is probably where we’ll see the winner come forth, eventhough there is about a week of racing before Paris.

Or course there is now the annual drug issue confronting some teams, but there is also some criticism of the current Yellow Jersey holder Frank Schleck from his own team coach.

”I told Frank, if he wants to win, it’s going to hurt,” he said.

Tune in and watch the battle….

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Radovan Karadzic finally captured by Serbian police

It only took a decade…

You may remember this guy from the war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Governments have been ‘looking for him’ (more or less, kind of) since the wars ended and the atrocities were discovered, but despite his unique hair do, it seems no one has ever been able to find him.

Supporters of him will quickly point to ‘other atrocities’ that were committed by the other side, but his arrest might soon help put an end to an ugly chapter in European history.

The BBC is reporting the details on his arrest:

The Bosnian Serb wartime political leader disappeared in 1996.

He had been indicted by the UN tribunal for war crimes and genocide over the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.

His wartime military leader, Ratko Mladic, remains at large.

“Radovan Karadzic was located and arrested tonight” by Serbian security officers, a statement by the office of President Boris Tadic said, without giving details.

“Karadzic was brought to the investigative judge of the War Crimes Court in Belgrade, in accordance with the law on cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

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