What I Learned Today

I’ve been enjoying a variety of podcasts on my iPod Shuffle, from knitting to Sandra Tsing Loh to Italian language lessons. One thing that’s been driving me batty is that when I drop new podcasts onto the iPod, they end up in reverse chronological order (newest first), which is almost always not the order I want them in. Any changes I make to the order (sorting by column or moving podcasts around) are mysteriously lost when I undock the iPod. To judge from the Web, I’m not the only one with this vexation.

Thankfully, Stephen Mielnicki posted the solution (buried in this thread): go into your Podcasts (not on the iPod) and click the “Release Date” column to order them in ascending order, rather than the default descending order. This order will propagate to the iPod, even for podcasts you previously copied over. Useful to know—but unintuitive; the obvious metaphor for the iPod is to treat it like another playlist, and in this case it definitely doesn’t behave like one.

Another thing I learned about the iPod Shuffle while googling is that when you put it in “random play” mode, it deliberately skips over podcasts and audio books. I’d noticed that it never played these things, but figured it was just because they were such a small fraction of the iPod’s contents and therefore had a low probability of being chosen. But this is a nice feature. (Of course, it seems to achieve it merely by looking at file extensions.)

This is my second post in the Kiri Learns to Use Technology Ten Years After Everyone Else series (previously: iPods). Due to an exceedingly generous friend, I now have my own GPS unit. That means I can join all the cool kids at geocaching.com and play technological hide-and-seek!

I set out today at about 4 p.m., equipped with GPS unit, camera, sunglasses, water, notebook, pen, wallet, and iPod Shuffle. Well, first I spent a little while fiddling with the GPS unit to learn its interface. I pushed buttons for a while until I figured out what each one did, and what kind of information the unit could provide (all sorts!). I then fiddled with it some more until I figured out how to set a “waypoint”, which I named HOME (always nice to be able to get back to where you started). I was impressed at how intuitive the interface turned out to be; I am an inveterate manual-reader, but since I did not have a manual, I had to learn by trial and error. This actually worked quite well, which I attribute to good interface design. I reset the current trip memory to start fresh from HOME and set off walking.

My first target was a benchmark, used for surveying purposes. I had only a dim idea of what one might look like, but I decided to see if I could find it. It turns out that EV2479 is only about four blocks from my house. I walked along the sidewalk, staring down at the GPS unit, until I reached the specified coordinates, then looked around. Nothing. I found an interesting plaque dedicating a tree to a couple that had passed away and a metal label on a streetlight about 3 inches off the ground, but nothing that looked like a benchmark. After a while, I gave up and kept walking along the road, until (naturally), I almost walked over the benchmark. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be — but the webpage does note that “the horizontal coordinates were scaled from a topographic map” and indeed, the latitude was correct but the longitude was off by 0.026 minutes.

Next, I decided to tackle a real geocache. The closest one to my house ended up not working out; there were too many people walking around, and I gather that part of geocaching etiquette is to not be obvious about what you are doing, so that the non-geocaching folks (referred to, of course, as “muggles”) don’t get curious and come steal/vandalize/enjoy the cache. However, while looking around, I did encounter an awesome praying mantis. They were right about interesting serendipitous discoveries while geoseeking!

After a nice long walk, I finally found my first real geocache. I reached the location and sat down on a rock to puzzle out the clue for where the cache would be hidden. Unlike the benchmark, I didn’t even have a fuzzy idea of what I was looking for, except that it would not be in plain sight. I got up and explored trees, bushes, rocks, and the railroad ties that were erected all along the jogging path. Finally, I sat back down on the same rock and at some point realized that I was literally sitting next to the cache (revealed due to the unnatural way some dead weeds were positioned). (I’m being a little vague so as not to ruin the surprise for anyone else.)

I rolled a rock over and found that the inside had been hollowed out and capped! I opened it and found a log and a tiny ziplock with “treasure” inside. The log not only had names and dates, but it seems that some people have custom stickers made up, and others even have customized stamps. I added my name and the date to the log. I believe the tradition is that you can take a piece of treasure if you replace it with something similarly small and fun, but I was content just to look and replace everything. It took me a little while, as I had to replace it in between joggers and people pushing strollers and a horseback rider passing by. But it was a beautiful evening and it was great to be outside… and away from the computer! All told, I was out for two hours and covered 5.5 miles.

So here’s my first find… and here’s to several more. :)

I got a 2 GB iPod Shuffle for my birthday (thanks, Mom!) — an entirely unanticipated gift. I’d never owned an MP3 player and, when I’d seen the Shuffle in stores, figured it wouldn’t really be all that useful — no display, you know? But then I got one of my own, and my world changed.

My favorite music is with me everywhere I go! This has literally transformed my commute (via tape adapter), my walks, and even washing the dishes (while I can play the same music through my laptop’s speakers, it sounds so much better through headphones). For walks, it’s almost as good as ThinkGeek’s personal soundtrack t-shirt, except that it doesn’t annoy others around me. (I do have to check my impulse to sing along, though!)

I thought the lack of a display would bug me. But it turns out that it supports the main ways I listen to music anyway — sequential, or random. If I don’t like the current song, I can just skip to the next one. What a beautiful little device!

Even better: I’ve discovered an actual use for podcasts! I’d experimented with a couple in the past, but whenever I’m actually using my computer, I’m almost always processing information (writing code, reading papers, work stuff) in a way that doesn’t permit me to pay attention to talk. But now… I can listen to podcasts in all of those same places (car, walks, dishes)! My favorites so far are:

• The Loh Life, by Sandra Tsing-Loh: I love her articles in the Atlantic Monthly and, the few times I’ve caught her in the mornings on KPCC, I’ve loved her short (~3-minute) monologues. But it never seems to sync up with my commute these days. No more! Now I have Sandra with me anytime I want! Edit: Sandra also has a daily 1-minute show called The Loh Down on Science!
• Cast On, by Brenda Dayne: I experimented with a few knitting podcats, but this is the only one that really stuck. I think I’d listen to “Cast On” even if I weren’t a knitter, just for the fabulous music she plays throughout the show. I haven’t recognized a single song, yet I’ve liked every one of them! The knitting-related material is great, too, from her “sweater of the day” stories to the thought-inspiring Essay.

Podcasts, like audio books, are definitely great for knitting accompaniment. Now my Shuffle makes it easy and portable. Can Apple ever go wrong?

Today I discovered that the USGS provides KML feeds for Google Earth that will show you, in real-time, the latest earthquakes that have been detected. (Well, with a 5-minute delay.) This came in super handy at work just after the 5.4-magnitude earthquake hit Chino Hills and rolled through the ground under our office building. I’m on the fourth floor. At about 11:45 a.m., I noticed a sort of rocking feeling, and then the blinds started to smack into the windows, and then I headed for the interior doorframe. My grad student intern dove under her desk. Our administrative assistant joined me in the doorway and remarked, “It’s too late in the day for an earthquake! Usually they wake you up in the morning.” We all marveled and held our breaths until the shifting and rattling stopped. One co-worker was in the restroom when it happened and said that the sound of all the water sloshing around in the pipes was pretty “unusual.” Overall, though, nothing broken and no injuries. It was the strongest earthquake I’ve felt since moving here in late 2003.

Once things had stopped, everyone jumped on their computers to look up where it had happened and what the magnitude was. Chino Hills is about 30 miles away. I guess for people closer to the epicenter, things actually fell off shelves. But from a purely geeky perspective, it was lots of fun watching all of the aftershocks being reported in Google Earth. We couldn’t feel any of them (ranged from magnitude 1.2 to 3.4), but they just kept rolling in. The Earth is a mighty sleeping giant… and even a tiny twitch amid all that slumber serves as a firm reminder.

Watching for meteors is a fun pastime on warm summer nights out in the dark desert; you lie back on a blanket and wait for the sky to present its fireworks. The American Meteor Society (AMS) can help you plan your observing times, with this year’s meteor shower calendar and a weekly meteor outlook. But it turns out that you don’t need dark skies, or even night at all. You can observe meteors via radio instead of by sight.

I learned about this technique from an excellent book I am reading titled “The Sky is Your Laboratory: Advanced Astronomy Projects for Amateurs.” The first chapter is devoted to meteor observations, and I was interested to learn that you can record your observations (such as number of meteors observed per hour during a given event) and contribute them to the AMS, which uses this information in the aggregate to characterize meteor activity. Their visual observations webpage is a little out of date (last updated in 2006), unfortunately, but presumably you can still submit your logs.

At any rate, the book then proceeds to describe how you can listen for meteors with your FM radio. Effectively, you use an FM station’s signal as your probe. Signals at the frequencies used by FM stations are high enough that they generally go right through the ionosphere, but if they hit the ionized gas created by a meteor whistling by, they instead bounce back. So you tune your radio to the frequency of a station that is too far away to be received normally (300-600 miles), listen to the static, and wait for a glimpse of non-static. When the signal successfully bounces, you get a snippet of music or speech, and then back to static. You can count these observations just like you’d count meteors streaking across the sky — except that you can count them 24 hours a day, regardless of sky conditions. Awesome!