Category Archives: Life

Electricity for Africa: if it’s a moral imperative, must it be green?

Leave a reply

In Electricity for Africa, Matt Ridley quotes a UN official who says, despite the troubles in Libya and the Sahel that make the news, the long-term problems are concentrated in Subsaharan Africa:

Just to get sub-Saharan electricity consumption up to the levels of South Africa or Bulgaria would mean adding about 1,000 gigawatts of capacity, the installation of which would cost at least £1 trillion.

Renewable generation will cost about 4-5 times what natural gas generation costs.

The economist Bjørn Lomborg has been making the case that getting energy and clean water to Africans is a higher moral priority than pursuing renewable energy. He still thinks climate change is a danger, but he thinks developing new energy technologies will get far better results than rolling out expensive and land-hungry renewables today.

Worth reading the whole thing.

The School Bus

Leave a reply

This stinks: Bus Driver to Eight-Year-Old: It’s Too Dangerous to Read While You Ride.

I used to read on the bus. One day I was being picked on, so I hit the @$$#073 who was bothering me with my algebra book and got off the bus at the direction of the driver. And I haven’t ridden a school bus since. That couldn’t have been later than 9th grade but it might have been 8th.

Podcast Tagging

Leave a reply

I’ve got a podcast and it’s a chore to update. I’ve built some tools to help me produce an RSS feed for the podcast, which is a good thing, since RSS = XML = too persnickety to do by hand. But I’ve had to do some of the work by hand, specifically, tagging the .MP3 files with the appropriate ID3 tags. I was using iTunes, which has never been very fun, and seems to get worse with each iteration.

Enter eyeD3. It’s a tag editor, but unlike most of them, you can operate it from the command line. Better yet, eyeD3 understands ID3 v. 2.X tags. The documentation for the classic eyeD3 interface is what I like best. You can use it to set all kinds of tags for your podcast. Like these v2.x tags here. If you want to set one of the date tags, you’ll need to know how to specify a date in ISO 8601 format.

Also, did you know that mp3info lets you get the length of an audio file from the command line? I didn’t, until I read it on the internet, and durned if it’s not true. That’s pretty nifty. And there’s even a Ruby API for it!

I also learned about something called mutagen, which is like eyed3 but for arbitrary types of audio files.

I spent the day learning all this, so my tools still need to be updated to do what I now know can be done programmatically. But I’ve done the hardest part, viz.:

Podcast Tagging

Hey, is that Skim Milk?

Leave a reply

My daughter has started drinking skim milk, which means the rest of us have to check the label to make sure we get the right jug from the fridge. Imagine if we looked at the label and it read “Non-Grade ‘A’ Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed.” It turns out that if you make skim milk by skimming off the cream, the government says you can’t call it skim milk.