Posts tagged ‘bbc’
That palace in the sun
October 28th, 2011 at 6:57 am by Dr. Drang
I love BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, and this week’s show is one of its best. It’s called “The Siege of Tenochtitlan.” In 1521 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes led an army of Spanish and native forces against the city of Tenochtitlan, the spectacular island capital of the Aztec civilisation. At first Cortes had…
Some Other Guy
August 2nd, 2011 at 10:41 pm by Dr. Drang
What I love about Brian Matthew’s Sounds of the 60s is that it’s not just a classic rock show—its playlist happily includes the decade’s cheese in addition to its masterpieces. Here’s the playlist for the episode I listened to on my rides to and from work today. I was delighted to hear Ritchie Barrett’s original…
Radio 2 recording scripts updated
March 22nd, 2011 at 9:37 pm by Dr. Drang
The most recent update to iTunes broke some of my BBC Radio 2 scripts, the AppleScript and Python scripts I use with AudioHijack Pro to automate the recording and iTunesifying of shows I like. The failures occurred in the parts of the scripts that add artwork to the saved shows. I could have just deleted…
Release the crackle!
October 5th, 2010 at 11:24 pm by Dr. Drang
On my ride home from work tonight, I heard something I haven’t heard in ages. RSS and some browsers won’t show the player that’s supposed to be here. Click this instead. It wasn’t “Stairway to Heaven”—that pops up every so often when I’m shuffling through my iTunes library. No, what I haven’t heard in ages…
Bull leapers and soybeans
September 20th, 2010 at 4:36 pm by Dr. Drang
When I first saw this cartoon back in June, I instantly decided to include its center panel (the funny one, even though it doesn’t have the punch line) every time I write a post about podcasts and radio shows I listen to. “Minoan bull leapers” captures beautifully the eccentric things you can hear on BBC…
Never mind the crackpipe
August 30th, 2010 at 11:06 pm by Dr. Drang
Instead of writing a post on how the new version of Simplenote stacks up against Elements, as I’d intended, I spent the evening watching old episodes of Never Mind the Buzzcocks on YouTube. And found, in a show from the spring of 2004, a young, cute, and thoroughly delightful Amy Winehouse. Sometimes goofing off pays…
To be played at maximum volume
July 4th, 2010 at 8:59 am by Dr. Drang
What better way to celebrate the Fourth than to listen to BBC Radio documentaries? I spent yesterday afternoon resetting bricks in the patio and listening to my iPod. First up was last week’s episode of In Our Time, the history/literature/philosophy/science/math Radio 4 series hosted by Melvyn Bragg. The topic was Athelstan: Athelstan, the grandson of…
BBC bull leapers
June 14th, 2010 at 2:50 pm by Dr. Drang
My wife cut this Zits cartoon out of the Tribune a couple of weeks ago, thinking, I guess, that Walt Duncan and I have something in common. I don’t know what she’s on about. As I write this, my iMac is recording (via Audio Hijack Pro) a BBC Radio 2 documentary on David Frost, who…
Exile radio documentary
May 24th, 2010 at 9:32 pm by Dr. Drang
Last week, the BBC aired an hourlong radio documentary on Exile on Main Street, coinciding with the album’s reissue. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you have two days to listen to it—or record it via Audio Hijack Pro or Wiretap Studio—through the BBC’s Listen Again service. I listened to it on my…
BBC iPlayer site-specific browser
February 24th, 2010 at 10:00 am by Dr. Drang
As I’ve mentioned at great length in earlier posts, I use Audio Hijack Pro to record BBC Radio shows that are streamed over the internet but don’t come in podcast form. Until recently, I’d been using Safari to open the stream URL. Generally, this worked out fine, but if I wanted to browse while recording…
