I collect links of interesting things all week with the idea to post them here. I leave them open in browser tabs and, eventually, it takes forever for my browser to load because of the number of pages it has to open. I think that's a good system for forcing blog updates, and also causing some judicious selection in what actually makes it.

First, there's the election of the Pirate Party to the EU parliament. I think that's pretty awesome. The message is loud and clear: intellectual property legislation is out of control and people actually care.

In other pirate news, Pirate Bay Nemesis Has Name Changed By Pranksters.

Yes, it was immature, and yes, I laughed. I'm just not real long on sympathy these days for the kinds of lawyers that make a living working on behalf of organizations that would rather sue consumers into terrified submission than engage in dialog about consumer rights and fair use. I also wonder if he's now legally required to put down "Pirate Pontén" on any forms that ask for other names he has used.

OneSpin is URL shortener that works from the address bar without installing buttons or browser plugins or registering accounts. It just works. (Watch the video.) I'm kind of loving it for Twitter.

After repeated requests and two months of waiting, ComHem has finally given us back "The Awesome Channel"http://history.viasat.se/. The caliber of my choice in viewing material has greatly increased as a result. No more Momma's Boys for me. Now I'm hooked on The Edwardian Country House (and kind of irked that I forgot it was on and missed episode 2).

Fried Chicken and Coffee is looking for rural literature. Make Rusty happy, send him your stories.

The 'Blog' of 'Unnecessary' Quotation Marks - Kind of like FAIL Blog for grammar people.

McSweeney's: Comments written by actual students extracted from workshopped manuscripts at a major university

"You talk about pregnant raindrops and chaos and auditory canals and 'the passing of time' as 'an orifice,' when you could really just be talking about humidity and ears."

Words to live by.

The Republican Budget Molecule

I laughed until it hurt. I wish my macroeconomics class had been that much fun. (I got an A, by the way, which disqualifies me for membership in the Republican party.)

Yet another plagiarism scandal rocks online writing communities. On a side note: apparently sending an email an administrator at Literary Mary asking to have plagiarised work removed makes you a 'cunt' and responsible for all that is wrong with the internet today.

If you're posting your writing online, even in closed workshops, it's important to know how to find your work reposted online.

Trying to eat healthier around here. Part of that is trading the chips and cookies for healthy snacks (or something a little fancier). It's a good time of year to swap homemade limeade or iced coffee for all those sugar-bomb sodas and chemical drink mixes too.

It's like Battle of the Evil Internet Titans. I think I need popcorn. Also, Google's obsessive drive to monetize everything probably explains why their search engine actually kind of sucks these days.

In the time of blogs and tweets and being able to pour out every random thought to an audience of millions at the click of a mouse, does anyone actually keep a private journal? Maybe we should: Why Good Writers Keep Journals

EU parliamentary elections today. Rösta pirat!

I read a post on a message board asking if anyone had published via Kindle. It coincided with my reading this post by J.A. Konrath, along with the previous one. Konrath's posts, especially, stirred up some thoughts. In no particular order:

1. People will pay for the convenience of the delivery system. All those Kindle users could go to Konrath's site and download the same books for free in PDF and put them on their Kindle. What they're really paying for is the ability to get the book from a central location, the various associated Amazon packaging (customers who bought this also bought..., consumer reviews, publisher blurbs, etc.), and have it delivered right into their eager little paws by Whispernet. (This flies in the face of the **AA position that people would rather steal it than buy it.)
2. It's important to make sure that sane rights reversion is part of any publishing contract. With technology like print-on-demand and ebooks, it makes sense for publishers to hold on to rights for as long as they can, since they don't have to go to extra expense or effort to make backlists available. The same technologies also mean that authors have the ability to re-release old titles on their own, without the support of a publishing company, and keep a larger percentage of the earnings. (See Konrath's excellent breakdown on what a backlist can potentially earn an author.)
3. It's only a matter of time before the Kindle store gets crufted up with fanfic epics and barely coherent manifestos on the evils of Catholicism/Islam/atheism/creationism/vegetarianism/CIA mind control experiments/alien abduction/.
4. What's really needed is a big, platform independent ebook retailer. The Kindle store is going to wind up just like iTunes for me: another store selling stuff I can't buy. I'm not going to spend insane amounts on an inferior hardware product (that isn't even available where I live anyway) just so I can read a book. I have hope for FictionWise; maybe Barnes and Noble will put some serious backing into them. (Hint: shinier site design and more convenient navigation.) I'd much rather buy my ebooks in multiple formats and DRM free. For me, that is convenient delivery.

My review copy of False Relations by Michelene Wandor arrived yesterday. Just started it, but so far it's superb and I'm looking forward to reading more.

I read a lot of books by white men (some dead) when I was growing up (and still do). It's only the past few years that I've also started reading lots of books written by women and writers from other cultures. I wonder why? Maybe it's the selection in the library. Maybe it's just a shift in taste and interests. I don't know. But I'm glad for it; I find that I really enjoy the variety.

Which reminded me of Genderanalyzer (by two Swedes, Roger Karlsson and Jon Kågström) which attempts to tell the gender of the writer by analyzing text. Can it tell with any level of accuracy?

It thought Margaret Atwood's Hay Journal was written by a man (66%), an excerpt from Alias Grace was written by a woman (78%), and an excerpt from Oryx and Crake was written by a woman (66%).

It thought Doris Lessing's Nobel lecture was written by a woman (56%), an excerpt from The Golden Notebook was written by a man (56%), and an excerpt of The Good Terrorist was written by a woman (70%). (GenderAnalyzer tends to hedge its bets and say that whatever it's analyzing is very gender neutral when the result is in the 50s range.)

It thought the excerpt of Joyce Carol Oates' The Gravedigger's Daughter was written by a man (64%), an excerpt from The Female of the Species was written by a woman (70%), and an excerpt of A Garden of Earthly Delights was written by a woman (59%).

It thought my blog was written by a man (65%), Tania Hershman's blog was written by a woman (59%), and that's when I realized how much time I had wasted finding stuff to plug into Genderanalyzer just to see if it could tell me what I already know.

So from my limited sample, it's right about 2/3 of the time, which is corroborated by poll on the site.

Procrastinate much?

In other news, taking scumbag to a new level by streaming live videos of rape over the internet.

The depths to which human depravity can sink still shock me.

And finally, closing some browser tabs:

• From Holt Uncensored, Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See
• Carolyn Jewel's articles on craft and writing advice
• E.M. Rowan's Field Notes (Research for beginning writers)
• Socialism Today, the Socialist Party magazine
• The Gift of Murder anthology submission call

First, get Juice software to subscribe to podcasts. It's a "podcatcher"--software to manage podcast subscriptions and automatically download episodes to your computer (where you can save them until you're ready to put them on your mp3 player). Download the user guide for step-by-step instructions on setting it up and managing your subscriptions.

The first link in the list below is to the podcast web page. Some sites, like NPR, the BBC, etc. have a lot of podcasts to choose from. Others just have a single podcast. The links after that are the subscription addresses that you'll put into Juice. You can either right-click on the name and choose the option to copy the link address on the context menu that comes up, or click on the link and copy the address in the address bar.

For sites with a lot of podcasts, I only listed a few direct subscription links to things that looked interesting. The only exception is the New York Times podcasts, where I listed a lot of them because it's virtually impossible to find the RSS subscription links on their site--they only link to the iTunes subscription information.

If you want to subscribe to a podcast you find on one of the pages below that I didn't already list the subscription address for, look for an option that says something like "subscribe by RSS" or "get the XML feed." Those are the options that will work in Juice. Most pages will also offer iTunes links, sometimes more prominently placed. You don't want those. (Dealing with iTunes is a pain in the ass. You're better off just not getting involved with it.)

When you set up Juice, one of the options when you add a new subscription will ask you if you want to "catch up." What that means is that, if you tell it yes, Juice will download all the recent episodes listed in the subscription feed. Sometimes it's just four or five, sometimes it can be twenty or more. If you want to download a bunch of back episodes (which you might, for something like Clarkesworld or Escape Pod or especially Leviathan Chronicles) then telling Juice to catch up is an easy way to do it. If you don't want a bunch of old episodes (like you probably don't want a month's worth of headline news stories) then tell Juice no when it asks. (This is covered in the user guide too.)

You probably don't want to subscribe to all of these. Some update more than once a day, some only monthly, and lengths range from around five minutes to an hour or more. Sometimes you can tell from the site what the average lengths and update frequencies are. If you go to the site, you can usually find a link to download an individual episode as an mp3 file, so you can listen to an episode before you waste a lot of time/space downloading a program that you end up not liking.

News

• New York Times podcasts | subscribe to: Front Page | Backstory | Book Review | Tech Talk | Political Points | Science Times | TimesTalks | World View | Your Money | Today's Business | Weekend Business
• NPR podcasts | subscribe to: Talk of the Nation | Fresh Air
• CBC podcasts | subscribe to: As it Happens | The Hour | CBC News World Report | CBC Radio: Editor's Choice
• BBC podcasts | subscribe to: Global News | Global Arts and Entertainment | Business Weekly | Documentaries | Digital Planet | Health Check
• Radio Sweden podcasts | subscribe

Government and Politics

• White House podcasts | The President's Weekly Address
• Prime Minister of Canada | subscribe
• C-SPAN podcasts | Podcast of the Week
• Common Sense | subscribe

Arts and Culture

• Smithsonian Institute podcasts | Behind the Scenes at the National Museum of Natural History
• National Arts Centre of Canada podcasts | Explore the Symphony

Science

• Science magazine's podcast | subscribe
• NASA podcasts | NASACast omnibus
• Scientific American podcasts | Science Talk
• NPR's Science Friday podcast | subscribe
• NOVA podcasts | subscribe
• CBC's Quirks & Quarks podcast | subscribe
• Nature podcast | subscribe
• The CERN podcast | subscribe
• Slacker Astronomy podcast | subscribe
• The Science Show | subscribe

Technology

• The Tech Guy | subscribe
• Engadget podcast | subscribe

History

• Hardcore History podcast | subscribe
• BBC History Magazine podcast | subscribe
• History Channel podcasts | Our Generation
• Military History podcast | subscribe
• Pritzker Military Library podcasts | subscribe to all podcasts
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography podcasts | subscribe
• Story Corps | subscribe
• U.S. National Archives | Presidential Libraries podcast
• U.K. National Archives | subscribe

Skeptic/Atheist

• Skepticality | subscribe
• The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe | subscribe
• Point of Inquiry | subscribe
• Humanist Network News podcast | subscribe
• The Non Prophets | subscribe
• Atheists Talk Radio | subscribe
• Atheist News podcast | subscribe

Books, Fiction, and Literature

• The New Yorker podcasts | Out Loud | The Political Scene | The Fiction Podcast
• Between the Covers | subscribe
• Writers on Writing | subscribe
• New York Review of Books podcast | subscribe

Science Fiction and Fantasy

• Escape Pod | subscribe
• SFF Audio | subscribe
• Spider on the Web | subscribe
• The Leviathan Chronicles | get the archive | subscribe
• Clarkesworld Magazine podcast | subscribe

Poker

• StoneColdBluff Poker podcast | subscribe
• PokerRoad Radio | subscribe
• Full Tilt Poker podcasts | subscribe
• Rounder's Radio | subscribe

Other Stuff

• Car Talk | subscribe
• The Money Pit home improvement podcast | subscribe
• The Handyguys Podcast | subscribe

Not exactly podcasts

The following aren't podcasts, but they're good places to find downloads. Mostly audio books, or other audio entertainment.

• Internet Archive: Audio Archive - Audio books, podcasts, radio shows, music, and more.
• Project Gutenberg - Listing of human read audio books.
• LibriVox - Free audio books in the public domain.
• OTR Network Library - Archive of old time radio shows for download.
• Zoot Radio - More old time radio shows. (Free membership is required to access the download section.)
• FSI Language Courses - Public domain language courses from the Foreign Service Institute. (Swedish, Dad, download Swedish.)
• MusOpen - Public domain classical music.

• Open Culture - Blog that rounds up links to educational and cultural media.

We got my dad an mp3 player for Christmas, and I was telling him about podcasts, so I put together a list of some that he might enjoy. Hi Dad!

Have I ever mentioned my fetish for timekeeping devices? Clocks, calenders, hourglasses, timers, you name it. It actually extends to measuring devices in general. Scales, thermometers, barometers, calipers, voltmeters. I have a fascination with them all. But today, I'm talking about clocks.

Just the plain old digital alarm clock doesn't really excite me. My favorite clocks go tick-tick-tick. I like listening to the passage of time. I like big clocks, clocks that have doors and pendulums, clocks that embody the weight of time. I like delicate clocks with chimes and porcelain faces. I like quirky little alarm clocks with bells like ears and little legs, clocks that look like they could spring into animated action at any moment. You probably wouldn't know this about me, because I don't actually have any clocks like that any more. But I really love them.

Right now, I'm enamored with the Ora ilLegale clock. It seems so simple and elegant and why haven't clocks like this been available for years?

Mattias looked at it for approximately half a second before he solved the problem of having numbers on the face. "Why not use an overlay on bearings," he said, "And weight it at six o'clock?"

He's pretty smart.