Dan Bachelder bought the MP3 audiobook for Little Brother and decided that he’d rather listen to it in single-chapter chunks, delivered on a regular basis like a podcast. So he hacked up his own personal podcast, using free software to slice it up and serve it right into his podcatcher.
Best of all, he’s made the slicer-file available for others who’ve bought the audiobook and want to cut it into chapter-sized chunks.
bought the audio book (and hard cover) version of Cory Doctorow’s new book Little Brother. It’s delivered as a 163 megabyte MP3 file, over 11 hours of spoken word… I have listened to dozens of audio books delivered as podcasts, but I only have one “normal” audio book (The Areas Of My Expertise by John Hodgman… hilarious) which I bought through iTunes, it is broken into 3 (2.5 hour) parts, which is still a bit long for an “episode”. I really prefer the podcast episode per chapter form factor because it caters to my various neurosises and gives me a feeling of progress and accomplishment even when I don’t really deserve said feeling.
I listen to my podcasts in three places, my iPhone, my Apple TV, and through iTunes on my MacBook Pro (Holy fanboy, Batman). While the synchronization between the three is pretty good, it can mess up and lose my place in an audio file. This usually isn’t an issue because I rarely need more than a sitting to complete any particular file. I suspect that I’m not going to finish an 11+ hour audio book in a sitting… or even 11… so there is bound to be frustration and cursing as I lose my place repeatedly somewhere in the syncing madness.
After some Googling, I found AudioSlicer. In under 30 minutes I had the book split into 26 named sections, intro, chapters 1-21, epilogue, afterword, bibliography, and credits and copyrights. Here is my .split file (unzip it) which you can use with AudioSlicer to split the MP3 you purchase into the same chapters (if you have a mac). When you “Export Splitted” make sure “Filename Format” is “[trackNumber]_[title]_[album]_[artist]”.
This afternoon, our school recieved a copy of Little Brother which was donated by a reader from Ridgefield, CT through the donation program. The Barnes and Noble “description” says:
“I saw your request on Cory’s site; I loved the book, I’m glad I could share.”
Bless you, benefactor. And Cory, bless you, too. I’ve been walking around glowing for over an hour, book in hand. When people (teachers and students) ask about my happiness, I tell them that socio-economic networking is the best thing ever. And then we get to talk about stuff that really matters. And we all get a little closer, and a little more knowledgable, and a LOT more excited.
Thanks for making my job work better, for making our school easier and more fun, for connecting us to you and vice versa, for making the world. Thanks to everyone else, too, for everything else. Whee!
Off to find just the right kid and slip the book into her hand — from there, I’ll ask the kids to pass it along virally until the end of the year, and then we’ll see where the book, the ideas, and the way it arrived here can take us.
Instructables has just posted its latest installment in its collection of HOWTOs inspired by my new novel Little Brother, a young adult book about hacker kids who use technology to win back their civil liberties from the Department of Homeland Security.
This week, it’s instructions for building a simple device that will let you spot hidden “pinhole” video cameras:
With one hand, hold up the toilet paper tube to your eye. With your other hand, hold up the flashlight at about eye level and point it away from you. With one eye, look through the tube and scan the room. If there are any small points of light bouncing back, inspect it further. It might be a camera.
Sunday night, I fly to Chicago to kick off my three-week US book-tour for Little Brother, my new young adult novel. I’ll be stopping in and around Chicago, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Francisco and (probably) New York. The schedule’s still being firmed up, but Tor (my publisher) is keeping an up-to-the-minute schedule for each appearance. This is my first publisher-financed tour, and I’m incredibly excited! I hope to meet lots of you on the road!
Last week, Canada’s Macleans Magazine ran a great piece on Little Brother — you can get at it through this Lexis-Nexis gateway.
“No, no, Marcus is more aspirational than autobiographical,” laughs Cory Doctorow about the 17-year-old hero of his newest science fiction novel, Little Brother (Fenn). Principled, literate, brave and, above all, technologically savvy, Marcus puts pebbles in his shoes to fool his school’s “gait recognition” software, chats with friends on an IMParanoid messaging program, and takes on the Department of Homeland Security’s Orwellian surveillance system in the name of liberty. “He’s the teen we all would have liked to have been,” says Doctorow, 36, who nevertheless bristles at the thought that Marcus is too unrealistic: “People have said, ‘C’mon, no teenager reads Jane Jacobs’; I read Jane Jacobs when I was a teenager!”
Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its series of HOWTOs inspired by my latest novel, Little Brother, a young adult novel about hacker kids who fight the DHS with technology in order to restore the Bill of Rights to America.
This week, it’s HOWTO build a spice-mister, a low-intensity edible pepper-spray to douse your food with (one of the characters in the book is a serious capsaicin junkie). Being the kind of guy who’d brush his teeth with Tobasco if I could, I love this one.
Putting the spice mister together is not hard. Simply remove the pump, fill with your choice of hot sauce, and put the pump back in.
To add a quick burst of intense flavor to your food, hold the mister a few inches above the dish and spray. Repeat until desirable heat is reached.
Keep it away from your face, and never spray at anyone else - capsaicin in the eyes hurts like hell. Pepper spray is nasty, evil stuff and should never, ever be used on anything except food.
Borderlands Books, San Francisco’s wonderful science fiction bookstore, has offered to free US shipping for signed, inscribed copies of Little Brother. Just order before my in-store appearance on May 22, and they’ll take care of having me sign and personalize your copy. People outside of the US can order, too — but there’s a small charge for shipping, depending on where you live.
Borderlands Books 866 Valencia Ave, San Francisco CA USA 94110 +1 888 893 4008
Instructables has just posted the latest installment in its ongoing series of HOWTOs inspired by my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of a teen underground that uses technology to fight back against surveillance and control.
This week’s HOWTO is “Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures” — AKA, anonymizing your photos before you post them online:
If you take enough images with your digital camera, they can all be compared together and a unique signature can be determined. This means that even when you think that you are posting a photo anonymously to the internet, you are actually providing clues for the government to better tell who you are. The larger the sample size of images they have, the easier it is them to track down images coming from the same camera. Once they know all the images are coming from the same camera, all they then have to do is find that camera and take a picture to confirm it beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is important to remove this noise signature so that you cannot be tracked down. I cannot guarantee any of these methods will work beyond the shadow of a doubt because the woman doing research for the government on how to find the signature is very good. I can only promise that this will make their work more difficult.
Tor Books and Expanded Books produced a funny interview/trailer thing for John Scalzi and me in honor of our latest books — he’s bringing out a young adult novel in the Old Man’s Warverse in August called Zoe’s Tale that I’ve read a little from and it’s dynamite!
Here’s the latest Instructables HOWTO to tie in with my young adult novel Little Brother, which tells the story of young geeks who use technology to restore liberty to post-9/11 America.
This week, it’s HOWTO start a flashmob:
Timing is everything
This refers back to the whole participation thing. If your event is spontaneous in nature and just requires people to show up at the same time and do something goofy(say, gather at a subway stop and follow the first bearded person you see as if they were Jesus), they won’t need much time to prepare. The ideal time for this sort of event is at the end of the workday (between 5 and 6PM) during the week as a) the streets are more crowded and b)participants are more available. For whatever reason, Thursdays seem to be most effective.
If you are planning something more elaborate, like a Costumed Rampage, you want to give people at least a week to prepare, and preferably two. These events are most effective in heavily populated shopping and tourist areas, so Saturday afternoons work best. Note: these often turn into drunkfests.
