Help me make a quick custom newspaper every morning.
benrodian
Me: I have serious difficulty paying attention in university classes
but I have three 3-hour lectures back-to-back. I'm going to need some
browsing material to make class time bearable.
The ideal solution: every weekday morning at 6am, my Mac goes online
and grabs the full text (Not just the headlines like in a newsreader,
but the whole text of the article) of enough RSS articles to fill (say)
ten printed pages with small text. All this text gets dumped to a PDF,
and I print and staple it before I head out the door. Then I can sit
in class with a stack of paper that looks like photocopies but is
actually BBC News, NYT front page articles, etc.
Any ideas? Apologies if this is a simple question, I couldn't find
anything satisfactory on Google.
TIA!
beelers
What a cool idea!
--
"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother
just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be
better than yourself." --William Faulkner
Karen Parry
if webstractor is scriptable...
http://www.softchaos.com/
--
Cheers,
Karen
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Karen Parry | Black Graphics
tel: 415.565 7345
fax: 415.255 7345
url: http://www.blackgraphics.com
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Travel Dates - I will be out of the studio:
Sept 26-Oct 5
Oct 25-29
Dec 12-Jan 3
Eric Sinclair
want) is the Guardian's "24" service. Up to date print to pdf:
-Eric
Mike Brown
dark...@gmail.com
Applescript, but I'm not aware of any actions for checking RSS feeds
and following their links (NetNewsWire comes with a few actions, but
none of them are all that useful). One possibility would be the BBC's
email service, which I understand is free and full text (but don't
quote me on that), and you would be able to use Automator to set that
up (Get new mail -> Filter mail items (messages containing 'BBC' or
whatever) -> Combine Mail messages -> New Textedit document -> Print
Finder Items should do it).
>From there, you could save the workflow as an application or an iCal
plugin and run it from iCal at six or six fifteen every morning.
Schedule your mac to wake up at six every morning (Schedule button in
Energy Saver) and you should be all set.
Just one comment - if you're not using a laptop it might be easier to
set your account to have auto-login. This is a security issue if your
mac gets half-inched, but bear in mind that if you don't have it set up
and your mac starts from a cold boot it won't login for you and the
workflow won't run.
eth1
downloading news to my palm. At first I used NewsMac which was able to
export RSS feeds to iSilo format with recursion, so you could download
the pages the linked to as well as the rss descriptions. When
NewsMacPro broke this for me (though I think this was more my set up
than NewMacPro) I checked out NetNewsWire and used its Applescript
support to construct flat HTML pages of each feed which I then could
use wget or iSilo to grab with recursion to include the pages. One
issue with this, however, is that it's tough to follow "Nex Page" and
">>" links for stories broken up into multiple pages. I've lately been
going through my favorite feeds in the morning, following all stories
that looked interesting, going to the print view and then bookmarking
that in del.icio.us with the same tag. I can then use my favorite
aggregator/offline view (be in iSilo, Plucker or my homerolled
NetNewsWire script) to grab the feed for that tag (@read+!next).
Phil Wolff
If your software keeps your focus tight, the volume right, and the formatting elegant, you're on your way.
friedbeef
do the same, you can use RSS popper and get feeds directly into your
Outlook inbox. From there, just select all the emails and print em out
at one go.
Free of course
speedo
your rss feeds and emails you the new stories.
http://newspipe.sourceforge.net/
As an aside, why are you even going to the lectures if you're not
interested in listening to the prof, seems like a waste of money to me
;)
Eugene Liedel
--
lie...@gmail.com
deepthoughts.liedel.org
benrodian
attention to anything for 3 solid hours (not TV, not a movie, nothing),
even something I'm interested in. If I can give myself two 5-minute
in-class newspaper breaks, I'll be able to pay attention better for the
other 170 minutes. Without the newspaper, I'm going to be paying
partial attention for 180 minutes.
School is definitely going to cost me a lot, so I'm trying to do as
much as I can to work around my attention problems so I can get my
money's worth.
Thanks for the newspipe suggestion, it sounds good.
benrodian
so it will be easy for me to print while I make breakfast.
Sam Beaven
stories are just a PDF that gets updated regularly, but it's always
at the same URL - you could get Automator to download that PDF at a
set time every morning and then print it out.
TB
in the assigned textbook or secondary sources. Also, you may learn
enough to get by understanding the concepts at the level presented in
class, whereas, if you function on assigned reading alone, you may not
have enough time to cover it all, and you won't recognize what you
nodded off during in class.
I'd advise you to:
1) write down everything on the board and capture all keywords
2) buy an use a digital voice recorder for lectures and write down in
your notes the times you nod off or don;t get things, so you can review
the audio later.
The spoken word makes me scattered and squirmy, too. But it's important
to develop habits of sustained attention or seek help if this continues
to be a problem.
Sarah Wiebenson
BlackFin
Sarah Wiebenson wrote:
> I have trouble focusing in lectures sometimes as well, so I like to bring
> simple knitting projects to class with me. I find that if I keep my hands
> busy, my mind won't get as distracted. And in a couple of weeks, I'll have a
> brand new scarf.
Something like that happened to me: I couldn't pay attention unless my
hands were busy.
A professor suggested that I should...
"pay attention and take notes, (...) student!"
>
> On 9/22/06, benrodian <brn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > (snip) If I can give myself two 5-minute
> > in-class newspaper breaks, I'll be able to pay attention better for the
> > other 170 minutes. Without the newspaper, I'm going to be paying
> > partial attention for 180 minutes.
I guess that's a bit dangerous. During a stint in Law, mi mind drifted
away through a lecture. When I realized I was daydreaming for like 2
minutes, the core of the subject had been dissected, and I lost it!
> > speedo wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > As an aside, why are you even going to the lectures if you're not
> > > interested in listening to the prof, seems like a waste of money to me
> > > ;)
All kiding aside, I suggest taping the lecture, and listening to it
(and maybe process it) in chunks of 5 or 10 minutes. too bad i
couldn´t do it during Law classes. the professors cited "the right to
one's voice". in short, I souldn't tape them if they didn't want to.
---
Smile. Relax. Attack-
Alfonso Piñate-Lopez
---
graeme.lyall
My answer to this has been, for a number of years, to bring a Cambridge Z88
computer to the lecture or conference. I am not a student but I have had to
attend a lot events where 50% of my attention was probably overstating the
required amount. I would not feel able to use a full sized laptop but these
little machines (which are antiques these days) are great - you can read
files, write other notes, do all kinds of stuff, in fact be twice as
productive as you would be otherwise.
speedo
someone is using an ipod+mic, I've thought about doing this in the past
but I only have a mini (doesn't support a mic) and couldn't decide if
that added feature was worth the money for an upgrade to one that
supports recording. Is anyone using their ipod to record lectures or
meetings, and if so how do you manage the recordings?
beelers
BlackFin
interviews, maybe you shouls check it out. (found it through
del.icio.us and lifehacker.com)
BlackFin
software), that'd be wonderful; the main reason i'd buy one of those.
(my writing output might be augmented! who knows?)
beelers
transcribing. The indexing feature helps me separate the wheat from
the chaff though.
--
“Politics is the art of controlling your environment.” --Hunter Thompson
rickla
any other advantages to a dedicated recorder?
beelers
cook an egg with a hammer). Using the right tools for the job just
seems to make sense to me. Sure, you *can* record on an iPod, but
that's just seems like a gimmick to me. [Disclaimer: I have never
used an iPod to record, so I really don't know what I'm talking about
here.]
What I do know is that there is a glut of trying to shoehorn
everything into tiny little devices. This isn't necessarily a bad
thing. Combining your Palm and your cell phone "makes sense." Putting
iTunes on a cell phone? Not so much.
That was kind of rambling and I'm not even sure it's an appropriate
response, but there you go.
--
Those that would give up a necessary freedom for temporary safety
deserve neither freedom nor safety. -- Ben Franklin
rickla
give all kinds of information not too narrowly focused on the specific
questions asked, and can often be even more useful.
I tend to agree with you that convergence is often misguided. My
specific situation, though, is that I have a 60-gig iPod photo (whose
main use is as a presentation device in place of a laptop). The
addition of a cheap mic could turn that into a recording device. I
don't know how good it would be, though. And I've never tried one of
those dedicated voice recorders, so I don't know what I'm missing. The
indexing feature does sound very useful. Is there anything similar for
the iPod?
David Douthitt
> I tend to agree with you that convergence is often misguided. My
> specific situation, though, is that I have a 60-gig iPod photo (whose
> main use is as a presentation device in place of a laptop). The
> addition of a cheap mic could turn that into a recording device. I
> don't know how good it would be, though. And I've never tried one of
> those dedicated voice recorders, so I don't know what I'm missing.
My biggest problem with most dedicated recorders is they don't support
any standard formats (like MP3). The iPod fails in this regard, also.
There are MP3 players with voice record; I had one and it worked
rather well.
The iMic connected to a laptop also worked well, but was less portable.
Steve Holden
Sarah Wiebenson
David Douthitt
> Is it possible to record with the iMic when the laptop is closed, or
> does it need to be open?
The iBook would have to be open. The iMic, for all the fancy
trimmings and the company behind it, is just your basic lapel mike:
the computer recognizes it and uses it as any other input device, but
when the iBook is closed it stops operating.
I have seen kernel modifications that would allow you to run the iBook
when closed, but there are heating issues.
As I recall, it was a complete Darwin kernel replacement - might've
been part of setting up a iBook for running servers or for wardriving
- I can't remember.
BlackFin
more:
http://lifehacker.com/software/laptop/download-of-the-day-insomniax-mac-204279.php
/not a mac user
