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May 30, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

Embedded below the fold. A lot of impact stories this time, from ICBMs to ISS to Saturn.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

12 comments

  • mkent

    Any way to get this as an MP3?

  • mkent: MP3 is no longer used. It has been officially abandoned by its developers. Can you not listen to the audio?

  • wayne

    Mr. Z.–
    slight correction– .mp3 remains widely used. But you are correct its not actively supported or updated.

    The JBS website (and Mark Levin Show btw) did recently change their streaming/download options & JBS in particular did get rid of their specific “download the MP3 file” option box, but the audioboom stream is still in .mp3 format.
    (This particular show file is 5.06mb for 21:57 time, at 32kbps.)

    They must no longer want to deliver those files directly. Better control over dynamically inserting adverts and whatnot. (but, I only play at being an expert on the interweb however.)
    I’m not familiar with how much functionality or download-friendly audioboom actually is.
    In general, if “they” want you to be able to download the audio/video file, they make it easy.

    Personally, I have download-software that automatically identifies any audio/video files at a website, including most but not all embedded players, and is able to download the files directly. (I can download 98% of “everything,” and sometimes I feel like I just might be able to pull it off! Same Program, 15 years of use, it’s updated monthly for free, I could not function on the interweb without it.)

    -Batchelor does post a lot of his segment at YouTube, but not all of them from my experience.
    – He used to have a link for his RSS feed somewhere— the file address for the audio segment is embedded in the metadata, you can right-clip “save file as” (in windows) by pasting the address into your browser. (They make it hard to do manually.)
    -I don’t do I-Tunes myself, but I think the show can be downloaded through them. (?)
    -I don’t do any of the “pod-catcher” software myself, but you can get a number of excellent free, open source programs, that handle that (the RSS stuff), if the JBS site still supports it.

    (my software has made me infinitely lazy on downloading)

  • Dick Eagleson

    Tried three times to listen to this podcast. I got the commercial all three times – that played just fine. The content, not so much. As soon as the commercial ends, I get a message that says, “Sorry, an error occurred. Try listening on audioBoom.”

    How, exactly, does one go about listening on audioBoom? The site has no search facility and appears to have an endless list of titles, in no evident order of presentation, to sift through. Or do I have to sign up to the site before I can see a search tool? I’m not real big on being made to jump through hoops for what I used to be able to get for free and without special effort. If you and/or Mr. Batchelor don’t care to have we hoi polloi as an audience anymore, that can certainly be arranged.

  • Dick: I will email John Batchelor and tell him of your problem. It could have nothing to do with you.

  • wayne

    Dick–
    Sorry to hear of your experience. (I’ve been caught in endless youtube advert loops before, but not at soundboom.)
    -tangentially, there was an extensive outage/disruption of streaming tonight, from WABC radio and a number of other Westwood One affiliates— no clue if that’s related.)

    -Personally, I do not like the audioboom set-up, at all.
    (The Mark Levin Show site switched over to audioboom as well, a few months ago. On the upside for him, you can still get his show in one complete block, with only in-show voice-overs. 3 hour show = 1:53:00 in content.)

    JBS is something like 42 minutes of content per 60 minutes show, and you can’t download it in a complete block.
    The number of commercials inserted in these JBS segment’s has definitely increased as well, especially the past 12 months.
    Radio podcast plays/downloads for the JBS show have grown so much the past 2 years they could not ignore those numbers, and started monetizing them more. (Levin has upwards of 12 million ‘downloads’ a month.) And JBS is number 1 in his timeslot on WABC 9pm, although not extensively syndicated nationwide, he has what? 5-6 stations, but those are large markets.)

    I’m afraid the trend is definitely toward “free” content becoming more difficult to directly download. And that probably will eventually require “signing-in” in some manner, more and more. Which I as well, dislike tremendously and try not to participate, but its becoming unavoidable, eventually…

    I’m only familiar with a small segment, of how some of this works. I’d welcome some more informed info from anyone.

  • wodun

    From the JBS main site, at the end of the address for a given episode there is “?t=0”. Cut that out and replace it with “.mp3”

    For me, this automatically starts a download of the episode. Doing this used to bring up an mp3 player in chrome, where you could right click and save as but now its automatic.

    I use podcast addict on android and it works great for JBS and just about everything else. You can even download and listen later when you don’t have internet access or don’t want to use data.

  • wodun

    You can click the audioboom icon in the bottom right which brings up the page for the episode. At the end, just type in .mp3

    It will automatically download.

  • wayne

    wodun–
    A most excellent trick, which I will remember!

    [totally tangential, but along the same lines– if you extract DVD files from a disc, you get files in a “Name.ts” (‘transport stream’) format, just change that to “Name.mpeg,” or “Name.mpg” and your media player will handle playing just fine. You will get a warning that your “file may become unstable,” by changing the extension, but just ignore it.]

    Referencing JBS–using his RSS feed you can do something similar to wodun’s protocol, although it requires more mouse-clicks.
    (I’ve been stealing Content for 15 years.)

    Go to the JBS show RSS feed at–
    https://audioboom.com/channels/4002274.rss

    Scroll through the meta-data and you will see the tag-
    “enclosure url=”
    and 2 lines later you will see the tag:
    ” <media:content url="
    Both of these tags contain within, the url address to the physical file and it will be in this format–

    "https://audioboom.com/posts/5974879-unmasking-obama-administration-unmasking-thadmccotter.mp3?source=rss&stitched=1&quot;

    Just highlight and copy the physical address, ending with .mp3 so you have a standard address format–(strip out "?source=rss&stitched=1")
    in this example you would have–
    https://audioboom.com/posts/5974879-unmasking-obama-administration-unmasking-thadmccotter.mp3
    Play or download at will.

    As I've noted, I have software (Internet Download Manager from Tonec) that is integrated into my browser (it does support all browsers) and it will automatically parse all the html code for a page, find the actual links to any specified audio/vide/media file-format and allow you to begin downloading. (It can handle 98% of anything you would ever want to download, including embedded players that actively try to prevent you from doing so.)
    Highly recommend– they will let you test a full function version for a month, for free. (totally eliminates any requirement to "right click, Save-as" in Windows)
    –This is especially functional at YouTube– allows you to pick individually among the various quality levels they have for each file, and there are no inserted commercials in the full-file.

  • Dick Eagleson

    Okay, today, for whatever reason, the podcast works fine. If that has anything to do with anything Messrs. Zimmerman and Batchelor did, thank you – good job.

    As to the rest of the proffered advice, I appreciate the thought, but any system that requires the level of fiddling about represented by your suggestions is simply a bad system. My invariable rule when confronted with a bad system is to give it a wide berth.

    There are, unfortunately, a lot of such systems around. With all due respect to Mr. Zimmerman’s oft-indulged boosterism for same, Unix/Linux is such a system. I may still be forced to deal with some form of it if Windows continues its descent into gratuitous Big Brother-ism and dysfunction, but I won’t go happily. I have on several occasions, butted heads with various flavors of Unix/Linux over the past four decades and none of these episodes has ended well.

    The problem, I believe, is that there are, at bottom, two kinds of software developers – appliance makers and wizards. Appliance makers build systems that are straightforward, clean, scrupulously error-checked and engineered in such a way that the novice user should find it almost impossible to step on his own crank, as the saying goes.

    Wizards, on the other hand, think everything should be run on the basis of opaque rituals and secret spells. There is something fundamentally deranged, IMHO, about the mental processes of anyone who finds the Unix command line and the Vi or EMACS editors sensible tools with which to accomplish anything.

    Wizards, unfortunately, seem far more numerous than appliance makers in software development circles. They completely own the
    Unix/Linux world and their malign influence is evident in more and more of Windows as well.

  • Dick Eagleson: I think you might be pleasantly surprised by many of the out of the box Linux flavors now available. When I upgraded recently to a new computer and a more up-to-date Linux system (having been very lazy and years behind updating my older Linux Debian system), I discovered that the modern Kubuntu system was much cleaner and easier to use. Basically I was able to get it configured to my liking in about a day with the first machine, and in a little more than an hour later with my laptop. After that, I need do nothing but work.

    Since my configuration is definitely more complex than most people (changing the keyboard to match my old TRS-80 Model III), your experience should be much simpler. Essentially, the system works like an appliance, which I think you would like. Periodically it tells me I should do an update, and then I manually tell it to do so, having configured this to protect my system so as to not change it in ways that will break my preferred working environment.

    None of this was hard, though I do admit that it is easier if you have been working with Linux for awhile. Regardless, it still is easy for any smart person, and is especially easier with the modern Linux GUIs.

  • wodun

    Dick Eagleson, it should work fine just listening in your browser. Adding .mp3 at the end is only if you want to download it to listen to later. But if you want a great experience for podcasts, get podcast addict for your android device. My only complaint is that it doesn’t work for FISO, although there are some old teleconferences up.

    Unfortunately, just not enough hours in the day for all the cool podcasts.

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.podcastaddict&hl=en

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