Jamie Bennett Speaks

I finally gave up on gPodder, it was flakey and constantly hanging and now I’m using bashpodder. It doesn’t have the ‘bling’ that gPodder does (it has a command line interface) but it ‘just works’.

To set it up first download

• bashpodder from http://lincgeek.org/bashpodder/ (I got Brian Hefferan’s version at http://www.lincgeek.org/bashpodder/user_contributed/brian_hefferan/)
• wget from http://armin-warda.de/maemo/dists/mistral/user/binary-armel/wget-1.10.2_armel.deb

Save the 3 bashpodder files on your flashcard to ensure that they are preserved after any future flashing of the 770 and edit the bashpodder.shell file if you wish.

Bashpodder uses a bp.conf file which lists all the urls of the podcasts you wish to download. For example, a snap-shot of mine is:

http://www.cnet.com/i/pod/cnet_buzz.xml http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/ziffdavis/crankygeekspodcast http://feeds.feedburner.com/Talkcrunch http://www.morningcoffeenotes.com/rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/43FPodcast http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/downloadtrial/worldservice/godigital/rss.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/twit.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/itn.xml http://leoville.tv/podcasts/floss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheLinuxActionShow http://www.lugradio.org/episodes.rss

To run bashpodder you need to type at the xterm (if you haven’t installed xterm do it now http://770.fs-security.com/xterm/):

./sh bashpodder.shell

bashpodder.shell needs to run with the sh first because its is running off of the FAT32 filesystem of the memory card and unix permisisons just do not exist for sh to check.

Now heres the clever bit. To get bashpodder to check your podcast feeds regulary for any new episodes (I get it to check once a day at 3am in the morning) you need to set up a cron job. Add the following line to your personal crontab or if you don’t already have one make a new one by running crontab -e.

00 03 * * 1-5 sh /media/mmc1/bashpodder/bashpodder.shell

With this setup I always have my regular podcasts available for the commute into work each morning. At the moment I use Canola to play back the podcasts in the car which is a great piece of software but one problem I found is that it doesn’t auto rescan the media directory if you add new files. To do this I use another cron job which looks like (runs at 4am):

00 04 * * 1-5 canola-conf-rescan.sh

And there you have it. Podcast heaven.