The situation:

I listen to a lot of podcasts.  I like to keep up with all of the episodes, not just the most recent one, and I like to be in control of exactly what plays and in what order.  (So stitcher is out.)  In my iPhone (and before that, iPod) days, I used iTunes to create Smart Playlists for the different categories of podcast I want to listen to.  E.g. all NPR podcasts go in one playlist, all short story podcasts go in another.  I define them like this:

my smart playlist in iTunes

See, it only lists podcasts, that haven’t been played, with certain names.  So if I’m in the mood for NPR, I start at the beginning of my NPR playlist.  As I play each podcast, either in iTunes or an iPod-like device, its play-count is incremented, and it no longer appears in its playlist.  The next time I sync the device with iTunes, it deletes played podcasts and loads on new unplayed ones.

The problem:

I switched from iPhone to an Android (Motorola Droid X), and didn’t want to have to carry several devices in my purse.  I wanted my Android to be a one-stop-shop just like the iPhone was, which meant it needed to sync podcasts.

My requirements were:

• Must be able to play podcasts in chronological order, but have multiple programs interspersed.  I.e. something like a Smart Playlist.
• Must know when a podcast has been played, so it can be removed from the list.
• Must not decide the podcast has been played when it’s only been started.
• Must be able to resume a podcast in the middle–I want to start listening to an episode of Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, switch to a short story, and then resume Wait, Wait where I left off, without any effort on my part.  (The Android’s default music player doesn’t resume files when you listen to something else in the middle.  In other words, it assumes all audio is music.  Weak.)
• If it syncs, the sync needs to be quick an easy.  No more than a couple of clicks, and shouldn’t take much longer than it takes to copy the files over USB.
• If it syncs, it needs to be a two-way sync.  So listening to a file on the phone increments the play-count on the computer.  Listening on the computer removes it from the playlist, so it will also be removed from the phone at the next sync.  Without this, syncing is useless.
• Sync music, too.
• If it syncs to a computer, it has to sync to a Mac, because almost all of my home computers run Mac OS (and all of my music is stored on a Mac).

And my nice-to-haves:

• A quick-rewind, to go back 7, 15, or 30 seconds with a single click (which iTunes on the iPhone supports)
• Sync to a computer, so the computer can download podcasts quickly, instead of the phone downloading slowly.
• Nice widget so I can run it easily.

The solution:

After trying a number of different programs, both for music playing and music syncing, here’s the combination I came up with:

• PlayerPro by Blaston LLC
• iSyncr for Mac by JRTStudio
• Simple Last.fm Scrobbler by Adam Renberg (any scrobbler would do, but this was the only one I found when I started looking)
• iTunes on my iMac

Here’s how it works:

iTunes downloads the podcasts, and I have Smart Playlists that define exactly which podcasts I want.  One trick: limit to 25 least recently added items per playlist.  It’s unlikely I’ll ever want to listen to that many in a row, and that way I’m not using up a ton of space for no good reason.

I start iTunes on the computer, then plug in my Droid X via USB.  (If you plug it in before opening iTunes, odd things happen and you have to reboot.)

I double-click the icon for the phone’s SD card when it appears, and there is iSyncr.app.  iSyncr on the phone also includes a Mac OS app, which resides on the phone itself.  All updates happen on the phone.  Smart!

I run iSyncr.app.  It comes up with a list of all of my playlists in iTunes (including smart playlists!), and I check which ones I want to sync to the phone.  These are remembered every time I open the app.  One key: I checked “remove files from phone when they’re removed from the playlist”.  This is the two-way sync.  The first time, it just copies all the files to the phone. Then I quit.

I disconnect the phone (safely, by dragging both phone icons to the trash before unplugging the USB).  Then whenever I feel like it, I listen to the playlists on PlayerPro.  PlayerPro has the best UI for listening to podcasts and playlists.

Each song I listen to is scrobbled (in the background) by Simple Last.fm Scrobbler (to the last.fm website; you’ll need an account).

When I connect the phone to the computer again, and run iSyncr again, it fetches the scrobble-list and uses that to determine which files I played, and increments the play count in iTunes.  iTunes then removes played files from the playlist, and iSyncr follows suit.

Caveats:

Sometimes I need to run iSyncr twice, because it reports play-count changes to iTunes after it fetches the playlists, so it misses anything that updated due to the play-count change.

And sometimes iSyncr doesn’t properly increment the play count of a file that I listened to in the course of more than two sessions.  I.e. if I listen to the first third of a podcast, then listen to some other file, then go back and listen to the next third, then listen to some other file, and then go back to finish the podcast, it doesn’t always register that it’s been finished.  This is a rare enough occurrence that I haven’t complained, but it does mean that I have to go into iTunes and correct it occasionally.

Custom Knits: Unleash Your Inner Designer with Top-Down and Improvisational Techniques  by Wendy Bernard (of knitandtonic.net) [GoodReads] is a lovely book.  I bought it because most written sweater patterns aren’t designed for someone as small as I am, which means I need to learn how to customize them.  I don’t want to spend all that time knitting a sweater, only to have it come out as something baggy and blechy that I’d never want to wear.  Also, most written patterns describe starting at the bottom and knitting up… which means you’ve knitted most of the sweater before you can try it on!  Knitting from the top-down allows you to try-as-you-go.

The book is clearly aimed at the modern (20s-30s, female) knitter.  The patterns are edgy, not boring baggy sweaters (whew!), but they’re items that real people might wear, and she includes suggestions for other ways to customize each pattern to “make it your own”.  They all call for finer weight yarn, so more knitting but less-bulky sweaters.  It has lots and lots of pictures… most of which involve scantily clad women and/or men.  (Only the women are wearing sweaters.  One picture seriously has a scantily clad pool boy in the background.  I don’t know why.)  The theme seems to be SoCal and beaches, since many of them are wearing swimsuits under their sweaters.

I wish there were more explanation of how each pattern works and how to calculate the numbers for your own body size, shape, and weight of yarn.  She gives instructions for a wider range of sizes than most patterns do; I think in most cases the extra small is too small even for me (this never happens, so I’m excited), and she goes up to 3x-large.  But the instructions are all for the particular gauge she specifies, so if you want to branch out by changing to a completely different yarn, you have to do the math, and figure out how to do the math, all on your own (or with another book).  I love her narrative voice, and wish she spent more time describing how she decides what changes to make to a sweater, and how to make those changes.

My favorite part is the two-page instructions on how to make your own dress-maker’s dummy using two rolls of duct tape, an old t-shirt, and a hanger.  (And cotton batting and your best friend.)  I’ve been wanting my own dummy for a long time, but the highly customizable ones are ridiculously expensive, and the lightly customizable ones will never be my shape.  This is something I could actually do.  (I just need to wait until purpleleopard finishes moving and has an afternoon to spend duct-taping me…)

I’ll let you know when I’ve knitted anything from the book …

Let’s say you use WordPress, and Thesis, and you decided you wanted to add a custom post type (new with WP 3.0!), for whatever reason.  Maybe you just wanted a way to differentiate book reviews from other blog posts, with a custom taxonomy called Authors* and no Categories, because they don’t make sense.

You might do a web search and find these helpful links about how to make the Thesis meta boxes appear in the custom post type’s edit page.  That’s awesome!  But really, I want those posts to show up on my home page and in my RSS feed.  I couldn’t find it documented anywhere.  There are lots of examples of how to narrow down query results in order to show only some of the normal post-type posts, but not on how to add posts that aren’t showing up in the default search.  It turns out it’s actually pretty easy.

So, here’s what you do!

1. Create your new post type.  I used Custom Post Type UI.
2. Create a new post of that type.  (Post Type Switcher is a nice way to change an existing post.)
3. Use the Thesis Custom File Editor to edit custom_functions.php to add the following:

   function custom_post_home($query) {
       if (is_feed() || is_home())
           set_query_var('post_type',array('post','bookreviews'));
   }
   add_filter('parse_query', 'custom_post_home');

What it’s doing:

Line 1 is creating a new function which can be added to a hook.

Line 2 checks if we’re on the home page or in an rss feed, because those are the two places where I expect a mix of posts and bookreviews should appear.

Line 3 updates the query to look for posts of type “post” (the default) or “bookreview”—of course, you would put in your own post type here.

Line 5 adds the custom function to WordPress’s hook “parse_query”.  (You could probably also use “pre_get_posts”, if you wanted.  I didn’t notice a difference in behavior.

——

* To pick an example completely at random.  It could be there is an easier way to accomplish this, but I wanted it as a trial run before creating a custom post type for short fiction.  To see if it’s feasible.  It is, and it’s easy once you know how.

Today being the first day of my holiday vacation, I just finished editing the third draft of my vampire story, “The Organville Vampire”. It’s a lot better now, nearly a real story!

When I type in the changes I’ll call it the fourth draft, and I’ll know how long it is.  And then I’ll print it out for my beta readers!  Should be ready by the new year…

(Now I need to go buy Christmas presents… at least my priorities are in order?  :-/ )

I’m not conceding defeat, exactly, because that would imply that I’m a failure, and I don’t believe that.  But… I took on a task, and real life came along and bit me.

I set out to write 50,000 new words on THE LAST FAIRY GODMOTHER this month, and I haven’t broken 15,000†.  Being the second-to-last day of the month, I’m not going to try to pretend that I could manage all that before the end of tomorrow.

I’ve concluded several things from this experiment:

• I can write a lot when I don’t care if it makes sense.
• I actually prefer it to make sense, even though it’s “just” NaNoWriMo.
• While I started out with characters and a plot, I missed out on the critical VILLAIN element.  I finally figured out the villain (and also what he does that personally affects my main characters!), but not until the third week, by which time I’d fallen seriously behind.
• Scheduling something, even something wonderful and fun, that takes up a whole weekend plus two weekday evenings during NaNoWriMo is tantamount to NaNoSuicide.  Especially when I still have my day job, and therefore had no weekend to recover from the week and the fun weekend, and still wanted to be able to keep writing.  I lost over a week recovering from that.
• Inertia is really helpful, so a disruption in the inertia drags me to a screeching halt, and then it takes me weeks to care enough to speed up again.
• When trying to avoid writing, I knit beautiful things*. 
• When trying to avoid writing, I make great progress resolving story issues in other stories that are not my main focus.  (Yesterday I realized I could fix two flaws in my vampire story, and I came up with four scenes for a short story version of my first [winning] NaNo story from 2006 about the invention and QA testing of the transporter**.)

Other wins for the month:

• I bought a ton of yarn on sale on Saturday.  Including enough to make my Staghorn Sweater.  As soon as I finish making my vest (see beautiful things, above), I’ll start on the sweater.  Woohoo!
• I haven’t died.
• I got to see or talk to most of my favorite people over the Thanksgiving long weekend.
• There might even be some others, but I’ve already forgotten them.  :-/

So, I think my plan is to finish polishing my vampire story, and then decide whether I want to start back in on LFG or write the four scenes for my transporter story.  Or maybe even try to figure out what the later scenes of the transporter story might be…  Hmm.

——

† Which brings me to 35,000 total!

* And of course I haven’t remembered to take any pictures of it, so no, you cannot see it.  Sorry.

** I can’t remember if it had a title.  It was wonderful and funny.  I still have the novel somewhere, but it is not worth resurrecting in any way shape or form, with the possible exception of the first scene, which was full of fabulous.  I seem to have only documented it on the internet on Nov. 1 of that year, here: http://booklizard.livejournal.com/2006/11/01/

I’m a little behind on NaNo. This week is kicking my butt, with too many things to do. But I’m not worried, I still have plenty of time to catch up. Meanwhile, here’s a wordle of the story:

I just noticed these things lying about my living room.

(It’s a bit grainy, because it’s night-time.  And I won’t remember to take a new picture in the morning.)

I know that I’m in the writing spirit because I have many important bits of the writing craft lying around my living room.

From top to bottom:

• The most awesome, portable, roll of fine-point markers, by Staedtler.
• My previous LFG notebook, Clairefontaine because I love them, and quad because it’s more versatile than lined.  Cloth-bound.
• My new LFG notebook, also Clairefontaine, also quad, but spiral-bound. (I just started this one, so the previous one is still hanging around.  It will move onto a shelf once I’m settled into this one.)
• The stack of pages (held together with one of my favorite pens) that is my Vampire Story printed out.
• The large spiral unlined notebook I use for brainstorming when the small quad paper isn’t working.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter*, which I loved the first half of years ago, and which I decided to pick up again this weekend.  I’ve just learned (again, since presumably I learned it the last time I read it) what a canon is and what a fugue is.
• Very large (ok, “very” in my little non-artistic world) drawing paper, for extra-large brainstorming.  Not often used: but used this weekend.
• And finally, chocolate.  Duh.

(The picture does not include my laptop, because I am using it and didn’t think to include it as one of my writing-things, even though it is.  I have selective blindness, sometimes, often without explanation.)

——

* I swear I don’t usually have so many^ things with the odd^^ “dt” sound pairing just lying around near each other.

^ i.e. greater than none

^^ odd for English, obviously.  I assume “dt” is German in Staedtler and Hofstadter?

I want writing to be about starting at the beginning and writing through until I find the end.  When it goes like that I think, “See, I was right, that’s what writing is like!”  When it doesn’t go like that I think, “Aaahh, I’m failling*!”

I’ve been writing my fairy story since the beginning of this year.  I’ve written somewhere between 15 and 20k words in this story.  (It is destined to be a novel, unless I suddenly discover that Lo, there isn’t really a plot where I expected there would be a plot**.)  And partway through the summer I realized I couldn’t keep writing the scene that I was trying to write, so I skipped ahead a little.  I mean a little, like I skipped over a boring bit that you wouldn’t have wanted to read anyway.  And then I was stuck.  So I backed up and tried again, this time trying not to skip ahead at all.  I have learned, in my years of writing stories, that when I’m stuck it’s usually because there’s something wrong with the story as I’ve written it so far, not because I’m inherently lazy, nor even because the story is inherently flawed.  And so if I can find the right question to ask, I can figure out what went wrong and fix it, and then the story will go merrily along on its way.  So I backed up a little, and rewrote.  And the newer version read better than the older version.  And then I got stuck, again.  I could’ve pushed on, but I know that pushing is a good way to get a bad story that’ll have to be rewritten.  So in July or August, I ripped back*** to a scene I’d written in May (oh, how that hurt), and noticed several plot holes.  Whew, that’s been the problem all along! thought I, and happily got back to writing.

In September I went on a (non-writing) vacation for two weeks, and when I came back I couldn’t remember why this story was supposed to be interesting, and ugh who wrote this rat’s nest, and why am I supposed to care about these characters?  What crystallized for me was that there were too many complications.  Yes, I need to have complications to keep the story going forward.  But if I can’t keep track of all of them, then my reader will have no hope.  So I simplified.  I pulled out an event that happened in the third scene and I made sure I knew, in each scene, what each person should primarily be reacting too.  If they’re not, then it’s a problem.  These things gave me a lot of clarity, and I am not rewriting.  I wrote down what I want to change, and I can see how those changes move forward into the “now” of my story so that I can pick up from “now” and keep writing.  I won’t waste time on rewriting that I could spend on writing new words.  The first draft will not be coherent from beginning to end, but coherence can wait until the second draft.

In order to make these decisions, to see what needs changing, I needed two things.  First was distance away from the story.  Second was the recognition that writing is a process of figuring out what the story is—and also what the story isn’t.  Just because I don’t always know what the story is doesn’t mean I’m failing.  Or falling.

It means I’m writing.

——

* Not merely a typo, but also “failing” and “falling” smooshed together into one word that should already exist.  I’m shocked I didn’t think of it sooner.

** It feels a lot like Columbus sailing and sailing and sailing, and then falling off the end of the Earth because, Lo, there really isn’t more Earth in that direction.  Luckily for all of us, there really was more Earth and he didn’t fall off.  But there are no guarantees for my story.  Mathy philosopher types like Euripedes^ have been positing for centuries that there is more story, but they could be wrong.

^ Was it Euripedes?  Who’s the guy from Egypt who calculated the circumference of the Earth to within 5% accuracy based on the fact that a pole in the ground had more shadow at noon than a similar pole 200 miles south?  That’s the guy I’m thinking of.  Except really I’m thinking of the metaphorical guy, who’s actually just one of the voices in my head, telling me that it has mathematically computed that there must be more story, and its circumference is about the size of a novel.  And other voices are pointing out that this mathy guy hasn’t really proven he’s not just pulling numbers out of his hat, so don’t trust him too much.  I’m trying to be neutral in this debate until I have evidence one way or another.

*** That’s a knitting metaphor, right there.  I’ve ripped back rows in knitting often enough, too.  I hate doing it more than once on a project—and again I think I must be failing—but sometimes it’s just part of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.  But in knitting there is no second draft.  (And if your second sleeve looks better than the first?  Then your sweater will look funny.  :-/)

I have this desire to write more.  I want to tell the world funny rambly stories about my life and whatever catches my attention, because—ooh, shiny!—I’m entertained by totally random things, and I firmly believe there exist people who will find my entertainment entertaining.  (Yeah, I can’t decide if I created that sentence on purpose or not.)

I don’t want to write about my day job.  It’s not relevant, and I have a tendency to drift into snarky rather than funny, which is inappropriate if I want to remain a respected employee.  I don’t want to be inappropriate, and I don’t actually want to be snarky more often than is necessary to entertain the people who find me entertaining.

I’ve noticed that I can tell tragic stories about my own mental processes in a funny way, and I can tell boring stories in a funny way (though they may still be boring).  And I can tell perfectly straight* stories in a perfectly straight way, though I usually bore myself halfway through and have to stop and write something random.

I have a desire to learn how to NOTICE good blog-post subjects, so that I can write about them.  I also have a desire to learn how to WRITE those posts, quickly enough that I’ll click “post” before losing the energy behind them such that I suddenly decide they’re actually dumb and no one cares.  I know no one ought to care, but I’m hoping that the people out there who find me entertaining will care even when the subjects are dumb.

So, what steps should I take to make those two DESIRES become MOTION**?  (Feedback encouraged…)

——

* Straight=non-funny, straight!=hetero, in this context.

** And when will I stop with the random YELLING for emphasis?

*** Does this sound as gross to anyone else as to me?  :-/  I can’t think of a better word, though, so I’m not changing it.  And yeah, I totally added this FIRST^ footnote last.

^ And I’m still yelling.  Sorry, I’ll try to get over it for next time.

I said that I wanted to customize the fit of this sweater, and my theory is that it’ll be better to fix before I get started, rather than after I’ve made it and am disappointed. To that end—being the seamstress that I also am—I decided to make a cloth mock-up, so I could see what it’ll look like on me.  I decided to use muslin, for the simple reasons that it’s super-cheap (~ $1/yd.) and that thin cotton is easy to work with.

Muslin sleeve of the Pseudo-Sweater

Fortunately, this pattern comes with expected dimensions, and I have sharpies, a ruler, and a basic sense of geometry.  So I drew the pattern directly onto the fabric, adding a 5/8 in. seam allowance to each edge that was meant to be sewn together.  Unfortunately, I forgot that the pattern already included a 1-stitch selvage.  The gauge is 16 stitches per 4 inches, or about 1/4 inch per stitch.  So, if I wanted 5/8 in. seam allowance, I could’ve just added 3/8 in.  I noticed this before I sewed anything together, and sewed 7/8 in. seams to get a proper sense of how it will fit.

The other thing was that despite its cheapness, I didn’t want to use up as much fabric as it would take to make the whole sweater.  Since this was just a mock-up to get a sense of how it would fit, I created the whole back, one front, and one sleeve.  Three seams later (I didn’t bother setting the sleeve into the sweater… I hate putting in sleeves), I had a pseudo-sweater and a sleeve.  At first I tried to just put the pseudo-sweater on myself, but I realized I wasn’t getting a good sense of where it would hang on me, so I safety-pinned the critical points (shoulders, center back, side seams) to a tank-top.

Front of the Pseudo-Sweater (with the dart at the sides)

This sweater is meant to be baggy.  I’m ok with that.  But here’s the thing.  Yarn is forgiving.  You can make it much smaller than you’d ever make something woven, and it’ll still fit just fine, because (in general, and obviously this varies depending on the yarn and the stitch) it’ll stretch.  Also, with a bottom hem that just hangs down and isn’t tight to the body, no ribbing around the hips or anything, it’s likely to stretch out and become even baggier, one direction or another.  So starting out with a too-baggy sweater, it’ll only become an even more too-baggy* sweater.

The pseudo-sweater seemed to fit just fine around the hips, but around the waist it looked huge on me.  Turns out I’m not square-shaped.  So, I measured the difference between my hips and the narrowest point of my waist, and divided that by 4 to pick a starting point for how much to leave out of each quarter of the sweater (front left, front right, back left, back right).  Then I tucked in and pinned the side-seam by approximately that much (I totally eyeballed it, not having my measuring tape handy), and was impressed by the improvement.  It would still be loose, but not crazy-baggy.

Back of the Pseudo-Sweater (don't you love how I've used safety pins to attach the sleeves and mark a random point on my back?)

The next questions are: where do I make that dart**, do I make the dart in both front and back or only the back, and after I’ve decreased that much do I want to increase again back to the hip-width, or do I want the shoulders to be a little narrower, too?  Everything I can find about making vertical darts in sweaters indicates I should decrease at the side-seam, not in the back like I would if I were sewing a shirt, but no one seems to explain why.  While I will go with that theory, I’m still waiting for the why.  Since I took in the proper amount from both the front and the back in my pseudo-sweater, and it looked just fine, I think the darts should be symmetrical about the side-seams.  Double-decreases, and double-increases.  The third question, I’m going to play by ear.  I could see increasing to get the shoulders to nearly the width of the hips, without affecting how the sleeves will fit.  From there, I’ll also have to play the sleeves by ear.  From the fabric mock-up, they seemed about the right length or a little short, so it’ll just be a matter of how the yarn actually behaves.

So, I think I’ve identified all of the sizing changes.  Decrease several inches, with the decrease vertically centered at my waist (careful measurement and attention will be required for that…), then increase probably 2/3s as much as I decreased.  And then pay attention to sleeve length as I go.

No problem!  o_O

——

* Check me out, rockin’ the descriptive adjectives.  Oh yeah.

** In knitting, they use the term dart just like in sewing.  But in sewing, a dart is where you cut out and sew together fabric, to make a 3D shape out of flat fabric.  In knitting, you just don’t knit those stitches, so they never exist.  Trippy.