I’m up outta here tomorrow for Spain, and I realized that I’ll be missing out on my This American Life shows, so I am revisiting time-shifting my radio. I’ve got a D-Link USB Radio plugged in to my linux machine. I just had to install Alsa, lame, and fmtools and come up with a script to marry them. Here’s what I came up with: ~~~ ruby #!/usr/bin/ruby -w

raise “#{$0} " if ARGV.length < 3

show = ARGV[0] freq = ARGV[1] seconds = ARGV[2]

FM = ‘/usr/local/bin/fm’ LAME = ‘/usr/bin/lame’ AMIXER = ‘/usr/bin/amixer’ ARECORD = ‘/usr/bin/arecord’

file = “#{ENV[‘HOME’]}/#{show}_#{Time.now.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%d’)}” # Tune the radio %x{#{FM} #{freq} 65535}

Set up the mixer settings

%x{#{AMIXER} -c 0 set Line,0 100%,100% unmute cap} %x{#{AMIXER} sset Capture 75%,75% unmute cap} %x{#{ARECORD} -f cd -t wav -d #{seconds} #{file}.wav} %x{#{LAME} –quiet -m j –preset standard #{file}.wav #{file}.mp3} %x{rm #{file}.wav} ~~~ Then just set up my crontab to record the show: 0 19 * * Fri /home/aaron/record.rb TAL 94.9 3600 ~~~ Now I'll have This American Life waiting for me when I get home!