Dear fellows of Twiv,

It is my understanding that us humans live in peace and symbiosis with some bacteria. Is there any such arrangement with any virus?

Another way to phrase the question; if all viruses were to be removed from the world, would we be better off?

A follow-up question, even more abstracted from the lab bench; if all viruses were gone, is it reasonable to believe that new ones would come into existence? How fast? From where? In one of the twiv episodes someone said “Any suffciently complex system has parasites”, so I assume given time something is bound to fill the niche of viruses.

All the best,

–Jesper Hogstrom

Actually, I had learned from the previous episode (#46) – which did air after I sent off my question – that there are at least one case of symbiosis between a virus and life. A type of grass that grows in volcanic areas needs to be infected with a fungi and a virus to withstand the heat in the ground.

Anyway, in episode 47, Vincent and Dick elaborated on my question from 49:57 to 58:40 (and Vincent thought it was a great question!).

In short, there are benefits from viruses:

* They speed up evolution by horizontal gene transfer.

* There is so much virus in the oceans, and that turns over a lot of carbon. Removing that and the carbon cycle would change, impacting the ecology greatly.

The ensuing discussion about if virus would re-appear in some way is also very interesting.

I do recommend listening to the entire episode.

Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad make the most well produced shows I’ve ever heard. And to top it off they always have an interesting topic, something about science or metaphysics or existential questions with well made interviews with interesting researchers in the field. And there’s more; Their voices sound so nice. It’s a bliss to listen to, and always make me feel good.

If I for some reason had to cut down on listening, I’d keep this show to the end.

Anyway, I got myself an account but rather quickly decided my laptop speaker did not make the music selection justice (and really, no matter the selection, the lap top speaker would be a joy killer), so I decided to put one of the old boxes to use and plug it into the stereo.

Said and done, I grabbed an old lappy with a broken screen I previously thought would be my video player, but it lacked the CPU power to do better than 50% frame drop rate. I guess it had an old Fedora 6 installation on it.

I should also mention that while I have ran cables to some places in the house, the corner of the stereo is unwired.

Thus, I spent more time than I really had learning about wireless under linux. Then I formatted the harddisk and installed FC9 on it. It accepted the wlan card without a problem, but I still couldn’t connect to the network. A few hours later I moved myself and the machine to a place where I knew for sure the wlan waves actually reached. Doh. The material in my house eats radio waves like pop corn.

At this point I was ready to install Spotify. On the minus side there is no linux client available. On the plus side it worked like a charm using Wine. Yehaa! For several minutes this worked out well. Using VNC I could easily remote to the “jukebox” to control the spotify client and it poured out the lovely tunes of my choice.

Then it lost the network connection, and I had to restart the Spotify client and then it played on and on for a few more minutes. Not satisfied!

I finally gave up on the project and bought one of those FM transmitters usually used to get the mp3 player to send audio to the car stereo.

Now I have Spotify running on my trustworthy ol’ lappy, the FM transmitter just beside me and music coming from my stereo tuned into FM 98.3MHz. If it hand’t been for the complete radio proof house I live in my neighbours could also enjoy the ride

–Jesper Hogstrom

So when my precious started acting up by shutting down. starting. shutting down. starting and so on for minutes, even hours at end I figured it was time to part ways.

My guess was that something in the contact surface of the Play/On button was bad (that’s a technical phrase for ‘oxidization causing inexplicable behaviour’). My choice was – as I saw it – either get a new player; admittedly tempting, or perform open heart surgery; as in spraying some expensive conductor spray on some surface. My financial situation is much better than my hardware skills, so indeed, getting a new player was topping the list.

Seconds before clicking the “buy” button I realized that it was quite some time since I reformatted the drive on the player. There shouldn’t really be any need to do that, except for me having … ehrm… unplugged it while it was still writing. Even – I shamefully admit – unplugged it while it was defragmenting (we all defrag our mp3-players, right?). Maybe there were some bad sectors or FAT entries that created all these problems?

Said and done, I copied most everything except the sound bits to my local harddrive, right-clicked the player-node in windows explorer and selected “Format”.

From here, I simply selected the default options and clicked Start.

After copying back the sync stuff, I asked my player to rsync itself and since then it’s worked just fine. I just wish I’d done a chkdsk first to have some evidence that was the actual problem. The mere fact that things work fine now doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an effect of my cause. But in this case I do think so.

–Jesper Högström

The show is about the latest development in neurology, brain development and related subjects. Sometimes Dr Campbell reviews a book, other times it’s an interview with a leading researcher in the field. The level is sometimes very technical, and always enlightening.

Show length is about an hour.

My peapod config for this:

Knowing more about how your brain works will help you understand yourself and others.

–Jesper Högström

My favourite show of all times is OnPoint Radio from WBUR in Boston. It’s hosted by Tom Ashbrook, a man I hold in high esteem for his knowledge, insight and ability to penetrate the most diverse subjects.

An incredible eight or so 45 minute episodes per week are produced. Each one dedicated to a topic ranging from the financial situation in the u.s. economy, a hot chef in New York City to the expectations of LHC in CERN. Fridays there’s a very interesting news round up. More on that later.

In every show there are a handful of guests, always with the best insight in the issue at hand. That might be the author of a newly published book, CEOs, professors, diplomats or former ministers or foreign correspondents.

The discussion with the studio (or on-pnone) guests is always relevant and insightful. To spice things up, the phone lines are open, and I am impressed both by the quality of people calling in and of course to the call screeners. The callers on air are well spoken with relevant questions.

I’ve subscribed to this podcast for several years, and only skipped 2-3 shows. The average level is simply superb. I’ve learned so much about a huge variety of subjects from this show!

So, check out http://www.wbur.org/listen/podcasts/ and determine how to hook it up for you and your current system.

My peapod config section for OnPoint is as follows

  <feed>
    <title>NPR: OnPoint</title>
    <url>http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510053</url>
  </feed>

Enjoy!

–Jesper Hogstrom

Note that this installation is done on linux! Windows users may be able to do the same thing, but to be honest I haven’t tried. My linux boxes run 24×7, whereas my windows machines are either doing something different or need to go to bed early.

My installation was essentially

wget http://peapodpy.org.uk/downloads/peapod-latest.tar.gz
unzip peapod* /usr/local/bin
ln -s /usr/local/lib/peapod-0.5/peapod.py /usr/local/bin/peapod

Note that the version number may differ. As of today it’s 0.7.2.

The last line to be able to run peapod without remembering where you put it.

If nothing else, at least easy to change afterwards.

Configuration

Read up on the very sparse document on configuration. Essentially you get a default config in ~/.peapod/peapod.xml after you run peapod the first time.

I changed mine to look like

I’m not all that interested in LugRadio, but let’s leave it at that for the moment.

This will put all your desired radio shows in your home directory in a sub directory named podcasts.Under that directory there will be sub directories with date names. That is very nice when you move everything onto an mp3-player that playes sequentially and keeps a current position.

I personally believe I need to pull stuff often, so I want a cron job executed hourly. Either you link a script into /etc/cron.hourly. or you configure the same thing via webmin and have it run as your user – not as root!.

The script I run looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/peapod
cd ~

# Delete dir older than 6 days (that should ensure they are empty)
dirs=`find ~/podcasts -mindepth 1 -type d -ctime +6`

if [ -n "${dirs}" ]; then
        echo Deleting ${dirs}
        rm -r ${dirs}
fi

This script invokes peapod to download all your casts, then finds all directories older than 6 days under ~/podcasts that are older than 6 days and clears them out. You will this have a 6 day rolling window of casts. Change that to suit your needs.

More to follow on both what radio shows to download and how to move the stuff onto your player.

–Jesper