The 20 Best iPod Utilities

in Podcasts, Web/Tech | December 4th, 2007

Life­hack­er has assem­bled a great list that will help you max­i­mize the use of your iPod. Here, they point you to free soft­ware that will let you 1) rip a DVD to your iPod, 2) copy music and videos to and from your iPod, and also from and to any com­put­er, 3) load videos (and par­tic­u­lar­ly YouTube videos) to you iPod, 4) put Wikipedia on your iPod, 5) free your­self from using iTunes, 6) back­up your iPod, etc.

Check out the full list here and learn to make your iPod a bet­ter learning/entertainment tool.

PS: A very sim­i­lar list of iPod tips was pub­lished a few days ago over at Pachecus.com, and they were kind of enough to include a link to one of our old fea­tures. Have a look here too.

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The Western Tradition by Eugen Weber: 52 Video Lectures

in History, Online Courses, Video - Arts & Culture | December 4th, 2007

The West­ern Tra­di­tion is a free series of videos that traces the arc of west­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Start­ing in Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the sur­vey pro­ceeds to cov­er the Byzan­tine Empire and Medieval Europe, then the Renais­sance, Enlight­en­ment, and Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, and final­ly ends up in 20th cen­tu­ry Europe and Amer­i­ca. Pre­sent­ed by UCLA pro­fes­sor Eugen Weber, an impres­sive Euro­pean his­to­ri­an, the video series includes over 2,700 images from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art that illus­trate some of the West’s great cul­tur­al achieve­ments. Each of the 52 videos runs about 30 min­utes. So you’re get­ting an amaz­ing 26 hours of con­tent for free.

You can stream all of the videos from this page.

You can find The West­ern Tra­di­tion list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Online Writing Courses at Stanford

in Stanford | December 3rd, 2007

Quick fyi: Start­ing today, you can sign up for online writ­ing cours­es from Stan­ford. Offered by Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies and the Stan­ford Cre­ative Writ­ing Pro­gram (which is one of the most dis­tin­guished writ­ing pro­grams in the coun­try), these online cours­es give begin­ning and advanced writ­ers, no mat­ter where they live, the chance to refine their craft with gift­ed writ­ing instruc­tors and smart peers. Just to be clear, the cours­es are not free.

Reg­is­tra­tion starts today, and the cours­es (see the list below) will go from Jan­u­ary 14 — March 23. For more infor­ma­tion, click here, or sep­a­rate­ly check out the FAQ.

(Full dis­clo­sure: I helped set up these cours­es and think they’re a great edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty. But nonethe­less take my opin­ion with a grain of salt.)

Win­ter Cours­es:

• Get­ting Start­ed in Cre­ative Writ­ing
• In-Depth Fea­ture Writ­ing
• Nov­els in Progress
• Writ­ing for Tele­vi­sion: The Basics
• Fic­tion Writ­ing: Linked Sto­ries
• Truth and Fric­tion: Mem­oirs and Per­son­al Essay
• Food Writ­ing: The Lit­er­ary Gourmet
• Poet­ic Inven­tion, or, What Strange World Is This?

By the way, if you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area and want to keep the mind engaged, give some thought to Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. Our full win­ter cat­a­logue is here.

James Joyce’s Dubliners: Four Stories

in Audio Books, Literature | December 2nd, 2007

Back in June, we high­light­ed the release of James Joyce’s Ulysses in free audio­book for­mat. Ulysses stands as Joyce’s most impor­tant work, and for some, it’s most the impor­tant work pub­lished in the Eng­lish lan­guage dur­ing the entire 20th cen­tu­ry. Despite Ulysses’ enor­mous stature, many read­ers still turn to Dublin­ers, a col­lec­tion of 15 short sto­ries that Joyce pub­lished in 1914, part­ly because it’s con­sid­ered his most acces­si­ble writ­ing. Over at Lib­rivox, you can find sev­er­al key sto­ries from this col­lec­tion — name­ly, The Sis­ters (mp3), Ara­by (mp3), Eve­line (mp3), and The Dead (mp3 in zip file). The Dead is the longest and last sto­ry in the col­lec­tion, and it’s a Christ­mas sto­ry, some say the “great­est of all Christ­mas sto­ries,” which makes it par­tic­u­lar­ly time­ly to men­tion here.

It’s worth not­ing that you can down­load the com­plete etext of Dublin­ers at Project Guten­berg or on Google Book Search. (The lat­ter ver­sion is clean­er.) And, if you can suf­fer through it, Guten­berg also offers a free audio ver­sion of Joyce’s text, which is read by a com­put­er, not a real per­son.

Last­ly, be sure to spend some time perus­ing Lib­rivox’s entire col­lec­tion of free audio­books. It’s the best on the web.

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MIT & Google for High School Students

in Google, Math, MIT | December 2nd, 2007

Here’s a quick fyi on two ini­tia­tives announced for high school stu­dents this past week:

For six years, MIT’s Open­Course­Ware ini­tia­tive has done a great job bring­ing free edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to adult learn­ers world­wide. (More on the ini­tia­tive here.) Now, it has launched a sec­tion of its web­site devot­ed to high school stu­dents and teach­ers. Here, you’ll find a series of “MIT intro­duc­to­ry cours­es” with­in 11 major areas of study (e.g. Engi­neer­ing, For­eign Lan­guages, Math, etc.). Plus, you can access infor­ma­tion that sup­ple­ments AP Biol­o­gy, Physics and Cal­cu­lus cours­es. This is a trove of mate­r­i­al that the ambi­tious stu­dent will cer­tain­ly want to explore.

Next, Google announced its first open source con­test for pre-uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents. Called the “Google High­ly Open Par­tic­i­pa­tion Con­test” (a bit of a mouth­ful), it’s intend­ed to “help intro­duce sec­ondary school and high school stu­dents to open source soft­ware devel­op­ment and to encour­age young peo­ple through oppor­tu­ni­ties in the fields of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math.” For more infor­ma­tion you can click here and here.

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The Beginnings of New Journalism: Capote’s In Cold Blood

in Books | November 30th, 2007

Talk has recent­ly focused on the pass­ing of Nor­man Mail­er, a nov­el­ist remem­bered for many things. As The New York Times put it, he was “a prodi­gious drinker and drug tak­er, a wom­an­iz­er, a devot­ed fam­i­ly man, a would-be politi­cian who ran for may­or of New York, a hip­ster exis­ten­tial­ist, an anti­war pro­test­er, an oppo­nent of women’s lib­er­a­tion and an all-pur­pose feud­er and short-fused brawler, who with the slight­est provo­ca­tion would hap­pi­ly engage in head-butting, arm-wrestling and ran­dom punch-throw­ing.” He was, of course, also a nov­el­ist, and, for some, “the great­est nov­el­ist of the sec­ond half of the Amer­i­can cen­tu­ry.” That’s at least how George Pack­er sized him up on his New York­er blog.

For Pack­er, Mail­er achieved his lit­er­ary great­ness when he ven­tured into the realm of “New Jour­nal­ism,” help­ing to cre­ate a new genre that brought fresh lit­er­ary tech­niques to con­ven­tion­al jour­nal­ism and his­tor­i­cal writ­ing. We need only men­tion The Exe­cu­tion­er’s Song, Mail­er’s heav­i­ly-researched account of the exe­cu­tion of Gary Gilmore, that earned him the Pulitzer Prize in fic­tion in 1980.

Although Tom Wolfe offi­cial­ly coined the expres­sion “New Jour­nal­ism” in 1973 (see the book with the same title and relat­ed book review), this lit­er­ary approach was not entire­ly new. Oth­er authors had already writ­ten mas­ter­pieces in the genre but referred to it by dif­fer­ent names. More than any­one else, Tru­man Capote gave form to the genre when he pub­lished In Cold Blood in 1965. Famous­ly cen­tered around the 1959 mur­der of the Clut­ter fam­i­ly in rur­al Kansas, this “non­fic­tion nov­el” was writ­ten to give real­i­ty to some­thing Capote believed for 20 years — that jour­nal­ism was “the most under­es­ti­mat­ed, the least explored of lit­er­ary medi­ums” and that in the right hands “jour­nal­ism, reportage, could be forced to yield a seri­ous new art form,” (See Capote’s inter­view with George Plimp­ton, 1966.)

In Cold Blood orig­i­nal­ly came out in four suc­ces­sive print­ings of The New York­er. And as the cur­rent edi­tor of the mag­a­zine describes it, “peo­ple were lit­er­al­ly chas­ing the deliv­ery trucks down the street.” Quite nice­ly, you can find the first install­ment of the nov­el in the New York­er’s online archive (for free). It cov­ers the first 70 pages of the cur­rent­ly pub­lished book, and here the stage for the rest of the non­fic­tion nov­el is set. To para­phrase a line from the recent film star­ring Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man, it’s in this sec­tion of the nov­el where two Amer­i­c­as col­lide — the qui­et con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­ca and its vio­lent under­bel­ly.

Quick after­thought: The New York­er should con­sid­er reprint­ing the four copies of the mag­a­zine which intro­duced In Cold Blood to the world. I imag­ine that copyright/contractual issues might stand in the way. But if they did­n’t, it could be a pret­ty excit­ing media event and read­ing expe­ri­ence.
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The MIT Lecture Browser & A Beautiful Mind

in MIT, Science | November 27th, 2007

MIT has released a new search engine that draws on speech recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy and lets users search MIT audio & video lec­tures by key­word. For exam­ple, if you type “NASA” into the search box, the search results will include all of the instances where a speak­er utters the word NASA in a record­ed lec­ture. (You can get more back­ground infor­ma­tion on the new search engine here.)

Now, what’s nice about using this exam­ple is that a “NASA” search will bring you to an intrigu­ing pre­sen­ta­tion by Sylvia Nasar. (Click here and type “NASA” or “Sylvia.”) She’s the author of the bestelling book, A Beau­ti­ful Mind, which offers a bio­graph­i­cal account of the Nobel Prize-win­ning math­e­mati­cian John Nash and his strug­gles with para­noid schiz­o­phre­nia. The book was turned into an Acad­e­my Award-win­ning film, and here you can find Nasar deliv­er­ing a lec­ture at MIT called “A Beau­ti­ful Mind: Genius, Mad­ness, Reawak­en­ing.” She’s a very able speak­er and tells a good sto­ry. Have a look. (You can also access Nasar’s talk here.)

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How to Watch DVDs on Your iPod?

in Podcasts, Web/Tech | November 27th, 2007

The answer is sim­ple: Hand­brake. This free, open source soft­ware (which works on MacOS X, Lin­ux and Win­dows) makes it sim­ple to load and watch DVDs on your video iPod. Here are some help­ful instruc­tions to get you start­ed.

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The Graduate at 40

in Film | November 27th, 2007

The film that spoke to a gen­er­a­tion of alien­at­ed youth dur­ing the 1960s is now 40 years old (and actu­al­ly look­ing much tamer than it first did). To mark the occa­sion, a 40th anniver­sary col­lec­tor’s edi­tion DVD has been released, filled with a good amount of extra mate­ri­als. Also, Fresh Air broad­cast­ed a show last week (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) that brought togeth­er inter­views with var­i­ous mem­bers of the film’s cast and crew. As Lar­ry David would say, it’s pret­ty, pret­ty, pret­ty good. And, by the way, have a look back at our ear­li­er post: Meet Lar­ry David (in Video)

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The Future of Print

in Literature, Media | November 27th, 2007

WNY­C’s lat­est On The Media (iTunes — Feed — Site) cov­ers the cri­sis of tra­di­tion­al book pub­lish­ing in a new media age. While Ama­zon rolls out the Kin­dle and more and more con­tent comes out in pure dig­i­tal form, we’re still pub­lish­ing more books than ever before. One inter­est­ing note from the pro­gram is that pub­lish­ers have dis­cov­ered that offer­ing more free con­tent online (i.e. not just excerpts but whole chap­ters of new books) serves to increase sales even more. The show was great–worth a lis­ten.