It's great having access to the Web and it's resources, including things like streaming media, typically in the form of Real Audio.
There's lots of people and organisations that are happy to provide Real Audio coverage of radio programmes and live concerts, and it's wonderful to be able to hear these things often long after the event itself.

However, there's a catch, which is that in order to listen to Real Audio a connection to the Internet is required at the same time. Wouldn't it be great if you could save these Real Audio streams for later listening? Well, although Real Audio don't like people to save these streams, it turns out there is a way to do just that.

StreamBox VCR, a cool tool that saves these streams to disk is available here. As the page says, after downloading and installing, a Stealth Mulder patch is needed (in order to prevent StreamBox VCR from reporting back to Real Audio).

Good instructions on using StreamBox VCR (and applying the patch) can be found here.

Once you have saved the Real Audio streams to disk, how to listen to them? Well, one of the bits of software downloaded from along with StreamBox VCR is StreamBox Ripper (also found separately here), which rips the saved stream to an MP3 file. In order to rip the Real Audio stream to an MP£ file, StreamBox Ripper requires Real Audio to be installed. At the time of writing, the current Real Audio player is RealOne, which is only free for the first 14 days, however an old version of the Real Audio player (i.e. a totally free version - I used the Real Player G2) will do fine.

Once you have an MP3 file, there are plenty of MP3 players out there, although if you've followed the instructions above you'll already have such an MP3 player installed in the form of the Real Audio player!

Of course, if you have converted these saved Real Audio streams to MP3 files, you can also use them in a number of personal audio devices, as well as playing them on a computer - I tend to burn them to a Mini-disc and listen to them while travelling.

Who ever thought it'd come to this.

Every one of us knows that there is a difference between the actor and the character that they play. However, certain actors exist synonymously in our heads with the their characters, and those that play the under-dog teen girl (shy but ever so clever and usually very cute in an alternative kinda way) fall firmly into this category.
So, it comes as a big shock to see what depths Miss Horowitz (her real name) has fallen to (certainly a case of girl - interrupted. Maybe it wasn't her own doing - maybe she really was "rehearsing" for an upcoming part). It's certainly not what we the public expect of someone who follows in the footsteps of actors such as Mary Stuart Masterton, Ally Sheedy and, until recently, Kirsten Dunst (though, for some reason we don't expect these high standards from Christina Ricci for some reason).

So, it's kind-of innocence destroying when we find that the real life person is capable of such things (*sigh*).

I think I'll come through though.

Finally managed to get an irritating error with this Blogger weblog sorted out - have been getting 503 errors for a long time. Worked out the way to resolve them was to choose one of the supplied templates, and then overwrite it with the html for my custom template - everything seems to work again (yay).

Spent the afternoon with friends, looking around Wapping, enjoying a roast pub lunch, and enjoying a bit of the last sunshine of the year (most probably).

It's been a quiet weekend (in the figurative sense, although maybe not in the literal as there has been a constant barrage of fireworks going off through out the weekend) - did go out to a surprise party last night, so I guess maybe it's not really been that quiet a weekend after all.

And, finally found time to put up some photos of the great time we had in Cornwall during the brief, but glorious British summer (i.e. all three weeks of it).