Making an Audio version of the Ubuntu Podcast

I listen to a number of podcasts on a regular basis, mainly programming related, during my 45 minute commute to and from work every day. Now almost all of them are downloaded in audio format but recently the Ubuntu Podcast as stopped posting these formats. In a recent episode (#32) Joel and Nick explained they reasoning behind this and I fully support them in their decision – I mean, it’s an overhead for them in terms of time and storage/bandwidth. Add to that the fact that I can still subscribe via iTunes and some would wonder why I’m making a fuss (which I’m not btw!)

Well the fact of the matter is that it both illegal and dangerous to watch a video podcast on an iPod Nano while driving at 70mph down the motorway. Add to that the fact that each of the main episodes is 500MB and my Nano has ‘only’ 8GB to play with and i have a few reasons for wanting an less-heavyweight version. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading an RSS Feed with C# and Python

When I started this site I had a project in mind that would download Podcasts as they were posted and maintain the content of my MP3 player so that I didn’t have to do it myself. Well since then I have lost my iTunes virginity and while it doesn’t do everything that I wanted (like telling me that a new episode has been downloaded) it does automatically download and delete them once I’ve watched/listened to them.

But just because I don’t need to develop a complete application there is still an itch to scratch here – a few of them in fact.

• How do I download an RSS stream – it’s not just podcasts that uses them
• How do I parse the resulting XML
• How do I download a file and store it locally
• and how do I do this in C# and Python

Well this post will answer the first two questions using C# and LINQ and Python and it’s XML library.
Read the rest of this entry »