Dan once pointed out the City of Seattle real time emergency dispatch list. I’ve found myself rooting around his site for it more than once of late as sirens spiraled off into the night. Early this evening there was a long-repeating distant lowing noise, the sort I associate with air-horns for air-raids and tornado alerts. It was to the north and west of here. It repeated an insistent pattern for several minutes, nearly inspiring me to leave the couch.

A few minutes later, as bellowing firetrucks barrelled through the intersection, the shaking of my house inspired me to the action of linking to that list. In future when idly curious about events of human disaster, I can consult my own site archives rather than Dan’s.

Moments later, another siren. “Motor Vehicle Accident,” I read, as the police car roughly shouldered through the crowd of gawking SUVs and Smarte Cars, rubber whip antenna flailing authoritatively. “10th Av E / E Roanoke St.”

I fell back against the cushions. My work for the night was done.

iPodder, the cross-platform Podcast receiver.

This may prove useful to learn non-iTunes podcast reception management.

Of course, my ideal would be just to use iTunes and hack something that will place the ‘casts onto the Treo at sync (just like this, but for a Missing-Sync-using Mac user). Perhaps Palmcasting has a lead. Hm, that article cites Pocket Tunes again, is windows-oriented, and relies on being able to drag-and-drop playlists into the sync window, something that Palm’s ‘add to handheld’ tool explicitly disallows.

I also came across AeroPlayer, which looks interesting as well.

Oh, I seem to have overlooked a feature of the Missing Sync toolkit. When the Treo is mounted as a drive to the Mac desktop using the Palm-based “Missing Sync” drive mounter, you can copy tunes (and playlists?) to the media card of the Palm from within iTunes via in-window drag-and-drops. That plus smart playlists for podcasts equals a possibility of accomplishing my goal.

How scriptable this is remains to be seen. Seems like someone must have scripted an ‘if volume mounted’applecsript for iTunes. Clearly. this is also the sort of monkeyshines that watched folders were designed for.

I may delete Busker after poking at it briefly. It is clearly designed to emulate much of iTunes’ functionality, but since the program is so solidly aimed at a Wintel audience I found the design and featureset implementation unappealing. I actually prefer parts of the portable RealPlayer UI, but that app clearly has trouble dealing with a volatile, multivalent mediabase and has already failed to play media from playlists I built with the application from local media on the card.

But enough palm futzing for the day. There’s writing to be done!