Re: Lecture Audio

  I'm not familiar with RSS feeds or podcasts, and I'm trying to figure it out.
  I see the RSS Feed link on the syllabus and I guess I need an RSS reader for
  it.  I know Google has one, but i'm not sure where to go from there.  Can you
  give me some direction?

You can ignore the rss stuff and download the audio from syllabus.
Right-button click on the audio link next to the lecture notes links (the
browser instructions are for firefox on linux or {open,free}BSD; firefox on
other systems (macos or windows), as well as other browsers (safari, ie) should
be the same or similar).  You should get a menu with a "Save Link as..." entry;
left click on that entry and fill in the rest of the download information.
Depending on how your browser's set up, if you left click on the audio link,
the browser may start playing the recording (I have disabled that feature on my
browser; left clicking on the audio link just downloads the recording as a web
page, which isn't too useful).

There are (at least) two reasons why you might want to pay attention to the rss
feed.  First, each feed entry may contain extra information about the
associated lecture and recording. For example, last Thursday's (21 January)
entry says the lecture didn't get recorded for some unknown reason, so
nothing's available for that lecture.  You can also download the podcast (if
available) from each entry using the right-click trick, except you click on the
entry date; similarly for listening to the recording.

Second, you can use the rss feed to automatically download the recordings.
(You could also automatically scrape the syllabus to download the recordings,
but you'd have to write that code, while there are plenty of automated rss
downloaders available.)

Google's feed reader is simple to use, but you need an account. (If you don't
have an account go to www.google.com/reader and click on the "create an
account" button.  Once you're logged in, go to the reader page if you're not
already there; there should be a link for it in the upper-left corner of the
page, either as a link by itself or as an entry in the more link.  Once in the
reader, open a new window or tab, go to the class home page (
http://tinyurl.com/yc684sb ) and look for rss link in the podcasting section.
Right click on the link and select "Copy Link Location".  Go back to the reader
page, click on "Add a subscription" in the upper left corner.  Move the cursor
into the pop-up text box and middle click, then left clock on add.

If you're running firefox, you can use sage to follow rss feeds; other browsers
may have similar tools, but I'm not familiar with them.  Go to
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77 and left click the "download
now" button (you'll have to left click the checkbox for installing experimental
add-ons to enable the download button).  Once installed, sage shows up as a
directory in your bookmarks; it used to say "sage" but now says "(no title)".
You should also see a sage leaf somewhere on your tool bar; in my case it just
to the left of the url window.  Go to the class homepage, right click on the
rss link, and select "bookmark this link".  Left click on the "Bookmarks Menu"
entry on the pop-up, find the sage (or (no title)) entry and left click on
that.  Finally, left click on save.  If you now click on the sage-leaf icon in
the tool bar, you should get a subwindow showing the rss feed; left click on
it, and you should get the feed.

If you use sage, you can just stay in your browser and don't need to log in to
google.  If you use google reader, you can read feeds from any browser
anywhere.  You can even use both if you can't decide.

I haven't mentioned automated rss downloaders yet, but this notes too long as
it is and it's late.  I'll finish this tomorrow.  Let me know if you have
any questions.