MEPIS Community Forum

GREAT! I downloaded it and will read it as soon as I can! Thanks!!!

Chapters 3 & 4 are up now. You can either download the whole thing or just the latest readings.

Still plugging away at the recording. Chapter eight (over an hour! pant gasp) is up on the site now. I also put up PDF and ePub versions with "cover" pictures. Just me and GIMP. Nothing to write home about.

I know I said I wasn't interested in blogging and that the greencomet site was meant only as a home for the book. Well, I couldn't help myself.-) There are about twenty posts up now, in case anyone has a few idle moments. There are a few on copyright, since it's germane to the book and the site, but the rest are pretty varied.

regards,

rjb

I've got 20 chapters of the reading on the site now, and it's getting pretty big. I'd like to reduce the size of the files so it's not such an obnoxious download. Now, I'm using Audacity to edit the raw files and export them in the ogg format at its lowest quality setting (0) and it's still in the 56kbps range. Since it's just my voice I think I should be able to cut that in half without losing anything. I've looked at soundkonverter and its lowest setting makes even bigger files.

Is there a converter that will let me select an arbitrary quality? Ideally I'd like to type a bit of code that will do the conversion on the whole directory and normalize it at the same time.

Thank you,

rjb

I tried out pacpl. It looked good, with switches for everything. It allowed me to specify bitrate and normalize on the fly. Unfortunately it creates files that are two-thirds larger than the Audacity ones.

hmph

rjb

I found the solution for creating smaller OGGs. It's oggenc, which allowed me to specify a quality of -1. (oggenc *.WAV -q -1) That resulted in about 39kbps average bitrate, and significantly smaller files. So, the full recording, all 47 chapters, comes to a total of about 230MB (the WAVs are a total of about 8GB.) I performed a little final tidying up and normalized it and it's now available on the Green Comet website.

http://greencomet.org/downloads It's the one called "Green Comet - Reading."

Please feel free to download it and have your way with it. (I'm secretly hoping someone will sample it and create something interesting.)

rjb

I'm not sure if you'd call it interesting, but I am thinking of using chapter 13 in one of my courses to illustrate enquiry as a discourse. Also, I'd like to use parts of your work for my literary criticism class in the future...as soon as I finish reading the novel.

I like that, although, not being a scholar, I don't know how ch. 13 illustrates "enquiry as a discourse."

Just be sure you get them all to download it.-)

rjb

Well, you see, you wrote a great example of language portraying the scientific method in action to establish new knowledge...right from the empirical observation to the hypotheses tested and the results obtained. All that in a solid and enjoyable narrative frame that keeps readers interested in the phenomenon and lets them wonder what can be done next. :)

BTW, I downloaded the audio file already. Thanks a lot for giving us the access to your fine work!