Defeating Technology: Outsmarting Websites, Finding Podcasts

As I'll note in subsequent posts about my Kindle Fire, I love outsmarting technology and making it do my bidding.

I learned basic HTML in high school, and I've picked up a few tricks through blogging and other pursuits. While I was living in Virginia, I was looking for information that I could use to counter 9/11 conspiracy theories presented by a couple of friends. One of the things I found was a wealth of information at the Popular Mechanics website - they've got some really smart people who have put together some really detailed information (#1, #2) aimed at debunking the conspiracy theories that have cropped up since 9/11.

There's a great podcast in the mix, but there's no download link, only a player. The original link that I had from several years ago - 2007 or 2008, maybe? - had disappeared, but the audio file was obviously still located somewhere since the player still worked. With a little ingenuity, and my basic knowledge of HTML, I was finally able to find a working link and download it. The podcast itself is too brief to go into detail about every conspiracy theory swirling around 9/11, but it goes through a number of the common lapses in logic used by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. The Popular Mechanics content is great in and of itself, but its best feature is that it demonstrates that the sheer volume of science and research is on the non-conspiracist side of the fence. For additional information, the reports from the National Institute for Standards and Technology are also extremely valuable.

More difficult was a January 2012 NPR interview with Chris Isaak on the World Cafe program. I tried to find it in January of 2012, while languishing in a back office in the Middle East. Then, nearly two years later, on the morning of 17 November 2013, while working on this post, the thing about The Sporkful and its snippet on NPR reminded me that I'd never gone and found that Chris Isaak podcast. The thing is, they don't give you a podcast download link, but but buuuuuut, there's an mp3 listed in the source code. I spent just shy of an hour trying one thing after another before I finally found it. I was so pleased, because I hate the idea of relying on a website to keep content up in perpetuity, and I also hate the idea of not being able to listen to stuff whenever I want, regardless of whether I can get an Internet connection or not. (By the way, on the topic of stuff from NPR, here's a 2005 interview by Terry Gross on the Fresh Air program with the authors of Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil.)

When I outsmart technology, or otherwise find ways to get a hold of stuff that the content owners don't intend for me to get, it makes me feel like a superior specimen of the human condition.