In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, Republicans are taking the opportunity to scold progressives about living in an echo chamber and failing to take a moment to sample thought patterns of the Right.

Well I did, but I came to the conclusion that most is still complete rubbish. In fact, according to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is crap. So don’t take it personally.

There are two problems with echo chambers. First they are chambers. Big walled-off areas that make it hard to hear the echoes from the adjacent chambers. To come to my own defence, I’ve peeked into the streams of my conservative friends. Sorry, you’re all great, but I don’t like what I see. One step beyond my immediate friends, I see rudeness, crudeness, profanity and little thoughtful analysis. Make a logical argument, bring evidence and I’ll listen. But “Lock that bitch up!”? What am I to do with that? Of course, the progressives have their own versions of the echo. But then there are the echoes themselves.

It’s the echoes that are bothering me mostly now.

The echoes have become a cacophony. Thoughts colliding against the walls, amplifying and distorting one another. It’s exhausting and anxiety provoking.

I’m trying something new. I’m dipping into the information stream on a need-to-know basis. Someone asks my opinion about the election of the U.S. president once every four years. And they ask about legislators on their own cycles. So I’ll check back on U.S. politics then. Seriously. Who is Trump going to pick for his Cabinet? Who will he nominate for the Supreme Court? I’m sure it’s all very fascinating. But I can’t do anything about it. And neither can you. Posting it on your FB feed. Liking this, liking that. It’s nothing. I’ll dip back into politics when I’m asked to vote. Otherwise what’s the point. Being informed? Being informed so that you can do what, exactly? So you participate in the Internet outrage du jour? FOMO?

Here’s my program:

• I’m taking a week off all news and social media. Pushing the reset button.
• I’ve deleted FB and Twitter from my phone. I’m not going anywhere. I haven’t resigned in protest. It’s just not helping me make better decisions.
• I’ve deleted all bookmarks to news sites.
• After a week, I’ll check back with FB. But my resolutions are:
  1. To spend no more that 10 minutes a day looking at FB.
  2. To log in to FB no more than once a day.
  3. To post something no more than once a week. Probably pictures of dogs, children, that sort of thing.
  4. To not post, like, or otherwise react to items of a political nature. Just to be clear, I still think Donald Trump is a neurotic pussy-grabbing clown, but now that you know that, we’re good.
• For news sites, I’ll check back when I need to act on something and when I need more information in order to act. It’s all very interesting but I’m not sure what I’ll do with it.

I’m calling it goal-oriented news gathering.

Peace.

As I’ve mentioned before I use Anki extensively to memorize and practice Russian vocabulary. With language learning in particular, adding spoken pronunciations to the cards makes an enormous difference. Since I use Open Russian extensively to provide information to built my Anki cards, it’s a natural source of audio data, too. To optimize my learning time, I built two small scripts to grab and rename the audio files from the Open Russian site. First, I’ll describe my workflow.

My vocabulary workflow

Each morning, I pull 6 words from the a Russian word frequency list to add to my Anki deck. With each word, I use Open Russian to look up the complete definition, example sentences, syllabic stress, and other pieces of information that go on the flashcard. To facilitate OpenRussian.org opening in its own dedicate browser window, I built a Fluid application out of it. Having common workflow-related sites like this in their own dedication applications makes a lot of sense for task isolation.

Finally, for many words, I like to extract the audio from the site and add it to the card that I’m building. It turns out to be a cumbersome step because the audio doesn’t play in a QuickTime or other player that allows me to save the file. The source sound files can be downloaded from Shtooka but this is yet another step. This is where my enhanced workflow comes in.

What should the enhanced workflow do?

Optimally, I should be able to grab the URL that is displayed in the Open Russian Fluid application. Using the content of that page, I should be able to obtain the URL of the mp3 file for that word and save it to the desktop using the Russian word as the filename.

The solution

First is a Python application that grabs the URL from the Fluid app, extracts the audio file URL, and downloads it to the desktop.

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import re
import urllib2
import urlparse
from os.path import expanduser, normpath, basename, join

""" Obtain the URL from the OpenRussian application,
which is just a Fluid browser application.
If obtaining URL from Safari:
	scpt = '''
	tell application "Safari"
		set theURL to URL of current tab of window 1
	end tell'''
"""
def getOpenRussianURL():
	from subprocess import Popen, PIPE


	scpt = '''
		tell application "OpenRussian"
			set theURL to URL of browser window 1
		end tell'''

	p = p = Popen(['osascript'], stdin=PIPE, stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
	stdout, stderr = p.communicate(scpt)
	return stdout

""" Extract the audio file mp3 from
the content of the OpenRussian.org page.
"""
def audioURL(html):
	m = re.search("<audio.+(http.+mp3)", html)
	return m.group(1)

def saveMP3(url,path):
	mp3file = urllib2.urlopen(url)
	with open(path,'wb') as output:
		output.write(mp3file.read())

""" Fetch mp3 to which aURL points and save
it to the Desktop using the word as the filename
"""
def fetchMP3(aURL):
	response = urllib2.urlopen(aURL)
	content = response.read()

	url = audioURL(content)
	path = join(expanduser("~"),'Desktop',basename(normpath(url)))
	saveMP3(url, path)

url = getOpenRussianURL()
fetchMP3(url)

To make this even faster, I assigned the script to a Quicksilver keystroke trigger. It’s that simple. Once little twist that I discovered was that difficulty in launching a Python application from a Quicksilver trigger. Although there must be an easier way, I haven’t found it. Instead, I just wrote an AppleScript that runs the application in question and I used that as the triggered script in Quicksilver:

--
--	Created by: Alan Duncan
--	Created on: 2016-11-05
--
--	Copyright (c) 2016 Ojisan Seiuchi
--	All Rights Reserved
--

use AppleScript version "2.4" -- Yosemite (10.10) or later
use scripting additions

do shell script "/Users/alan/Documents/dev/scripts+tools/fetchOpenRussianMP3.py"

There may be a way to finish the process and add this to the Anki card in one step. I’ll have to work on that.