I still don’t have TV service and I plan to keep it that way for a while longer. One thing I have missed is the evening national news. I found the NBC Evening News has been made available as a podcast. That’s good, but I don’t like to leave my computers running at night so I’ve been left with watching for the update to appear in my feed reader (Google Reader) and then manually starting the download. The only “computer” that runs at night is my ReadyNAS which is performing backups and retrieving Linux builds etc. via BitTorrent.

I discovered that the video podcast is also available as a simple video download. The big difference is that the podcast assigns a unique file name to each day’s news whereas the video download has the same name all of the time. This gave me an idea. The ReadyNAS does not have a podcast client but it does have a lightweight version of Linux. I did some digging and found that it runs cron, as task scheduler. So, I setup to define a “task” that would download the evening news every night. It turned out to be simple one-line command …

wget -t 5 -nc -o /media/Daily/nbc-nightly-news.log
        -O /media/Daily/nbc-nightly-news.m4v 
        http://msnbcpod.rd.llnwd.net/e1/video/podcast/pdv_nn_netcast_m4v.m4v
Note: “/media/Daily” is the directory accessable to my video player.

Now, at one minute past one in the morning (“1 1 * * *” in crontab syntax) the ReadyNAS fetches the evening news. I get up every morning, and watch the evening news while enjoying my morning espresso. It’s not a bad way to start the day !