Ever the tinkerer

OK, so I found out there is a program that I could download to construct personalized treadmill routines on the new treadmill I just inherited. It is called i2Workout and it has a sound(!) interface with the new treadmill. I thought that was pretty novel. In other words, if I wanted a program that would interact with a piece of exercise equipment I would not have thought to use sound. So, what I do is hook up the computer to the treadmill via the headphone jack, press start on i2Workout and I have my routine.

But then I thought that it was too much of a pain to bring the computer down to the basement every time just to get my customized routine. So, I downloaded Audacity from Sourceforge and, as I type this, I am recording the sounds that come out of the computer speakers to control the treadmill to an mp3 file. Now I can use a cheapo mp3 player to play the sounds that control the treadmill. In order to export the sound file as an mp3 I needed to download and decompress the compiled Lame encoder. I could not get that off of Sourceforge because it only distributes the source code and I am not smart enough to compile it.

If this works it will be a miracle. No, it should work out just fine. If there is anything wrong in my approach I will be the first to write about it here. Isn't technology grand?

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