Quirks & Quarks is the CBC’s excellent science program. I usually download the mp3 archives of the show on the weekends and listen while I walk Ceiligh.

Of course, loading up the Quirks & Quarks webpage, finding the archives, downloading the mp3s, and adding them to iTunes takes at least a few minutes. Computers are much better and handling such tedium.

Inspired by the success (for me) of the apod script, quirks.pl is a perl script that downloads the current Quirks & Quarks episode to the Desktop. runQuirks.scpt is an applescript that further simplifies the process by adding the downloads to iTunes and trashing the redundant downloads. I’ve set iCal to invoke runQuirks.scpt in the middle of the night, so now Quirks & Quarks is on my iPod and ready to go Sunday morning.

Note that runQuirks.scpt expects quirks.pl to be in “~/Library/Scripts/quirks/”.