brainwagon

What can I say? I was bored on the way home yesterday, and decided to record a 23 minute podcast, reviewing two of my moderately recent gadget purchases:

• The Delphi SKYFI2 receiver for XM satellite radio.
• The Panasonic DMC-TZ1 digital camera, a compact five megapixel camera with 10x optical zoom.

I also gave a brief report about my trip down to the Computer History Museum to see their recently restored PDP-1 and play Spacewar!

And I shamelessly plug Pixar’s upcoming summer release of  Cars.

I still get pinged by lots of podcast aggregators, here is hoping that somebody is listening.

Quite some time ago, I started using Feedburner to republish my RSS feed.  It’s nice because you can actually see who is reading your blog via RSS, what items they click through and the like.  But I was sending a mixed message, you could subscribe to my feed either by the ordinary WordPress feed, or via FeedBurner.   The solution is to redirect the Wordpress feed automatically to the Feedburner feed, but this has a problem: Feedburner still needs to access your feed, so you can’t redirect it.   The resulting mod_rewrite stuff always seemed like a pain, so I was happy to find the following plugin by Steve Smith, which makes all these problems go away.

If you have a similar problem, be sure to check it out.

WordPress FeedBurner Plugin // Ordered List by Steve Smith

[tags]WordPress,Blogging,FeedBurner[/tags]

Checking in on Dave Slusher’s blog, I found that he was a voice in something called Geek Christmas Carol, which I find you can download from Friends In Tech. Neat. Also, perusing the comments there, I found that someone else had done much the same thing: Podcast Pickle had produced A Podcast Christmas Carol. Check them both out for the holiday.

Well, I wish my experiment in podcasting was going out with a bang instead of a whimper, but for now, I’m closing the saga that was Brainwagon Radio. It may return in some retooled form in the future: I’m thinking that to really revitalize my interest in doing podcasts I need to find an appropriate cohost and develop a better setup. For now, the 98 episodes stand as an attempt to utilize a new media before I even understood what it was, what I should use it for, or who my audience was. Perhaps when I have a personal answer to one of those questions, I’ll be back to try it again.

Until then, I hope that I didn’t bore you all, and that you drop in and read my blog, which I will continue to keep. I also hope that at least a couple of you were inspired to reach out to others who reside in the Long Tail and create your own podcasts.

It really has been a blast.

I was looking for a nifty gadget to embed audio players inside Wordpress posts. This was a nifty Audio player Wordpress plugin that uses flash to play audio files. You can create simple links, and it creates a nice little Flash gadget to stream and play them.

Here’s one that links to my last podcast (which sadly occurred over a month ago):

[audio:http://brainwagon.info/audio/brainwagon-20051117.mp3]

Penguin Books is releasing the classic Dicken’s tale A Christmas Carol as a podcast. Go here and you can subscribe to it, or just download the mp3 files. They even have an AAC enhanced version for the iPod. Neat! Via BoingBoing

And if you need some more audio, you could still avail yourself of the classic Christmas serial The Cinnamon Bear.

Last year, I wrote a script to eek out one episode of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear each day leading up to Christmas Eve. I had a few subscribers, but just a few. Still, I think it’s a fun holiday serial, and I was gonna set it up to do the same this year. Unfortunately, I seem to have mislaid the little python script that I used to generate the feeds and the webpage, so instead, I’ve wimped out and just stuck them all on a special page dedicated to The Cinnamon Bear. Go ahead, slaughter my bandwidth, slurp up all 74 megabytes of classic radio and enjoy it.

Happy Holidays!

Each of the last two years, I’ve made mp3 files of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear available here. This serial ran from November 29th through Christmas Eve, and I realized today that I haven’t got it queued up yet for this year. Expect it (and a more worthy introduction) by the end of today.

If you really are doing it for the love, why bother assigning a number to it?

Let’s put it another way: if my goal is to maximize the value that I create, I obviously can do that in a couple of different ways, I can either choose to concentrate and create things which are truly of large value to a smaller number of people, or I could settle for quantity over quality and pander to the lowest common denominator. There has to be more to how you choose to live your life than spamming lots of individuals with trivial thoughts.

Need a spooky mp3 for your halloween party? Try this brief mp3 of Bach’s Toccatta and Fugue in D minor. I created this myself from an unlabelled MIDI file using Timidity, and I release as free for whatever use you can think of.

On October 30th, 1938, Orson Wells’ Mercury Theater broadcast what is quite likely the most famous radio play ever created: his own version of the classic H.G. Wells story The War of the Worlds. On the occasion of Halloween, and corresponding to the current opposition of Mars, it seems like an appropriate treat would be a copy of the original broadcast for your mp3 player. Not only fun, but non-fattening!

KNBR has posted a very nice tribute to Bay Area sportscasting legend Bill King. It’s amazing to me the breadth and depth of his experience and talent, and how many important events in sports history he was calling. Truly an amazing career. Check it out.

Yahoo! has decided to try to break into the podcasting arena. Apparently you can even use their Yahoo! Music Engine to download and listen to podcasts, at least if you are using Windows XP. The website looks nice, I’ll have to check it out further when time permits.

Todd over at Geek News Central notes that the iTunes 4.9 release with podcasting is blasting him with traffic:

I just checked my latest Libsyn Stats and downloads are through the roof. I am getting reports that sites like Dawn and Drew are down, servers have melted all over the podcasting sphere. Thus far this site which is hosted on a GoDaddy server has kept up and we have seen over 300,000 individual hits to this site alone today.

I know that at least 6500 people on iTunes have downloaded the newest show so this is significant traffic. Be patient with the downloads as servers are getting hammered worldwide.

I’ve been hammered too. 17 people used iTunes to download brainwagon radio in the last 24 hours! Woohoo! Let the pidgeons loose!

Everybody else seems to be yapping about it: got to apple.com and get your fresh tasty new iTunes, complete with support for podcast subscriptions. I didn’t have a chance to install it yet, but will tonight.