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.

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.

Where your host briefly displays his anger about Sony rootkitting their customers, but then happily lapses off into musing about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and food.

Another podcast recorded on my Dell Axim x50v after upgrading to Windows Mobile 5. Quicky review: it works, seems to have a few things cleaned up, including some nice enhancements to Pocket Internet Explorer. It does seem however that the Core Pocket Media Player might not be detecting the graphics accelerator in the Dell anymore, I’ll investigate that some more.

Other links:

• World Wind from NASA has a new version that includes data on the Moon. It’s like Google Earth, but paid for by your tax dollars! On the right you can see the view of my neightborhood. Check it out.
• Videora Ipod Converter a gadget for converting video to a format that can be watched on the ipod. For some reason the files I tried to transfer from my Media PC didn’t have sound, I haven’t figured that out yet. But the price is right!

Oh, and Happy Anniversary to Tinyscreenfuls.com. While I was podcasting before Josh was, he was the guy whose Axim x50v podcast gave me the idea of recording all these podcasts with my PDA. Thanks Josh, and best wishes for the future.

Yesterday, I received a package in the mail from Dell including a new headset for my Dell Axim x50v PDA, as well as the upgrade CD for Windows Mobile 5. I recorded this podcast on the way home as a test of the microphone. Also a bit about my sidebar hack for list birthdays of Major Leaguers.

Holy crap, it’s been a month since I published my last podcast. But today I managed to corner my wife in the car and we recorded a brief 10 minute podcast, largely consisting of a review of the new video iPod. She gives her impressions of the iPod, how she’s using it, and the success (and minor irritations) that she has experienced with it. Overall though, she really loves it. Listen in for more, as well as a brief interruption while we discuss the horse rolling in a field of manure.

Twice in one day…

Scoble responds to lots of criciticism that he’s evangelizing a crappy format, and really misses the forest for the trees. Actually, he misses the trees too. Earlier today I recorded this podcast, which I wasn’t going to post, but if Scoble’s going to go on, I think it actually merits it.

Scoble writes:

See, as a user, I really don’t care about the spec. I can’t read them. I don’t appreciate them. And, all they seem to do is lead to religious arguments one way or another.

I’m a user. Shoot me.

But what Dave did was give me an application. It works. And, as a user, I wonder “if the format is so crappy, how did Dave get it to work in his own application?”

And, as a user, I wonder “why can’t the developers just get their OPML to work with Dave’s application?”

The reason that developer’s just can’t get their OPML to work with Dave’s application is because the specification sucks. There is simply no way for anyone to tell if the OPML file generated by their application is really compliant with what Dave’s editor implements, or only just happens to never tickle a bug or an ambinguity which wasn’t specified.

It’s really not that hard to write an application: the trick comes from interoperability. To be useful, these files must be able to be routinely exchanged between applications written by different people, and that simply isn’t feasible without a clear, complete specification of what the format actually entails.

Scoble concludes:

The crappy format is good enough until someone comes up with something better. And that’s what you’re all missing.

What Scoble is missing is that currently he’s in a position to help dictate what gets adopted and what users are going to be seeing for the next five, ten, or even more years, and if he had any concern for those users, he’d work to ensure that the technology underlying that growth is as robust and reasonable as possible. OPML doesn’t qualify. RSS doesn’t even qualify. Did we learn nothing from the whole HTML standards process?

Well, in this edition of my podcast, I lament the end of baseball season for the Oakland Athletics, talk about the modifications I’m making to my Linksys NSLU2, and then talk about the predicted death of the PC as a platform for innovation.

Links from the show:

• Jonathan Schwartz of Sun talks about how web services are the future.
• Philip Greenspun muses on the idea that the cell phone will replace the PC.

I have a special treat in today’s podcast: my wife makes an appearance. We chat about our experience at Friday’s Oakland A’s game which the A’s lost (boo!) but which had great fireworks (yay!), as well as a couple of other geeky topics like Jeri Ellsworth’s hackable gadget, the C64 Direct To TV. The Slashdot thread about her that I mentioned can be found here. The wikipedia page has links to all the hacking sites that I’ve found.

Today’s podcast recaps a bunch of topics which have floated to the top of my conciousness: a recap of last night’s baseball game, my experience in programming the old Atari 2600 video console, what it might mean to have a video game console which promoted consumer experimentation and programming, some musings about Field Programmable Gate Arrays, and just a general recap.

Enjoy.

Today’s podcast mostly concerns my confusion on why eBay purchased Internet phone company Skype. Well, not so much why they bought it as why they paid 2.8 billion dollars for it. I present some of my skepticism about the Web services marketplace as well.

Addendum: Jeff Pulver has an interesting perspective.

One year ago today, I did my first podcast. I didn’t even call it a podcast, I think the term was yet to be coined. Since then, by my rough count I’ve done 93 or so podcasts, on subjects ranging all over the map, with varying bits of quality, stupidity, mistakes and the like. In short it’s been a blast.

In the last year, podcasting has gone from something that Adam Curry was trying to get people to do, to something that is organized into podcasting networks, marketed on the Apple iTunes store, and mentioned on major news networks. There are books. There are pundits. It’s everywhere.

And, in some sense, it has left guys like me in the dust.

I was talking to my friend Tom today about why I still am podcasting. I need no more justification than this: I’ve now got an audio record of a slice of my life for an entire year, consisting of over twenty hours of me talking about whatever was on my mind. It’s a time machine. A slice of myself, stored in digital form. Even if it was of no interest to anyone else, it would be valuable for that reason alone.

Still, I hope that you, my occasional listeners and my regular subscribers, have found something of interest. I’ll keep it up, and I hope you all do too.

Addendum: I just listened to my first post again, and what was surprising to me is that even in my very first podcast, I foresaw that I’d really like to have a PDA to record my podcasts. I wouldn’t get my Dell until February, but very early on I wanted the usage scenario that I have settled on for all my recent podcasts: a mobile gadget that I could carry with me and use to record material wherever I was.

Neat.

Oh, and I talked about this grasshopper too.

Last night, I attended an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View entitled “The History of Computer Chess”. It was a panel discussion by some of the pioneers in the field: Monty Newborn, Murray Campbell, John McCarthy, Ed Feigenbaum and David Levy. My daily podcast gives some of my brief impressions. I didn’t learn a whole lot, since I’ve read quite a bit about computer chess and search, but I found the discussion enjoyable and given the increasing age amongst the panel members, I was glad to see these gentlemen talking about the forty-something year pursuit of computer chess in person. The Computer History Museum is having an open house this Saturday, I think I’ll be back with my wife to visit it (it seems like a great facility) and I’ll be joining as a member.

Mostly this podcast concerns itself with my latest geeky project: writing programs for the old atari 2600. Why would anyone do this? Have a listen! Hear the sense of childish joy I take in wasting my time!

In the podcast I mentioned my implementation of PDP-1 simulator so I could run the original Spacewar! game (a video game which is just barely older than I am). I thought I’d provide this link to it.

Eventually, I’ll have binary images of my “game” available that you can run on Stella. If youa re impatient, you should just grab a copy of it and start writing one yourself.

Today’s podcast gives some information about my experiments with getting podcasts transferred to a CompactFlash card so I can listen to them using my Dell Axim x50v PDA, which I also use to record podcasts.

• This post on Social Customer Manifesto detailed how one guy used a cheapy mp3 player in a pretty creative way. The player simply looked like a harddrive, so he installed Doppler on it, configured it to save podcasts to the same drive, and then created an AUTORUN.INF file so that when it is inserted. There is one big problem though: Windows XP doesn’t automatically run AUTORUN stuff from removeable drives. You can hack the registry to get around it, but instead I just configured my podcasting client to save to the CompactFlash “drive”, and dropped a shortcut on my desktop. Now, to update my CompactFlash I jam it in my reader slot, double click on the icon to run Doppler, and then wait for it to fill it up. Not too bad.