Monthly Archives: December 2004

Self Flagellation

My criticisms don’t just extend to others. Here’s my own attempt at self-flagellation today.

I fired up my ipod this morning and was listening to my latest show as I came in. I like to do this on occasion, mainly to monitor the technical quality as well as whether I sound like a complete dolt. I can’t speak to the second issue, but bleh. My podcast had some low amplitude noise which polluted the background. As the mp3 encoder shifted from frame to frame, the noise jumps in amplitude in a really annoying way. Yuck.

Two questions for myself:

  1. Why am I not hearing this when I do my post recording checks? (Likely answer: really cheap headset with poor response)
  2. Was it always this bad? A quick scan back through my recent episodes reveal that this one was particularly bad, but noisy recordings have gone out for the last three or four. Likely cause: change in my sound recording setup, mixer levels are perhaps too high.

Apologies for murdering your ears. I’ll have to work on getting this sorted out before my next podcast.

Frustration with two different podcasting clients

I must admit, I’m a little bit frustrated with the current crop of ipodder clients. I don’t know if it is just me, but I’m finding them to be relatively unreliable, and remarkably difficult to work with.

Before I go off (and people respond in kind with flames), I’ll admit it could just be me and/or my trusty WinXP box. But here’s my experience in trying to use ipodder, version 1.1.4.

It mostly worked, but for some reason I had frequent crashes of iTunes when I would run it. Sometimes, this would mean that individual podcasts which had been downloaded would be marked as downloaded and never retried, but even though they were downloaded, they would never get added to my iTunes list. So, I’d have to go in by hand and add them. Every attempt to get ipodder to redownload and add these skipped files (including uninstalling and reinstalling ipodder) resulted in it thinking it had already gotten it. I grovelled around, and found the history file and deleted that, and still no dice. In frustration, I thought I’d give another client a try:

Witness Doppler. Also a nice looking client, but it occasionally errors out while downloading as well, and fails to retry in any useful way. For reasons which escape me, I’m not receiving Dave Slusher’s podcasts, and even my own Cinnamon Bear Podcast has managed to skip three or four episodes. Sigh.

Here’s my wishlist for podcasting:

  1. I’d like a client that is invisible. Never fails. Don’t even know it’s there. Works by magic.
  2. Don’t care if it has directory support. Not even a bit.
  3. On the rare, unforseen occasion when it does screw up, make it straightforward to fix. Allow you to flag items which it think it has already downloaded, and delete it from its history mechanism so they can be fetched again. When you uninstall the program, delete every trace of its previous installation.

Can anyone suggest a client which fufills these requirements?

Pot Roast Recipe, Sounds Yummy.

Stepping back from podcasting and intellectual property for a minute, I noticed that Lisa Williams posted a link to her husband’s pot roast recipe.

Pot roast is another one of these recipes that has gotten short-changed in recent years, mainly because people don’t do a very good job of it, despite the fact that it’s pretty easy. The keys:

  • Use the right cut of meat. I like chuck for potroast. It has a fair amount of connective tissue in it (more on that later) and lots of really beefy flavor.
  • Brown the meat really well. As Evan’s recipe says, don’t pepper the meat prior to this treatment. The pepper will just burn on the outside if you are browning it at the “freakin’ hot” temperature it really needs. I do put kosher salt on the outside of my meat before browning. It helps draw some of the moisture out of the surface of the meat and give it a really good brown.
  • Cook it for a long time over low heat. A really long time. A really really long time. The temperature of the meat has to come up to around 190 or so to melt all the connective tissue. That’s when pot roast becomes tender. If your pot roast is tough, chances are it is undercooked rather than overcooked.
  • Season it well. I like cumin, thyme and black pepper. Some Worchester sauce isn’t bad either. Carrots and onions will add some sweetness to the dish, which can be nice.

Damn, I’m making myself hungry. I’ll have to put one of these on this week.

Et tu, Marvel?

Fred von Lohmann of the EFF writes an interesting piece about Marvel’s complaint filed against NCSoft Corporation and Cryptic Studios, makers of the enormously popular City of Heros online role playing game.

What’s got Marvel’s panties in a bunch is the fact that using the in-game editors, you can easily recreate characters which are properties of Marvel Comics, such as Spiderman, the Hulk or Wolverine.

The complaint lists claims of copyright and trademark infringement, as well as intentional interference with actual and prospective economic advantage and unfair competition.

I suppose the makers of a good old Ticonderoga #2 are up next, as they were obviously contributing for the ability of millions of kids to sketch unauthorized and damaging representations of Marvel properties on school notebooks.

Brainwagon Radio: Kudos, Drawing and Helix DNA Server

Wherein your host lists a number of people who have said nice things about us, and mentions the weekend’s projects: a new icon redesign for brainwagon and Helix DNA Server.

Items mentioned in the podcast:

Useful Firefox Extensions

My Firefox Status AreaI love Firefox. It’s a great browser all by its lonesome. But it also has some nicely done extensions which have proven to be really useful and now which I find it hard to live without. Some of the better extensions are:

  • Gmail Notifier — Keep track of your gmail account
  • Bloglines Toolkit — I use bloglines as my principal RSS aggregator, and having it always a button click away is useful.
  • Adblock — I’m no great fan of ads, and between pop up blocker and this thing, my desktop seldom leaves my control.
  • Foxy Tunes — Puts media player controls in your status bar. It’s nice not to have to click on other windows to change media settings while browsing.
  • Oh! I forgot! Weather Fox — localized weather icons, constantly updated for your locale. Neat!

Check them out. Download Firefox and check under the Tools > Extensions menu, and click Get More Extensions.