Wherein your host tries out his new Behringer UB802 mixer (with mixed results) and goes on about his new project: hacking on “the Slug”, a Linksys NSLU2 network storage device.

For all the enthusiastic support that I’ve read for the Behringer as a decent mixer for the beginner, I’m still getting a substantial amount of noise from the mic preamplifier, and the simple noise reduction filters in Audacity really is not very good at removing. The result of not running them is that occasionally the noise pops on and off as the quantization of the mp3 encoder either decides to encode or discard it. The result of running the noise reduction is a warbly, chirpy quality to my voice which is even more distracting. Are people really having good results with mixer? What am I doing wrong? All comments and advice on my audio quality are cheerfully accepted.

Oh, incidently, you can read this skeptical view of who will make money doing podcasts. Frankly, since I don’t view my podcast as a revenue stream, I hardly care whether what he says is true or not.

You can see a page hosted on my slug or even a simple weblog written in perl that can be hosted on the slug. Nifty huh, for a gadget which cost $80 and runs on about 1 watt of power. This hardware can serve as the prototype for my “digital homesteading device”, an idea I’ve been trying to refine. Imagine a device which you could carry with you. Imagine that it could attach to your home broadband, and would register itself with one of the dynamic DNS servers so that everyone could find it. Imagine it had lots of flash storage, and could serve as your weblog server, your wiki server, your photo gallery, serve your podcasts and maybe even stream audio to other servers. Imagine further it was a simple, inexpensive, worry free device. That’s what I think of as my digital homestead. Not a server which can handle a slashdotting, but just a little place to hang your digital hat, which lowers the barrier between content creation (in other words, living your life) and sharing it with the world at large.

Is there a market for such a thing? I have no idea, but it is a fun thing to think about and try to build.

Addendum: For some strange reason, the initial version of this podcast was borked in some strange way: at two points during the podcast an annoying blast of noise occurred. I pulled it within the first twenty minutes (I usually download and listen to podcasts after publishing them, and discovered this annoying noise relatively quickly) and have replaced it with a new version. I apologize for anyone’s problems.