Using my Dell PDA to record podcasts while on the way to work is strangely addicting. Here’s another one that features an update on my cat Scrappy and his recovery from his fisticuffs with another cat, my thoughts on the Schiavo case, and my disgust with Barry Bonds. Barry, you’ll get no huzzahs from me this year.
Oh, here is a picture of Scrappy rolling around on the ground in our front yard this morning. The sunlight apparently feels good to his recovering body…
Well, today’s mobile podcast is dominated by a report on the health of my kitty. I know, I know, podcasting about your pets, how cliché is that? But I’ve spent the last 48 hours worrying about the little fuzzball, so this is what you get for subscribing… 🙂
I do have a few tiny bits of geek news though…
A wiki is a program, often a CGI, which enables you to edit a website using an HTML form. You can limit the editing priviliges to a single or group of users, or let anyone in the world edit it.
They are often used for documentation where the user community is expected to update and correct information, and I’m thinking about using it on my LiveCD project.
A short short 12 minute podcast recorded in my home “studio”, which includes updates on building a LiveCD, the release of The Incredibles DVD, and our quickie movie review of The Ring, Two.
Has anyone got any comments, positive or negative, regarding the quality and/or content of my last two podcasts which I recorded in my car using my PDA? Just curious if people find them more compelling due to their less formal nature, or irritating because of the background ambient sound…
Drop me an email or post a comment here. Thanks.
If you’d like to put out a good sounding podcast, or at least spend some money in an attempt to do so, check out this page for Carl Franklin’s solution.
I met Brewster Kahle a couple of years ago at Hackers, when he brought the Internet Bookmobile and printed attendees copies of Alice in Wonderland and let us bind and cut them for ourselves. Here is an episode of IT Conversations where he talks about the ideal of providing accessibility to all knowledge for everyone.
Big thoughts for a Wednesday, but you can handle it.
Another mobile podcast, recorded with my Dell Axim x50v PDA and Resco Audio Recorder. This morning I chat a bit about various LiveCDs on Linux, and muse about the possibility of a specialized LiveCD for podcasting.
Links from the show:
This week I was too busy over the weekend, so I recorded this podcast using my Dell Axim x50v PDA while driving to work. It was recorded using the Resco Audio Recorder which was recommended by Josh over at TinyScreenfuls, and I must admit: it kicks ass. It allows me to record in .mp3, .ogg or .spx format on my PDA. It’s a pity that it doesn’t support mp3 tagging, it would be nearly ideal for mobile podcasting. Let me know what you all think of the quality, I think it isn’t too bad given that I was just using the built-in mic.
Other links:
I still have gmail invites, so go ahead and send me an email and I’ll send you an invite.
Thanks to Jason for helping me get this mp3 file off my PDA.
I didn’t get my podcast recorded last night, but one will be coming shortly… tonight. I’ve got it all recorded on my PDA, but unfortunately I have no way of getting it transferred off to my server. It will have to wait until this evening. Thanks to Jason, it’s up!
Josh Bancroft recorded his TinyPodcast at a McDonald’s using his Dell Axim x50v and a $20 audio recording application. It sounds pretty darned good, much better than I imagined. I turned around and tried to use mine to do the same, but found that the background noise in my office was audible, in fact, distracting. I suppose if I’m going to podcast with my PDA, I’ll have to find a room with less machine noise.
Check out his podcast though. Very nice.
Update: Josh found this post, and posted a nice comment. Check it out.
I’d like everyone who has downloaded one of my podcasts to run to your nearest podcasting rating service and vote my podcast down. Give it a one. Give it no stars at all. Drive it straight to the bottom.
Or don’t. I just don’t care.
Frankly, I don’t look at these things. I just look at how many people download my podcast. If that number seems good or growing, I get a little bit of a rush. If it seems like it’s falling or nobody is downloading, then I feel a bit less of a rush, but I keep at it anyway.
I simply choose to ignore sites like podcastalley for two reasons:
The first is simply that I know the numbers are meaningless. Those that beg and plead and cajole their listenership can probably make it look like they are popular, while those that don’t care to boost their egos like that will probably languish. Therefore, position in their rankings doesn’t really mean anything useful. It’s not a measure of how good your podcast is. It’s just politics and advertising all over again, two things that I sometimes talk about, but seldom try to manipulate.
Secondly, even if the numbers were accurate, I hardly care. I’ve accepted life in the long tail. That means that there will be others who are more popular than me. That’s perfectly cool with me. I just don’t care.
I bring this up again because Dave brought it up again. He’s upset that someone who talks about his poop is higher on podcastalley than he is. I wonder why he cares at all.
Dave, look at how many people download your podcasts. That’s at least a reasonable measure of your popularity. Focus on that. At least it is objective.
Next, figure out a way to judge whether your podcast is good. Sometimes this requires deep introspection. Sometimes it requires the feedback of people whose opinion you trust. And sometime this requires that you reject the opinions of the unwashed masses.
Lastly, just accept that you don’t want to be on top. It’s a stupid place to want to be. The top is full of banal, low-brow, annoying crap. And if you don’t want to be on top, then don’t sweat it when you aren’t.
To my three hundredish subscribers: bless you all. If you enjoy my podcasts, just keep downloading ’em and pass links to your friends who might enjoy them.
Where your host describes his mostly good experience in upgrading from WordPress 1.2 to WordPress 1.5.
Links from the show:
That’s it for this week. Sorry for the sparse episode. Still have gmail accounts available, drop me an email to get one!
Well, there is some support for enclosures right out of the box in the new release of WordPress, but it could still handle a bit of help. The way I hacked this into the old version was to insert two special custom fields and then wire the templates to scan for these and output the right bits of HTML and RSS when each post was printed.
WordPress 1.5 handles things a bit differently: it will scan the post for links to urls which appear to be audio files, and then inserts a custom enclosure field in the database with the url, size and type included as a string. But since it already thinks that the URL is linked in the post, it does nothing to make the link stand out in any way.
When I updated from 1.2, I converted each of my custom fields into a format which was compatible with the new scheme, but I was then left with a dilemma: go back and patch the text of all 52 entries so that it included a link (ugly) or go ahead and modify the templates to include a customized link. I chose the latter. I found out with a bit of work that code that looks like the following works. I include it just after any template emits the_content for a post.
[php]
$encs = get_enclosed($post_ID) ;
if ($encs) {
echo ‘
‘;
}[/php]
Nothing too exciting, but might prove useful to you in your work.
Well, I cloned this weblog and tried out the newest release of WordPress on the clone. Basically I used mysqldump to save everything out in the current database, then created a new database and reloaded the contents, changing all occurrances of brainwagon.org to brainwagon.net. Then, I modified my httpd.conf file to route brainwagon.net to a different directory, installed it there, ran the upgrade.php script, and voila!
Overall, I think it went very smoothly. I like the new templates and the new templating system. It will take me a bit of work to make them look more brainwagon-y, but I didn’t really have that much going on that I really feel like I need to preserve (mostly just the color scheme and the use of floating images). I did make some really crufty modifications to support enclosures in WordPress 1.2.1, so I’ll have to do some minor bits of database surgery to get all the old enclosures inserted into the database so that they will continue to be available. I also use various spam preventing plugins, I’ll have to check to see whether these are still needed. The RSS feeds are also renamed, I’ll have to either fix that or insert appropriate rewrite rules to get them to be the same, I wouldn’t want all my subscribers to end up with broken feeds.
Overall though, I am pretty happy, and should be able to move the main site over this weekend. Congratulations to the WordPress team, it looks like a nice improvement!
Wil Wheaton has some distinctly harsh words for the notion that ASCAP now will sell you a license to play music on your podcasts. Peter Kim responded that:
Wil, you WOULDN’T pay for an individual song. ASCAP licenses are blanket licenses, and the interactive minimum pricing they’ve set below $300/yr. Once you have the license, ALL ASCAP music is legal to play. (Some people might actually be making money from online distribution . . .)
Frankly, I’m not at all upset with ASCAP. I simply don’t use any of their music, because I can’t afford it. $300 dollars a year exceeds the budget of all other expenses I incur to put out my podcast, and I can’t justify it. That’s fine, I’m comfortable using music from more friendly labels like magnatune or music which is licensed directly by artists under liberal Creative Commons licenses.
It does bring up something interesting though: they charge roughly $300 to license the playback of ANY of the music under their catalog. Doesn’t it seem odd that the penalties for copyright infringement are so draconian by comparison? Just as someone noticed with Napster (which grants a license to play any music they have for a mere $15 a month), doesn’t this ASCAP license fee structure imply that the real damages caused by any individual act of copyright infringement is incredibly tiny?