Category Archives: Audioblogs and Podcasting

iPod returned!

iPod returned!My wife called and informed me that a Fedex Box had shown up from Apple with my newly repaired iPod tucked inside. Neat! Now I can catch up on all the podcasts I’ve been missing. Not bad, I mailed it in on the 13th, they got in on the 14th, and today is the 17th. Now that’s customer service.

Brainwagon Radio: Wil Wheaton’s Booksigning

Where your host forgoes his usual activities at Chabot Observatory and instead accompanies his wife to Wil Wheaton’s booksigning at the Border’s in Union Square.

As is true of many things, it was actually my wife who took notice of his blogging activities. I’ve read his blog off and on for quite some time, and have just become more and more impressed as time goes on. What I find most attractive about his day-to-day writings is that you can see the conflict that we all have within us: the conflict between our ego which tells us we are great and our doubts which tell us that we are failures. As an actor (and a struggling one), Wil experiences this inner battle with a frequency that may be higher than your typical individual, but we all can empathize. What I think is really remarkable is that while he still fights these battles, he’s clearly winning. Not winning in the sense that these battles no longer trouble him: only conceited asses never suffer from self doubt, but rather in the sense that he seems satisfied with the ride. He takes joy in his wife and children. He can now look back on his Star Trek experience, and he can look forward to a bright future as a writer, as a speaker, doing improv, and probably a bunch of things he hasn’t even thought of yet.

It’s great to see such a nice guy survive his early success and become a well rounded adult.

He also took time in the beginning to mention how terrificly empowering blogs are, repeating some of the themes that I’ve mentioned from time to time in these pages and in my podcasts. He’s a guy who realizes the power of the Internet is that we don’t have to approach so called “gatekeepers” for permission to participate in popular media: we just need very modest computer equipment and an Internet connection. He was really plugging the Internet as a vehicle for public expression. Right on!

Wil went way over on time, and then patiently signed and posed for photographs, doubtlessly listening to dozens of people’s stories, nodding patiently and good naturedly. When my wife went up to sign, he wrote a very nice note thanking her for her support, and noted that she had one of the very early copies of Dancing Barefoot. Wil, you get my thumbs up. Keep up the good work.

Brainwagon Radio: New Years Goals, Women in Podcasting and a Mellow Track

Where your host talks a bit about his goals for the New Year, chats about the newly announced Apple Mini and iPod Shuffle, rambles (probably incoherently) about the perceived gap between men and women in technical fields, and finishes with a mellow track from online record label Magnatune.

Some links:

  • Do you really need a link to Apple?
  • I build (or more accurately, used to build) telescopes. I hope to finish (nay, plan to finish) my 12.5″ Newtonian in 2005.
  • I’ve started actually running. According to some, I’m probably pushing myself too hard, but I’d like to run a 10k in 2005.
  • Getting Things Done by David Allen has some interesting tips on trying to get organized. The geek in me immediately wants to find some electronic organizer thing to make it all easy. Lazy.
  • 43 Folders turned me on to Allen’s book. Kudos to them.
  • Amy Gahran has been trying to find women’s voices in podcasting, and they seem to be few and far between. Her January 11th podcast is a plea for more women in podcasting.

    Frankly, I haven’t a clue why more women aren’t involved in podcasting. I suspect that it is merely a reflection of the relatively small proportion of individuals who (say) go into graduate school in computer science. Why that occurs is also a bit of a mystery to me. Lack of mentors? Discouragement from parents and teachers? Desire to begin families? None of these answers seem entirely adequate. If there is a “podcast gap”, is there something we should (or even can) do about it?

  • The closing track is from Falling You’s Touch, and is titled something about eve. Very relaxing.

Things to look forward to next time: a report on Wil Wheaton’s book signing in SF and a movie review of Electra… Stay tuned!

Call for topics!

I must admit it, I’m pretty empty today. I have a couple of topics that I could talk about in today’s podcast, but they seem of limited interest to anyone but myself. So, I’m throwing the topics out to my listeners and readers:

Is their some topic that you’d like to hear covered by the Brainwagon Radio Podcast? If so, send me an email or leave a comment in this thread (remember, I have moderation on, so it will take a bit for it to appear) and I’ll use this topic to build a podcast! Help me break through my writer’s podcaster’s block.

TiVo announces new developer tools | PVRblog

The gents at PVRblog are reporting that Tivo is beginning a new developer program. I’ll have to keep an eye on this, as it appears they may support the ability of amateurs to create content on the Internet which can be delivered directly to Tivo players. A quote:

TiVo announces new developer tools | PVRblog

TiVo Video Publisher will allow video creators to provide downloadable content for TiVo. They talk about how content providers will be able to package and protect their video, but I hope that the amateurs won’t be left out of the party. It would be great to be able to pull up my mom’s vacation video as easily as a movie from the big studios. If they play their cards right they could make a killing off of long tail videos.

Exciting stuff! Can you imagine having podcast feeds which are delivered directly to your Tivo player? It sounds like it may be within the reach of the APIs specified.

I’ll read up some more and get back later with information in my next podcast.

What is your alternative?

Over at evilgeniuschronicles, Dave Slusher has dug out yet another Internet pundit who proclaims that the idea of allowing every individual to have their own radio show is somehow a bad thing. I promised that I wouldn’t rant, and it may seem like I’m piling on, but here’s my take.

  1. If you don’t want to listen, don’t. Podcasting isn’t like billboard advertising, or even television or radio. You have to specifically request any content you are interested in. Any perceived problem with listening is solved quite simply: don’t bother listening.
  2. Is this argument really saying that some people should not be allowed to express their opinions merely because someone finds them banal? Is the argument really that the world is a better place when there is less communication, rather than more?
  3. Podcasting allows audio publishing at very low cost. There are lots of reasons that someone might wish to do that, and many of them are great for society, not to mention the individuals who participate. If you are a musician, or in theater, or a performer, podcasting gives you the same ability to reach individuals with your talent that writers and programmers have had. That’s awesome. Revolutionary even.

I don’t care all that much about the business opportunities that podcasting represents. I’m more interested in the real opportunities that podcasting has to create a whole new class of human interaction. That’s good. That is very good.

Brainwagon Radio: Miscellaneous Rambling

Where your host blinks the sleep from his eyes, relates his experience with swapping operating systems on his laptop, and tells the story of how he came to work at Pixar and what he did on the Incredibles.

Expanding on my operating system debacle:

  • I never got Fedora Core 3 to have acceptable record quality. I also experienced a number of Firefox crashes which I hadn’t seen before. Not sure what was going on, but I decided to get back on more familiar ground and install FreeBSD 5.3 on it. (I’ve used FreeBSD a lot more than Linux.)
  • FreeBSD 5.3 installed easily, but when I tried to do a kernel recompile, I would get random segmentation faults from gcc. Usually such faults indicate bad hardware, and while I hadn’t noticed any problems like this before, I didn’t immediately discount the notion that the laptop could become less reliable when it overheated.
  • On the other hand, I thought it might be a problem with gcc 3.4 or something else having to do with 5.3. So I reinstalled 4.10-RELEASE on the laptop. After a problem with incorrect probing of the network device (it autodetected into hw-loopback mode) and noticing a problem with the sound driver (begins lound, but tails off after 15 seconds on the initial use, seems fine afterwards) I did a kernel/world recompile. The laptop shut itself off during the compile. Very strange, and could indicate an overheating condition.
  • Now, I’ve come full circle. Back to WinXP SP2, because I suspect I’m going to have to call HP to get this resolved (not under warranty anymore unfortunately). Surprisingly though, the laptop seems to be running cooler now, with less use of the fan than it has previously, even when I began with WinXP.

Additionally, here are the items that I got from Powell’s Books when I was in Portland:

Podcasts stalled by crappy sound

I’m mostly satisfied with running Fedora Core 3, but I’m having some difficulty getting rid of the crackly, popping sound that you heard in my last podcast. I’ve tried disabling apm, acpi, added no-hlt to the boot, disabled dma on the hard drive, and still the crackling badness remains. If anyone has any information which might be of help, try dropping dropping me an email.

lspci lists the sound controller as:

00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)

/proc/asound/version contains:

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.6 (Sun Aug 15 07:17:53 2004 UTC).
Compiled on Nov 18 2004 for kernel 2.6.9-1.681_FC3.

I thank you for any help in advance, as do my listener(s).

Brainwagon Radio: A Minor Revolt, Linux on the Laptop

my desktop!Wherein your host describes his pique with Windows XP and describes his installation of Fedora Core 3 onto his laptop, followed by his recording of a podcast using the new software setup. Links from the show:

  • I chose Fedora Core for my Linux variant. It works rather well, and has the most polished installation of any Linux distribution I tried.
  • The ndiswrapper project allows you to use Windows network drivers on Linux. This allowed me to use my Belkin F5D7010 card (an 802.11g card) which would have otherwise been unsupported. Seems to work fine, even without the kernel compile they recommend.
  • You can get audacity packages prebuilt for Fedora Core 3 from Dag’s repository. I also installed mplayer from his packages, as well as some other packages.
  • Can anyone tell me of a cheaper bluetooth GPS than the Delorme Bluelogger?

Quality note: The sound is a bit crackly, which appears to not be a problem with the microphone. It may actually be a software issue. I’m looking into it.

Free! Free from the shackles of Microsoft!

Now, back to playing Halflife 2 on my other box which still runs WinXP.

Brainwagon Radio: Boxing Day, with some Gift Reviews

On this 44th edition of Brainwagon Radio, your host apologizes for his lack of podcasting over the holiday, but gives brief reviews of some of the toys that were acquired during this 2004 holiday season:

I’m off to face terror of post Christmas shopping. Enjoy!

Thanks to all my listeners and readers…

Woo hoo! Top 100,000!When I woke up this morning (well, after loafing in bed for a while) I did my usual scan of email and weblog posts, and then checked my link rank via pubsub and found to my shock that I have entered the top 100,000 weblogs, apparently because of link backs from Lisa Williams and Brian Cantoni. Thanks to both of them, and to all my readers and listeners. I must admit to getting a certain charge from seeing my link rank and the raw numbers of downloaders grow, but as I’ve said before: it’s more than just the numbers. It’s about using a new and powerful medium to entertain and occasionally to inform others, and to learn from others as well.

Happy Holidays!

Brainwagon Radio: Christmas Prep, My Wife, Referer Spam and BitTorrent

Where your host complains about his perfect storm of auto repair, switches back to his laptop for improved sound quality, is interrupted by the missus, and talks briefly about referer spam and BitTorrent. I think this very well might be my most boring podcast ever, but what can I say: I’m preoccupied by the holiday.

I’m experiencing very slow access to my hosting service, not sure what the trouble is, but hopefully this will clear up shortly.

Addendum: it seems better now.

How bad is referer spam?

While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple
query:

mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog where to_days(now()) - 
to_days(visitTime) = 0 group by baseDomain order by cnt desc limit 10 ;
+-----+--------------------------+
| cnt | baseDomain               |
+-----+--------------------------+
| 682 | chikaliresortmalawi.com  |
| 682 | champvilleclub.com       |
| 682 | ceyloncurry.com          |
| 682 | cbmwyo.org               |
| 289 | brittandersondesigns.com |
| 243 | clevelandfyi.com         |
|  50 | google.com               |
|  16 | google.co.uk             |
|   8 | xopy.com                 |
|   6 | search.yahoo.com         |
+-----+--------------------------+
10 rows in set (1.16 sec)

It’s kind of depressing to find just how many people work that hard to try to spam my silly little site.

Addendum: It seems that virtually all my referer spam comes from four distinct IP addresses. They are now in my blacklist. We shall see how long this holds.