Category Archives: Audioblogs and Podcasting

Where does Brainwagon belong?

A direct question from Ruth Meers at Bloggercon served to percolate a question that has been kicking around subliminally for quite some time.

What is your podcast (or more generally) your weblog about?

Brainwagon isn’t really a personal diary weblog. I do occasionally mention stuff about my personal life, but that isn’t the focus. I don’t write it especially for my friends, although some of them do get mentions from time to time. I don’t write it to pitch business ideas or find new jobs.

If that’s what this site is not, then what is it?

Have you ever wandered into somebody’s office and scanned the list of books on their shelves? Books naturally grab my eye, so I do it pretty much everytime I go into people’s office. Brainwagon is basically a way of giving you a glimpse into my office bookshelves. You aren’t going to find anything deeply personal here, but you are going to find the list of topics that I am interested in, at least to the point where I took the trouble to buy a book. If you see me posting about Mayan art, the Enigma machine, photography or whatever, you can be rest assured that somewhere there are some dead trees which I’ve been thumbing through lately to help fuel my understanding.

On my desk today, amidst the empty cups which previously held Diet coke, I counted six books:

  • The Physics of Baseball, which has been there since the Red Sox defeated the Yankees. A great book, incidently. Behind me is a copy of Ross’ The Mathematics of Baseball, much less interesting.
  • Meyer and Downing’s Java Virtual Machine. For some reason this was on the top of a big pile. It is one book I’ve never really found a good reason to read.
  • Advanced Renderman, by Apodcaca and Gritz, a nominally work related book.
  • Ken Steiglitz’s A Digital Signal Processing Primer, which I consider one of the best books on DSP around. I’ve read it about six times, and it finally is beginning to sink in more or less completely.
  • Jones and Flynn’s Mobile Robots. I have lots of books on robotics, but never built one. A pity.
  • Helen Fouché Gaines’ Cryptanalysis, a book no budding code breaker should be without.

Okay, so where am I going with this? Imagine trying to assign a particular category to the variety of books that are on my desk at the moment. Just what do you think that word would be?

iPodder out, Doppler is in…

Sorry the team working on iPodder, but I’ve become too frustrated with it to continue using it. I have been having problems with iTunes crashing periodically, with items which are downloaded and inserted multiple times, and with a situation where a feed which botched once and refused to download again, even after uninstalling and reinstalling (hint: wherever you are storing the history, it isn’t removed during an uninstall). So, toward that end, I’ve decided to give Doppler a shot.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Brainwagon Radio: MPx220 and MythTV

Where your host describes the fun he’s been having with his new cell phone and his travails in trying to get MythTV installed.

Links for the show:

I’ve currently got video recording from an old Brooktree 878 card (made by Pinnacle) working at 320×220 at 60% or so cpu load on my aging 800mhz Celeron box. There seem to be very few problems with dropped frames or synch. Unfortunately, there do appear to be significant problems still with sound when watching Live TV: the video lurches and I get prebuffering audio errors in the invoking xterm window. I’m also having quality issues with horizontal streaking: I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the card.

I’ll keep you all posted on my improved efforts.

Cinnamon Bear Podcast

Well, it’s November 29, which means that my podcast of the classic radio serial The Cinnamon Bear has officially begun. There are 26 episodes, each slightly longer than ten minutes, which culminate on Christmas Eve. I hope you all enjoy it.

Initially there was a small bug in my RSS feed generator which accidently produced the feed in reverse order. If you got the Cinnamon Bear Podcast early on the morning of the 29th, you might wish to try again to get the MP3 files in their proper order. Sorry for the mixup.

Brainwagon Radio: Tinkering with Gizmos

In episode 37, your intrepid host reports on his new cell phone, talks about his as yet unsuccessful efforts to get MythTV to work, plays a song from Comfort Stand, an online record label and then is hastened away to the Sponge Bob Squarepants movie. Anyone who wants to serve as my mentor on the world of MythTV can mail me and we can discuss it via mail, Skype, irc, or whatever. Thanks in advance!

Music of the day:

Addendum: To rip video for my phone, I used the command:

ffmpeg -i some.vob -r 10 -b 56 -an -s qcif some.asf

This command doesn’t encode audio, just video (no problem that I know of, I just was encoding a silent film as a test, so I didn’t bother).

Apple Audio Interface Speculation?

Two Mockups of a New Apple ProductThis morning the gadget sites (as well as some podcasters) were all a twitter over the possibility of Apple producing a new audio interface code named Asteroid. This is supposedly a firewire interface with two XL mic inputs and a bunch of other stuff. What struck me as funny were the two different artists renditions that were being circulated (pictured on the right, and shamelessly stolen from Gizmodo).

Rumor-mongering has clearly reached epic proportions in the Apple universe.

But Steve, if these are for real, I’ll take one, and a new Powerbook please!

Ipodder Idea

I mentioned in yesterday’s audio podcast that it would be nice if ipodder clients did more to manage your collection of online audio from podcasts. I suggested that you might want to pick a size such as 10gb that you are willing to use for podcasts. As new podcasts come in, the oldest would be deleted to maintain that 10gb boundary. Perhaps (similar to Tivo) you could also click either feeds or individual shows that would be retained longer.

This morning Dave Winer remarked that Todd Maffin wanted to be able to delete stuff off his ipod. If you go to his post, he wanted something slightly different: when he had listened to something, he wanted it to go away from his playlist. But more than just complaining, he had an actual suggestion: use the rating system built into the ipod in combination with the smart playlist capability. When you rate an item in your New Playlist, it is deleted from the New Playlist and added to your Heard playlist. Great idea, since I don’t normally use the “Rated” sections anyway.

Brainwagon Radio: Cinnamon Bear, Core Media Player, and Konfabulator

Where your host describes his upcoming special holiday treat, yammers about a couple of interesting bits of software, and plays some holiday music to prime the pump for the largest shopping weekend of the year.

Links from today’s show:

  • I’m going to be presenting podcast for the classic 1937 radio serial The Cinnamon Bear. You can go to to this page starting November 29th and download one episode per day, culminating in the final episode on Christmas Eve. I’ll also have an RSS feed available which I’m still testing.
  • The Core Media Player for Windows plays all sorts of media, including Ogg files.
  • Konfabulator has a terrible name, but many widgets that can enhance your desktop. Available for either Windows or OSX, and they even have a developer’s API.
  • Song of the day: The Whistling Elves playing Dot Com Christmas

Brainwagon Radio: Lost and Found, Gadgets, Software and Recipes!

Where your host rambles and meanders through the topics that seem appropriate on a Saturday. Links from the show:

  • I use lots of command-line tools to process and convert video files. Some of the more important ones are mplayer, transcode and ffmpeg. All three are useful and powerful, but have steep learning curves. Still, for mass conversion and ripping of video files, they annoy me much less than other alternatives, and they are all open-source.
  • Mark Tilden is the inventor of BEAM robotics and also the Robosapien, a cute remote controlled robot toy with surprisingly long battery life. You can look for other Robosapien hacks here.
  • Dave Slusher uses blosxom as his blogging software: a good choice. I use WordPress, and have recently begun testing the newest version at a mirror of my text weblog. Verdict: nice, but generates illegal RSS for enclosures (multiple enclosures per item).
  • Get ready for the holidays! Try these recipes from the web:

Brainwagon Radio: Aiptek DV4500, Halo2 and other gadgets

Aiptek DV4500Where your host describes a number of interesting gadgets and gizmos, and then plays some Halloween sounding music:

Links from the show:

  • The Aiptek DV4500, pictures, video and sound files coming soon.
  • Grayson: a film trailer created by amateurs, telling the story of Dick Grayson, aka Robin
  • Jeri Ellsworth designed the Commodore One, a clone of the old Commodore 64 using programmable logic devices. She’s also designed the C64 Direct TV, a joystick with a C64 embedded in it, available this Christmas season from QVC. Cool!
  • I got a chance to play some Halo 2. Short story: If you liked the original, you’ll like the new one.
  • Cool product of the day: a plastic which you can melt in hot water and easily sculpt. When heated to 150 degrees F, it turns clear and is easily moldable, and yet when cools becomes tough and stiff like nylon. Can be remelted again and again. Neat stuff.
  • Music of the Day: Frank Ho’s The Merry Prank of Mr. J, kind of Halloweeny sounding, from garageband.com

Brainwagon Radio: Alternator Trouble, plus a Pot Pourri

Where your host laments the problem with his SUV (bad alternator) and comment spammers, chats about the NPR program regarding political speech and the public domain, talks a bit about his microphone setup, plays some blues music, and recalls all the terrific Cajun food he had during his only trip to New Orleans.

Links:

I’m looking for recommendations for a good phone for use in mobile weblogging, if you have any suggestions go ahead and mail me with your recommendations. I am inherently a cheapskate, so cheaper suggestions will be considered more strongly than more expensive $500 and up phones, so bear that in mind. The ideal candidate will be:

  • cheap
  • decent camera, VGA resolution or up, good low light sensitivity a plus
  • Bluetooth
  • bonuses: voice recorder and video clip capability
  • did I mention cheap would be good?

Oops…

Herbert Baerten reported that my feeds weren’t valid RSS and that his client Doppler was having difficulties with it as a result. It should be fixed now: Feed Validator gives it a clean bill of health. If you had difficulty getting Brainwagon Radio, I apologize and will try to be more careful in the future.

Brainwagon Radio: Digital Audio 101

Where your host tries to give a meaningful introduction into digital audio by explaining the basics of digital audio. Topics covered include:

  • What is sound?
  • What does your computer do when it records a digital audio file?
  • What does sample rate, sample size and bitrate mean?
  • The sound settings that I use to record these podcasts, namely:
    1. sample rate = 22050
    2. sample size = 16 bits
    3. I record in stereo (2 channels)
    4. I use a bitrate of 64kbps, which results in files which are 480Kbytes per minute

Anybody with any experience in digital recording will undoubtably be bored, but my lunch at Bloggercon gave some hint that this might be necessary.

Garageband closing music is Leigh Silver and the Bitter Things, playing Moody.

Bloggercon Post-Mortem

Where your host, refreshed by two ibuprofen and eight hours of sleep, replays his experience and impressions of Bloggercon.

Closing music from garageband.com:

Push: Don’t want to say goodbye

Errata: I said “Michael Scoble” on the podcast, he is of course Robert Scoble. Why is it that my brain can remember thousands of Simpson’s quotes verbatim, but fails on these rudimentary social tests?