Where your host teams with his charming wife to give the fashion rundown of the Oscars, and to review all the movies we didn’t see (most of the Oscar nominated) and the ones we did see in 2005. This was our first team effort: your charity in listening is appreciated for this stupendously long episode. Hope you have fun with it.
Links from the show:
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!
Where your host chats about photography in public, blogging in the workplace, and his usual assortment of podcasting and gadget related experiences.
Links from the show:
Where your host wakes up early and knocks out another podcast, even while suffering through an at-times painful head cold. Hope the sound of nasal drip didn’t offend.
Links from the show:
Addendum: I believe by my at times unreliable count that this was podcast number fifty! Thanks to all who have patiently listened to my drivel.
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.
Where your noble host apologizes for his infrequent podcasts, and goes on to describe why he thinks small devices are interesting as webservers, with some suggestions. Also, the history of his involvement in telescope making.
My interest in these small webservers are for implementing an idea that I’ve been calling a digital homestead: a small, self-sufficient presence on the web. I’ll probably expand upon this more in the future.
Links from the show:
Errata: I know the word is “metropolis”, not “metrolopis”. Chalk one up for Spoonerisms.
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.
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:
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?
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!
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:
Additionally, here are the items that I got from Powell’s Books when I was in Portland:
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:
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.
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!
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.
In trying to fix his previous noise problems, your host appears to have squelched that a bit, but ends up with clippy audio. Sigh.
More stuff:
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:
(In the podcast, I strangely said that Udell was working on streaming to phones. That is what I was interested in when I found his connection, but that’s not what John is talking about.)
Damn, it’s been nearly a week since I put out my last one, and this was painful to put out. Hopefully it isn’t too painful to listen to.
Items from the show: