Where your host shows his geekiness by generating a new intro for his podcast while demonstrating a simple digital signal processing trick he coded up in 30 minutes of goofing off this evening. Apologies to the BBC and to my listeners, but it’s a very short podcast.
Category Archives: Brainwagon Radio
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:
- The Motorola MPx220, my new Cingular cell phone
- Useful sites for MPx220 information: mpx200.org and pdaphonehome.com
- My ASCII television hack: over two years old, but still fun. Inspired by aatv.
- Anandtech’s Guide to Building a Linux PVR, which inspired me to get off my butt and give it a try.
- The Official MythTV site
- These guys provide the program data for MythTV
- A nice site about MythTV on Fedora
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.
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:
- From Interplanetary Materials, Dana Countryman’s Lovesick Martian Boy
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).
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:
- You could do worse than using Alton Brown’s Good Eats Roast Turkey. Be prepared for a good amount of smoke during the initial roast: 500 degrees for 30 minutes usually sets off my smoke alarm. Still, good stuff.
- I really like epicurious.com for recipes. Winners from my personal file include Pumpkin Pecan Cheesecake and Mashed Sweet Potatos with Brown Sugar and Pecans. My wife usually doubles the topping, so it turns out like candy on top. Good stuff.
Brainwagon Radio: Aiptek DV4500, Halo2 and other gadgets
Where 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:
- Home To New Orleans, by the Dare ya Blues Band
- The NPR program Political Speech and the Public Domain
- IT Conversations has mp3 files for all the sessions of Bloggercon III
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?
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:
- sample rate = 22050
- sample size = 16 bits
- I record in stereo (2 channels)
- 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:
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?
Brainwagon Radio: Post Election Blues
Where your host records half of the program with his mike muted, then re-records an apology to his brother, spins two rockin’ blues tunes from garageband.com, and records some impressions of three independent film books he has begun reading.
The songs:
- Company Graveyard by B.B. Chung and the Buddaheads
- I Won’t Go Back by Joe White
Brainwagon Radio: Election Eve Politics
Breaking with the tradition of geeky news, your host explains why he’s voting for the Kerry/Edwards ticket this year, and encourages everyone to go out and vote, no matter what your political affiliation. After tomorrow, it will be back to geekiness, I promise.
Halloween Podcast!
Well, it’s still a couple of days till Halloween, but I thought I would to this special halloween themed podcast so that you could still have time to use some of the ideas and downloads that I present here in whatever spooky proceedings you may have planned. Here are some of the links I mentioned:
- Murnau’s classic Nosferatu, courtesy of archive.org
- Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, also courtesy of archive.org
- The Brain that Wouldn’t Die, courtesy of, you guessed it, archive.org
- Vintage Scary Music (from vinyl), courtesy of vinylorphanage.com
- Ghouls with Attitude, from oddiooverplay.com
- At Home With The Munsters, of questionable legality, but fun.
- Halloween Organ Music, specifically Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, translated from an unlabelled MIDI file into a wav via timidity and encoded via lame.
Podcast #27: Magnatune, DMCA and the Treo Podcast
Where your host plugs the worthy record label Magnatune and their gracious use of Creative Commons licensing, plays a bit of American Baroque’s rendition of Vivaldi’s Concerto No.1 in D Major RV, better known as the Spring Concerto among us people who don’t know much about music, and lauds the 6th Court of appeals decision in the Lexmark case. You can read the court’s opinion here as a PDF file, provided by the EFF.
Bonus links:
- Gordon Smith recommended that I check out Crux Linux. I’ll have to give it a shot sometime soon.
- Russell Holliman’s Treocast — a podcast recorded entirely on a Treo cellphone.
Errata: I erroneously called Doug Kaye David Kaye. Sorry Doug! I don’t know what blip caused my brain to make this mistake.
Happy Anniversary Honey!
Ten years ago I had a job interview with SGI, and afterwards went on a first date with Carmen. I didn’t get the job, but I did get to meet a marvelous woman, and in 2000 I made her my wife. Her patience, kindness and humor all work to make me a better man, and I love her more each day.
Happy Anniversary Honey!
Podcast #25: Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting, Two Reviews and Picking a Linux Distribution
Where your host introduces you to his brother’s venture Webranger Nostalgia Broadcasting, reviews the Iogear MiniView 2-port KVM switch, gives his brief thoughts on the movie The Grudge starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, and tries installing three different Linux distributions in a weekend, only to end up back where he began.
Other cool items mentioned:
- Roger Corman’s The Little Shop of Horrors
- Max Fleischer’s Superman shorts Billion Dollar Limited and The Arctic Giant