Category Archives: podcasts

Friday Linkage

Not a lot to talk about today, but a couple of interesting links.

Since I got my iPod, I’ve been having fun with podcasting. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s just recording an audio file (typically MP3) and putting it up for downloading. If you have a program like iTunes (though there are others that do it as well), it will check periodically to see if there is a new file available and download it for you and even upload it to your portable music player. Here are a couple of podcasts that I’ve found that I like (no music player required – you can just download the files to your computer and listen to them there).

National Public Radio has a couple of nice podcasts: Right now I’m subscribed to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me (the most recently aired episode) and Story of the Day, but just in writing this I see that there’s a heck of a lot more there to check out. Woo!

There’s also the audio version of the latest Ebert and Roeper At The Movies show.

If you like Celtic music, particularly contemporary Celtic music, Celtic rock, and Celtic fusion, have I got a podcast for you. Celt in a Twist airs weekly on AM 1470, CJVB in Vancouver, BC, and they make their hour-long show available in four parts. Lots of great stuff here – The Paperboys, Spirit of the West, Flook, and Enter the Haggis, among many others.

Finally, woodychitwn pointed me to The Bruiser Chronicles (possibly NSFW). This, to me, is the epitome of the power of podcasting: one guy, just talking about his life and what’s on his mind. The thing is, he’s a personable guy, has a great “radio voice”, and can tell a riveting story. His lengthy story of his encounters with “Bill”, a repressed and vengeful co-worker, is nothing short of astonishing; if it were fiction it would be hard to believe but the fact that he had to live through it is amazing. Along the way, he touches on topics of sexual identity, self-doubt, and self-esteem. This is a show for adults, though; Bruiser is a gay man who is frank about what he likes and doesn’t like and there’s plenty of Bad Words and Sexual Content. It’s definitely worth a listen, though.

Can anyone recommend any other podcasts to check out? I’m always looking for new and interesting stuff.

Since I’m posting a bunch of links today, I’ll also throw in a couple that interested me:
I just added Hungry Magazine to my Bloglines subscriptions. It’s an interesting read anyway, but two great articles showed up today: the McDonalds McArabia (really!), and a nice profile of “The Sausage King”, Doug Sohn, owner and operator of Hot Dougs “Encased Meat Emporium” (with accompanying podcast!).

It’s not too late to get in on Consumerist’s Worst Company in America Tournament!

Finally, if you watch Survivor or The Amazing Race, you really should be reading the hilariously snarky recaps at televisionwithoutpity.com. They cover many other (U.S.) prime-time shows as well, and even have a lengthy recap of the movie Serenity.

Right-o, then. Off to lunch I go! I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Wait for my iPod?

As you may have heard, yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Seeing that on a typical workday morning, I see takaza for all of five minutes before I head off to work (I go in to get dressed at 6 AM, when he wakes up), and given that there are a number of wonderful descriptions for Dan but none of them include the phrase “morning person”, we elected to exchange V-Day gifts when he got home in the evening. That evening, we both had tooth-rottingly cute cards for each other, and there was a folded-up piece of paper in mine. I opened it up and it was a list of upcoming showings for Wait Wait – Don’t Tell Me, a fabulously funny NPR program recorded right here in Chicago, for me to choose from. Dan then opened up the envelope I gave him with his card to find…tickets to this week’s taping of Wait Wait – Don’t Tell Me. We both burst out laughing. Evidently, we know each other well enough and share the same tastes enough that we got each other the same gift. It works out since Dan hadn’t actually bought the tickets yet, and he made my birthday so lovely that it all evens out. He then cooked up some tasty macaroni and cheese (with lots of thick-sliced bacon! arr num num num) and we had a nice relaxing evening.

Well, sort of relaxing. My iPod has become the bane of my existence. Well, not really; more accurately our MP3 collection has become the bane of my existence. We have about 35 Gb of MP3’s (about 8,300 tracks) that we have accumulated over the last six or seven years. Because they’re from a wide variety of sources the ID3 tags (information in each file that contains artist, album, and song title, plus other info) are of varying quality, from quite thorough to completely blank. With my last MP3 player, this wasn’t an issue because it relied more on the file name so I could usually figure out what I was listening to. The iPod, though, ignores file names and relies completely on ID3 tag information. If I want to, say, play all tracks in a given genre, or by a given artist, I’m out of luck if that information isn’t on a track.

I found an excellent program to fill in the ID3 information on a semi-automated basis. In my first pass I fed it all 8,300 tracks and wound up with about6,100 tracks identified and tagged and 2,200 tracks that had to be identified manually. Well, that wasn’t going to work, plus if I want podcasts and room for new music I was going to have to leave room on my iPod for those, and it only holds 30 Gb. So I sorted through the files and split them into those that I wanted to carry around, and those I could comfortably leave behind, with about 20 Gb of tracks going onto the iPod. I fed those files into MusicBrainz and this was better – after some whittling down, I’m down to about 630 tracks still to be identified manually. I think i can pare that down further, but I expect that in the end I’ll still have to sort through 400 files or so. I’m actually glad of it, though – I’m finding that we have a lot more electronica than I thought we did, and that’s my music of choice when working out at the gym.

Once I get all the files straightened out and uploaded to the iPod, I’ve found a nifty utility that will add album art to the files, which will show up on the iPod display when the track is playing. Then I need to start picking up podcasts; I’ve already got Wait Wait.. and NPR’s Story of the Day subscriptions set up, and I need to go hunting around to see what else tickles my fancy. altivo, I’ll admit I’m a slacker and I still haven’t checked out your podcasts, and woodychitwn had a good recommendation a while ago, though I’m not sure how I’d feel about listening to that while working out 🙂 I’ll have to see what I can find. Oh, and on top of all of this, I just found Azureus, and I’m having a lot of fun playing with it. I’ve found that when you have a flaky wireless connection, though, Bittorrent doesn’t work very well. I need to work on that.