Late Night PC

Intro

I did a poster presentation on podcatching yesterday at the University of Windsor's Campus Technology Day. I liked the other presentations at the conference, but today I just wanted to post to make sure I remembered to share mine. I did some research on podcatching. That's right, not podcasting but podcatching. Subscribing to podcasts and automatically downloading new episodes of those podcasts, then getting those on to a media player. Considering all the copious talk there is out there about podcasting, there's surprisingly little help for the listeners. I've done a couple podcasts, but by and large I just listen, I was just downloading manually the episodes of podcasts I like until a few weeks ago when I started really getting in to the research for this presentation. I was pretty happy with what Amarok can do but for my fellow podcast listeners on Macs and Windows machines, you'll just have to wait. The most-referenced names I saw were iTunes and Juice (formerly iPodder). I was disappointed in iTunes in that it considers subscribing to any podcast not in there directory to be an "advanced" option. Then there's Juice, which claims to be open-source but I can't seem to find the source for it. So my choice is clear but at the conference I tried to give as much choice as I could for an interested user so I've included all three.

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I've been listening to podcasts off and on for maybe a year now but I've only been getting them manually. That is to say that instead of having a piece of software that will catch podcasts for me I've just been going out looking for the ones I like and grabbing them. I find now that I like podcasts so much more than the radio that I'm listening to quite a bit more of them and maybe it's time to start subscribing with a newsreader that downloads those enclosures for me automatically. So I started poking around and found surprisingly little good stuff when I search for podcatching on Linux or iTunes on Linux. On a whim I thought I'd have a look at Amarok.

I was using Amarok as my main music player on my openSuse 10.2 desktop until I broke my sound once and it wouldn't play mp3s but Kaffeine would. So Kaffeine's been my player. I've always preferred Amarok for the slick user interface and convenient use of the usually unmapped Windows key for globally accessible keyboard shortcuts. Just now I started Amarok up again and all I had to do was go to Settings -> Configure Amarok... then pick Engine on the left and set the Output Plugin field to Alsa. Okay, not obvious to a new user but I've been down this road before. Now Amarok plays fine again.

Bob, keep your hands off my coffee! Bob Hanner gave a talk at Pop!Tech 2005 on a growing project called the Barcode of Life. I'm listening to the podcast from ITConversations. Some of the terminology is too far out of my field, but I definitely get the idea. He's talking about cataloging all species of the world based on identifying short sequences of DNA. One eventual outcome of the project would be a device that would be capable of identifying species in real time. He makes a convincing case with some really interesting examples of uses that have already been made of their project. Near the end, I realized he's coming from University of Guelph, just south of Toronto. That brings up a new angle for me - I'm glad to hear that my province is funding some great stuff like this. You'll have to listen close to get the coffee connection.

I have to say that Winer's really hit on something with this one (10/27/2005). He did his Morning Coffee Notes podcast from a breakfast get-together last Thursday . The tone is very casual and we get to hear all the regular diner sounds. I don't know if it's all that great foley or the wide variety of voices, but something really strikes me about the whole production. Maybe it's more personal for me since it's kind of like evesdropping in a bay area diner. Topics wander from gender in tech to cohousing, have a listen - it's long but it's interesting.

I'm listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code from Monday right now. When I heard the first few minutes I had to say "What the hell is this and why do I want to hear it?"