Podcasting...

...the amateur way

I've created my first podcasts, and they are indeed pretty amateur at the moment. All the same it's quite fun to do, especially once you've set up the hosting for the MP3 files and the RSS feed for the blog. With that lot done all that's needed to post is to record, edit and upload the MP3 then post the link in the blog.

The problem I've got at the moment is that the mike I'm using is just not sensitive at all. I think it's actually defective but in any case, even with the recording volume set to maximum and the mike so close that every 'P' and 'B' sounds like I'm thumping the mike with a fist, the recorded sound is way too quiet. To get the voice track volume up to something reasonable I have to amplify it by 9dB or more, and that has the effect of amplifying background hiss. I'll have to get a new mike at some point but I'm fairly sure even something pretty cheap will do a much better job.

At the moment the podcast is on the subject of computers and the Internet - short episodes to try to help people who have problems using computers. I'm aiming at producing one episode about every two weeks, and I have subjects for about seven episodes planned to start with. I'll probably add more subjects as I go along, and maybe if I get some feedback that'll give me ideas for more.

As for the format, I've kind of combined the things I like from two of my favourite podcasts. Brian Dunning keeps the episodes of the Skeptoid.com podcast down to around ten minutes by covering one subject and keeping it to the point, and not adding opening and closing music and very little background music. Lord Garthog of Logically Critical posts much longer episodes (or rather, he did - sadly, LC is no longer being produced), adds some theme music and also humourous sound effects. My podcast is short like Skeptoid (shorter, actually, at least for the first couple of posts) but I have the theme music and the sound effects (a few, anyway) which I hope add a bit of interest.

I've added links to the blog and the feed to the sidebar. I don't expect many downloads, at least at first, but the feed has already been scoped by Google and the way I understand it the feed will probably show up in the iTunes Store and the Zune Marketplace once I have five or six episodes up - if that's true I may see a bit of a download explosion. Hopefully I'll be able to fix the sound quality problems before anything like that happens.

What I Did On My Holidays

Christmas 2007

Two years ago I wrote a post about what I got for Christmas. Last year I meant to, but I was too busy writing a series about home video editing. To get back to what seems to be a fine tradition, here is a summary of what I got for Christmas this year:

DVD - Babylon 5 - The Complete First Season and Babylon 5 - The Movie Collection

Babylon 5 is probably the best science fiction TV series ever made. While I'm also a great fan of Star Trek (especially Voyager), I can't help but feel that ST was overly optimistic about human society in the future - one 'nation', no money, no war. B5 is to me far more realistic in the sense that people are people and that human society will probably be much the same in 2258 as it is now - just as political, conflict-torn and self-destructive as it has ever been. Watching B5 it's easy to believe that we'll still be stuck with religion and all the problems it causes three hundred years from now. The only real differences are the technologies we happen to have at our disposal at each respective period; the only thing that shows any real advance is science.

B5 ran five seasons and also had five spin-off movies that closed out some plotlines from the series. So far we've watched something like twenty episodes and the first of the movies. I want to get the other four seasons to complete the collection.

DVD - The Pink Panther Film Collection

The best of the Peter Sellers Pink Panther films including the original The Pink Panther, A Shot In The Dark and others. There are five movies and a sixth "Bonus Disk" which is a complete mystery - there is nothing in the notes to even hint at what's on that disk. I may not post about it when I find out what's on it - it could be a tremendous spoiler. Do Not Watch This Space.

DVD - The Bourne Ultimatum

I loved the first Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity. The second, The Bourne Supremacy, was good but I do wish that modern film directors would learn that handheld, shaky camera shots don't work well when your audience is watching your work on a screen eighty feet wide and forty feet in front of them. Kate bought me the The Bourne Ultimatum and while I expect it to be as excellent as the first two I'm hoping it doesn't make me seasick like the second one almost did.

DVD - Live Free and Die Hard

The original Die Hard (1988) is a classic. The second one (1990) was stupid; the third (1995), better than the second but not, in my opinion, as good as the first. I've heard that the new one (almost twenty years after the original) is pretty good. Haven't watched it yet. We'll see.

DVD - The Kingdom

I haven't even seen a trailer for this and have no real idea what it's about, but Jamie Foxx is turning out to be a fine actor and his recent movies in particular have been damn good. I'm looking forward to seeing this one.

Rabbit Wine Preserver and Marquis Corkscrew

I do like a nice glass of wine. The wine preserver is basically a hand-operated vacuum pump that pulls the air out of an opened bottle to prevent the oxygen spoiling the wine. I've used it a couple of times already and it seems to work well. The corkscrew is a high-quality affair with a knife and bottle opener built in, very solidly made. Very nice.

Zune 30

I mentioned in an earlier posting that my iPod was having some problems, and that those problems ultimately spelled the end of the iPod because of Apple's crappy customer 'service'. Kate surprised me with a Zune for Christmas; I already like it immensely (although the Zune software that you install on your PC could do with some serious improvements).

I've even managed to transfer over all the music that I bought on iTunes. Unfortunately there's no way I've yet found to do the same thing with the audiobooks I paid for. (DRM stinks. Thank you, music pirates, for bringing us the DMCA and all the bullshit DRM garbage that it ushered in. Thanks to you I can't listen to audio that I've paid for and the only way I can get where I can use it would make me, technically speaking, a lawbreaker no better than you. You dumb bastards.)

Other Things

Also: a polished wood and glass case, kind of a men's jewelry box for keeping watches but handy for keeping all kinds of bits in one place; a really nice pair of slippers; and I'm fairly sure there's at least one other DVD I've forgotten to mention.