10 posts tagged “podcast”

Accomplishment of the day:

Why are not more people talking about this issue of government eroding on our rights on every front?

Podcasts waiting to be listened: 14 hours
Total flight time from Bangalore to Newark: 24.5 hours
Get home: Priceless

As part of the Download Squad blogger team I was honored to be invited to participate in a podcast about my Ubuntu experience, the first of the switcher series on Download Squad. I've already listened to it and think my inexperience as an interviewee shows. I did not sound entirely comfortable and felt rushed in places but I guess it all comes down to practice.

If you spend the time to listen to the podcast, do you think I went into too much technical details about my experience?

David and I were IMing this afternoon and during our discussion, he mentioned to me that there are supplimentary podcasts for the design: e² on iTunes! One of the thing that caught my eyes as I browse through the design: e² web site is this bit:

More than 23 billion square feet of residential floor space was built in China from 1997 to 2005. That's three times the total amount of office space in the entire United States.

Looked at another way, China will have built the equivalent of 21 Manhattan in eight year.

How do you pass the time during a flight?  What do you bring in your carry-on?

Depending on the flight time but generally this is the order of events:

1. Start reading a book/magazine that I want to read for a while but didn't have time until the flight/vacation.
2. Get bored and switch on the in-flight map to see where we are.
3. Get bored with the map and start listening to podcast on my iPod.
4. Dozed off and only wake up for food and drinks.
5. Rinse and repeat...
   

I've heard about Dolby Headphone encoding for a while now and was impressed by the demo track. But the latest MacBreak Weekly podcast @ TWiT is encoded using it and I must say, I am very impressed. I hope they continue to encode their regular podcasts using Dolby Headphone too.

Last week while I was browsing around iTunes Music Store, looking for new podcast to subscribe to, I decided to see how many new BBC podcasts had been added to iTunes since I last looked. So I typed in "BBC" in the search box and the list was pretty long. As I read down the list, I spotted the Newsnight video podcast. It is a short excerpt of the week's footage so it is a nice way to get the best digest of the program.

I didn't manage to watch the three episodes until late last night and a couple of minutes into the first one, I wondered what file format BBC is encoding the podcast. A quick check in iTunes showed that it is just plain mp4 video, and I then wondered further whether my Nokia E61 will play it.

E61 on Titanium PowerBook

1 comment

So I dug out the USB data cable and connected the phone up. The memory card showed up as a disk on my Mac desktop and I just dragged the file into the disk. A few minutes later I had it on my phone and RealPlayer was playing the podcast in its fullscreen glory! The video quality is pretty good. I didn't notice any dropped frames and the sound from the speaker is adequate for a talking head program. Battery life, of course, suffers when you play video on the phone but that is to be expected.

Anyway, after that it was just a matter of entering the long URL for the podcast into the Nokia Podcasting app on the phone. Soon it was download the latest episode onto the phone via the Wi-Fi connection. This is especially cool for me because I can't play video on my 4G iPod (obviously) and I am waiting for the next generation before upgrading. Being able to play video on my phone means I have less of an excuse to buy the 6G iPod when it comes out.

So now I have even more content to keep me occupied as when I am stuck in a subway train. One thing still annoys me though. Why can't all audio and video podcasts on iTunes uses non-DRM, non-proprietary format like BBC. How about that Apple? Can I have iTunes New Music Tuesday in regular mp4 audio format, may be as an alternative to the special one you've been using? I don't care for the album arts and chapters, I just want to listen to the podcast on my phone!

Thanks to iTunes New Music Tuesday podcast (Yes eiron, I am still listening to the woman from Midwest), I found out that Evanescence's new album is now available on iTunes Music Store as a pre-order! I've already added it to my cart and downloaded the bonus track "Call Me When You're Sober". I've only listened to it once thus far but it sounds pretty good. Classic Evanescence music. Can't wait till October 3rd!