Twittin'

Three years of walking to and from work, recently altered to an (admittedly quite palatable) 20 minute drive has led to three simple revelations:

1. Driving is fun when done for fun, and sucks when done for work
2. The iPod is a wonder device for walkers, and it is made so by iTunes, which is in turn enhanced by the Airport Express (which lets you send your iTunes wirelessly from your machine straight to your stereo).
3. Because of (ii), I now realize that I have not a skerrick of patience for commercial radio (especially in the morning). Nothing to do with the personalities Mkae (ok, a little to do with that), more to do with commercialism and crappy thin playlists. During my walking years, it seems I got too old for today's music (and not quite old enough for more than a half-hour of NPR).

This little list explains why I am in love with Podcasting right now. Don't let the name fool ya, it's just a slice of recorded audio from any old person willing to commit audio to bytes, and then publish it somewhere so you can download it onto your machine and dig-audio device of choice. It's like having some guy mail you a tape of your favourite radio show each week.

It has been around for a few years, but was never this easy. Previously you had to find it, download it, and then push it into your iTunes. Now you just cruise a massive searchable directory through iTunes 5, and click the subscribe button. Your iTunes will then show you all the recent 'episodes', and you can set it to automatically download each week/month as required as well as how many to keep.

Room To Improve I will say though, that iTiunes great shortcoming for the wife and I is its inability to handle a single library syncing with multiple iPods. As a two-iPod household though (+1 shuffle, but thats managed as a Playlist) we really need an iTunes version that can handle multiple iPods, rather than the 1:1 forced relationship we have now. Thus we end up with music library doubled

This is, for me, the ultimate solution to radio content. I can subscribe to the things I am interested in, I can listen to it when I want to (fast forward etc), and importantly they're are commercial free (at least my faves are). Now I listen to a podcast via main room stereo every few nights while making dinner etc. Bloody brilliant.

My current favourite podcast is TWiT, or This Week In Tech. It's a conversational hour each week with a lot of the old blokes from The Screen Savers (when TechTV actually had more tech content than Top 10 Gaming lists) bantering about anything that crosses their target reticle. More animated than the also good Engadget, thanks to a diverse bunch of folks with some broadcasting experience (which helps). Geeky goodness.

For a great introductory episode, subscribe via iTunes and listen to Episode 25 (10/3/2005). Hilarious section about the quality of the Serenity movie and the effect it should have on George Lucas.

Other good links from recent TWiTs:

• Read which senators are quietly trying to attach to a Congress bill such that your TV/VCR/etc should come with a broadcast flag whereby the broadcaster can have approval control over the features allowed on your receiving device.
• Need help organizing your life? Then you may be a geek. Read why GTD is nerd-friendly
• Microsoft want to sell you a subscription service where they help keep your machine safe from spyware and viruses. How the hell is this gonna encourage them to fix their leaky operating system? Conflict of interest is putting it lightly. Someone commented that if it was The Mafia you were paying for protection, at least you knew you were actually gonna be safe.
• Australia Supreme court rules that it is legal to modd your own Playstation. Thank god, I was waiting for that ruling (4 years in the making...) before I did it.
• For the old TechTV fans, keep an ear out for the Ep 25 discussion of where pieces of the set went, and what was auctioned for how much when the company was bought out. It was an employee fire-sale to rival The Big D's. Try and guess how much they got for Morgan Webb's mouse mat...

Did you notice the post date/time? I swear, plus or minus a few minutes it just turned out that way!