Tag: podcasts

The Hate Debate

Listened to a podcast episode titled, “The Hate Debate” (via Radiolab Presents: More Perfect by WNYC Studios). It was published on November 5th, 2017.

Should you be able to say and do whatever you want online? And if not, who should police this? More Perfect hosts a debate about online hate speech, fake news and whether the First Amendment needs an update for the digital age.

Definitely worth a listen.

Official runtime is about 36 minutes, and a bit less if you use Overcast with Smart Speed active. 😉

See also: Freedom of Speech at WordPress.com

Merlin Mann discusses GTD on Back to Work

Why would you use a source of input as a way to decide how to spend your day?

Merlin discusses GTD with Dan Benjamin in their podcast, Back to Work: 261: The Illusion of Ease (starting at 1:23:00). I’ve listened to this several times. Super insightful, and perfect timing in combination with my earlier post, Keep todos out of Slack.

They also reference earlier episodes that were great, so here’s a search at 5by5 for podcasts referencing GTD.

P.S. If I don’t have weekly reviews, I’m not following GTD.

Huffduffer: Your personal podcast feed

Huffduffer is a free service that helps you create a podcast feed consisting of your selected episodes. While downloading individual episodes with Overcast can be done in a few steps1, there isn’t a quicker workflow when using a laptop or desktop.

With a Huffduffer account, you can use a browser bookmarklet! Stumble across an episode? With the bookmarklet and a few text fields (optional if you’d like to add a description), that podcast episode will be queued for download shortly.

You’re also given a Huffduffer username and public page, where others can subscribe to your Huffduffer feed, or listen to podcasts from the page itself. (I was able to snag bryan.)

Enjoy!

  1. Search the title of the podcast, scroll through the episodes, then tap the episode you’d like to download. ↩

Marvelous calendaring tips from Back to Work

I listened to Back to Work: 200: Blitzkriegscheiße a couple of weeks ago. Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin share excellent calendaring tips for yourself and shared events at the 52–minute mark.

The suggestion to include a list of agenda items in the notes field for the event is one of my favorite tips.

For reference, I currently use:

  1. I grabbed Calendars 5 when it was free last year for a limited time. ↩

Podcasts I love

When I’m on the Metro or driving without friends, I’m listening to podcasts. I haven’t made a list here in awhile, so I thought I’d share in hopes you’d like them, too.

Yes, most of these are photography-related. I don’t have any favorites…I love them all equally! The last one is definitely the oddball out of the others, but sometimes I just want mindless humor. 🙂

One more thing: listening to podcasts don’t require the use of an iPod. You can listen to them on your computer, any MP3 player, or burned onto a CD-R disc.

Enjoy!

Speed up podcasts for free with foobar2000

A commenter (Freddie) was struggling with speeding up podcasts with Audacity. (See my how-to on speeding up podcasts with Audacity, version 1 and version 2.) Then, he found this article:

“Time stretching [MP3s] and other audio” by Blake Tolbert

I haven’t tried foobar2000 — because I’ve only been into the Kevin and Bean’s podcast from KROQ lately — but it looks legit and much simpler.

Oh yeah, welcome the new blogger! He doesn’t have a contact page and his comment form is broken, so let’s send him some traffic so he could see a spike from my blog. 🙂

How to speed up podcasts for free with Audacity (v2)

This is an update to the How-to article, “How to speed up podcasts for free with Audacity.”

In Audacity 1.3.2 (Beta), configuring the batch script is easier. The developers moved the location, though, so you might be lost if you recently updated to this version.

First, setup the chain: File > Edit Chains

In the left pane of the window that pops up, you’ll need to add a new chain. Title it “Speedup,” or whatever you like. With it selected, the right pane should have only one parameter: END.

Select that command, then at the bottom of the window, click Insert. Another window will pop up, and you’ll want to choose Change Tempo. Change the parameter to 25.000000, then click OK. (Later, you can increase the tempo if you’re comfortable.) Again, click Insert, select the ExportMP3 command, then click OK. Finally, OK out of the Edit Chains window.

Then, if you want to run the script, go to File > Apply Chain. Select the chain you just created, click Apply to Files, then browse to the folder where the podcasts are stored. Like I mentioned in the previous How-to, I copy the MP3s to the root podcast folder, so I’m not limited to one show (folder) at a time.

Conclusion

This’ll empower you to listen to podcasts, or any other supported audio files in a shorter amount of time, and you can convert multiple files at once. In addition to podcasts, I also speed up class lectures. 80-minute classes reduced to 64 minutes — awesome!

Podcasts are great time killers

On Tuesday, I had to make a trip to a remote office that needed some software updated. I called in the morning and confirmed that 2:00pm was a good time to do the job.

When I got there, it wasn’t a good time. It was swamped. I should’ve called before I left the main office to make sure it’d be a good time.

Anyway, I ended up waiting over an hour because they were so busy. Fortunately, I had a book and my iPod (with a few podcasts to catch up on).

Remember: You can listen to podcasts with any MP3 or CD player! (Here’s some more posts categorized under podcasting. PodcastAlley and Podcast.net look like good places to find podcasts to listen to. I mainly listen to Diggnation and Buzz Out Loud. I was listening to TWiT, but they’ve been too lengthy for me. I download them in case I run out of stuff to listen to.

I’m writing about this because podcasting still isn’t mainstream.

How to speed up podcasts for free with Audacity

Update 4/18/2007: This post is outdated. Audacity 1.3.2 (Beta) changes the method a bit, which I describe here.

Over a month ago, Lifehacker linked to an article: “Speeding Up Podcasts and Audio Books“. Here are the two sentences that caught my eye:

It lets you play one minute and fifteen seconds of audio for every minute you listen. In other words, you get an extra 25% of content.

However:

It’s the feature that Apple introduced with the 4G iPods back a couple of years ago. The feature is the ability to speed up (or slow down) audio without changing the pitch (if you are familiar with variable speed tape recorders, you understand that simply speeding up the playback of something tends to also make the speaker sound like a chipmunk).

I have a 3G iPod, so I don’t have this feature. The article mentioned Amazing Slow Downer, but it’s not free. Fortunately, Matt commented about Audacity:

Audacity is great for this, at an unbeatable price ($0). [..] It is cross platform, open source (free), and [speeds] up audio excellently, [in addition to] being a general purpose audio editor. There was a beta of the next version last time I checked that allowed bulk conversion. Unfortunately no command-line. (Effect [menu] > Change Tempo is the command you want.)

So, if I want to speed up podcasts, I have to do some work. Except for the tempo increase, it won’t be automatic.

Continue reading How to speed up podcasts for free with Audacity

KTLA discusses podcasts

Podcasting is one of the biggest hi-tech crazes now combining iPods and self-made music broadcasts. We’ll talk to the authors of “Podcast Solutions” about what Podcasting is and how you can actually listen or make your own cast.

I saw the above news item talked about on the KTLA morning news today. However, for better clarification, go to the Podcasting Wikipedia entry. An excerpt, with the important points in bold:

The word “Podcast” is often incorrectly used to describe the posting of any link to a media-player-compatible audio file (typically MP3) on a website. Some radio personalities post MP3 versions of their shows daily, and even though they are not part of any subscription model, they are often called podcasts.

Most podcatching software enables the user to copy podcasts to portable music players. Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software can play podcasts. From the earliest RSS-enclosure tests, feeds have been used to deliver video files as well as audio. By 2005 some aggregators and mobile devices could receive and play video, but the “podcast” name remained most associated with audio.

“Podcasting” is a portmanteau misnomer that combines the words “broadcasting” and “iPod.” The term can be misleading since neither podcasting nor listening to podcasts requires an iPod or any portable player. Also podcasting does not involve broadcasting or sending out of audio, since citizens need to point software to XML-tagged file to pull it down to their computer or portable device.

So, it’s not limited to iPods, okay? That’s what Kurt the Cyberguy missed. Also, you don’t need a book to learn about it. I believe those pages are more than enough information to go from.

iLounge Goodness

Actually, in case you still can’t wrap your head around this, here’s some more links to sift through:

Conclusion

If you have an iPod, use iTunes. (That’s what I’m doing right now.) Look for the “Podcasts” section, then click on “Podcast Directory” to find and subscribe to a podcast. If you don’t have an iPod, there’s a huge list of news aggregators. Find one that supports podcasts, then when a podcast is updated, copy the MP3 file to your digital audio player. I know someone that uses Doppler (free) to download podcasts, then burns them to CD for his truck. Before iTunes supported podcasts, I used iPodder Lemon (free). Oh, and you can listen to podcasts just on your computer (if you don’t have a DAP).

I know the audience here, but I figured that if it was on the morning news, people might look more into this. (Plus I was somewhat annoyed – wasn’t thorough enough.) If this entry hits somewhere in the top of some search results, it’ll be worth it.

What am I listening to?

Please note that I probably won’t update this list. But I think these will stick around for awhile. You can always ask me if I added or removed any subscriptions, no problem.