Dark Pigmented Mallard

Dark Pigmented Mallard
Originally uploaded by KCanard.

A New Duck makes a splash at my local pond. He had all the attention. The drakes envied his dark sleek feathers.

Some Podcasts I Have Sampled - Six

How to Succeed in Evil is a podcast I have been listening to recently. It is the fun tale of an evil advisor who is exasperated at the ineptitude of this clients - evil geniuses who are to big headed to realise their own shortcomings. It is also available in comic form here. One of the podcasts sees Edwin (the evil expert) dealing with zombie workers run amok, that episode features music by Jonathan Coulton.

I've listened to a few episodes of Typeradio which is supposed to be all about typography, but it's not so heavy on the typography. There are interviews with font creators (where the question "how many illegal fonts have you got?" is asked, among others) and such - have to do some more listening but it sounds (after hearing three 'casts) interesting.

Not categorically a podcast (ah, my mistake yes it is! Here is the RSS feed link) but there is audio from South By Southwest Interactive presentations and discussions (more files being added as they get around to it). There's one called Web Typography Sucks which I have heard about and have yet to listen to - It was just put up today.
Also there is audio and video from the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (talks on open sourceness, linux, wikis collaboration etc.).

Links for 13th March 2007

The Tumbleist is a list of some tumblelogs (brief, immediate, mixed media post blog (ooh - post-blog?)) around on the web. Snippets from a life is the main way they are being used. What is so exciting about the net is that things don't stay uniform for long.

I read tell of Duck stand up on bash.org.

Firefox 3.0 news - ComputerWorld says -
"Firefox 3.0 will also have a small, embedded database -- SQL Lite -- that will eventually be used for full-text indexing of the browser's "history." ".
Useful - but will it slow the browser down? Hope not, sound's interesting.

Shiira Browser - Fast and Pretty

Shiira Browser 2.0b2 for OS X
Originally uploaded by KCanard.

Shiira 1.2.2 (Panther or later) is the stable build, but 2.0b2 (in the pic) is - in my reckoning - faster still, but alas buggy still. Nevertheless I am using this at present. I had tried Shiira before, but wasn't as blown away by it - don't know if it was more a change in the app or a change in me that makes me feel WOW. I can't wait to see the stable release of 2.0.

-
This is my first post from Flickr. I like this Flickr blog feature.

Links for 6th March 2007

Open Culture: The Podcast Portal has links to some good podcasts organised by topic (e.g. Arts+Culture, Technology) including good things like TWiT, Buzz Out Loud but also less well known shows are here.

Meomi is a lovely site full of pastel cute "critters" and such. They have some desktop images (link to one of my favourites) and icons, and a few game type things and they sell magnets and badges and cards, which are quite tempting.

Video from the past at Videojug
Video clips from the 30s onwards including things like Nixon in the USSR and model homes with built in fall out shelters and Farmer plays tune with hands from 1933 - (see, people were so much more sophisticated back then, how far we have fallen). There's lots of news items and the like.


Navigate the OS X Menu (File, Edit etc and the small apple) by Keyboard. - a Tip from Apple.

Some Podcasts I Have Sampled - Five

TED talks audio and video feed - Often compelling and sometimes inspiring lectures from the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) event TED ("is an event like no other. It brings together more than 1000 thought-leaders, movers and shakers... in Monterey, California every year... for four days of learning laughter and inspiration.")
A couple of the lectures that excited me were Cameron Sinclair (founder of Architecture for Humanity talking about Open Source Design and Architecture - and the DIY ethic) and Nicholas Negroponte (on One Laptop Per Child and how it will be done - and what it means for education). Other interesting casts were David Pogue and Arctic explorer Ben Saunders. I've got to listen to and watch more of this stuff. The site says "For best effect, plan to listen to at least three, start to finish. They have a cumulative effect." I agree - that's what I have just done. I am excited.

The Show with Ze Frank - is what I've been watching a lot of recently. (There's over a year to catch up on to) (And then a few days later I saw his thang mentioned on the 3rd episode of Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe BBCPage WikiPage (series 2)).
Watching Ze Frank is compulsive watching, it has echoes of Armando Iannucci's stuff... I'm trying to find a way to describe it (if you haven't watched it already)- a face to camera talking about "the knowledge", reading something from the comments, provoking viewer interaction rearranging his perceptual architecture...

And then there's TWIT. Which is all good. MacBreak Weekly, and TWIT are my favourite, due to the informal, looser and "rathole"-y nature of the show (they refer to their veering off topic moments as ratholes) and their reliable characters - Leo Laporte and his voices and accents, Merlin Mann and his joshing, John C. Dvorak the grumpy old man etc. net@nite is interesting cos it's has live listener interaction (people phone in) and I like the back and forth between Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte.

I'm thinking of creating a deli.cio.us tag - podcasts I like - or something - can I be arsed? After listening to those TED talks with all those go ahead and do stuff people I feel incredibly lazy. But my reasoning is - I am a duck, ducks laze and doze a lot, I'm the only duck I know that can understand human language. But that's a very specious argument.

Some Podcasts I Have Sampled - Four

Sounds Good podcast "The podcast that makes you sound better"- Audio engineering and how to get sounding good podcast. It's an enhanced iTunes podcast. The images (of enhancement) explain how to achieve certain effects, there's advice, tips and tricks with visuals that make tricky things easier to understand. The host Hens Zimmerman has an intriguing (is it Belgian?) accent. Clearly he's an audio professional, very authoritative and the advice is detailed and fairly easy to follow if you take it bit by bit. He seems to be working on a Mac - this is an exciting podcast that I have to listen to more of. Lots of listener interaction too - which is fab.

Indiefeed - I discovered Mixel Pixel's Coming up Xs on this podcast. The site allows you to chose from different genres like Hip Hop or Blues or Electronica. Each little podcast contains a song and some information about the artist. The website has a page with flash players where you can listen to streams of various genres. Have to make more use of this too. - Oh there is also some spoken word on the site too - I have yet to check that out. The posts on each genre page have the feed link, some of the posts don't seem to - if you scroll down far enough you'll find the feed link somewhere.


So few Mac apps with the podcast download and play ability - or even better preview a podcast. I was trying out Juice but I found I don't give it much of a go, I have a knee jerk dislike of Java apps. I'd also had enough of Playpod which was buggy. So I'm now trying out new podcast feeds in Vienna to see if i like them - If I do I import them into iTunes. I don't like that iTunes doesn't allow you to copy the feed URL from within the app - but if you drag the podcast feed to the desktop it will create a .pcast file which you can then open in a text editor and copy the feed URL. Or I could open the exported OPML file, but my list is so huge it's faster to do the drag and open thing.