Kroc Camen meets Thom Holwerda for another attempt at interpreting the stories currently on the OSNews.com homepage. Thom’s sound issues have been solved, but as you will find out I had some mic difficulties. GarageBand crashed half way through – again. The show keeps up it’s ‘unscripted’ style! “Read More” for the links and show-notes.
No, you didn’t miss Episodes 2 and 3! We decided to bump up to episode number 4 to reflect the two previous podcast episodes (not produced by me and Thom) already in the feed, and so last week’s episode should actually be episode 3, not 1.
Here’s how the sound file breaks down:
| 00:39 | Intro |
|---|---|
| 01:57 | “When Did You First Use Linux?” |
| 12:26 | “BumpTop” |
| 24:36 | “Firefox 3.6” |
| 36:14 | Meta |
| 47:35 | (Total Time) |
Click here to download the .mp3 file directly
Click here to subscribe to the Podcast feed
We genuinely hope that you enjoy this, and that we’ve managed to bring up original points in our discussion. Do follow up what you picked up on in your comments!
We are always open to your feedback. Please either leave your comments on the site, or send us an email to [email protected]
I say Okay a lot… Sorry Thom, I’m not being rude, just trying to form some kind of order to the proceedings in my mind!
Secondly, I forgot to say Ubuntu at the start when I mentioned downloading every beta/release version!
I was curious why the podcast I just saw last week was podcast #1 and this is number 4, and wondered “did I miss any?” So I looked at
http://www.osnews.com/files/podcast.xml
and found you guys did 2 podcasts a few years back and that #1 last week was actually #3.
Just figured I put this comment out for anyone else who is confused.
Thanks. We have included this fact in the show notes when you click “Read More”. Next week will be #5.
I thought MPX (Multi-Pointer Xsever) did just that. But as i found out it has no “true” touch support yet. More info here:
http://wearables.unisa.edu.au/mpx/?q=node/147
Garageband crashed? I thought Macs ‘just work’? 😛
I have had quite a few crashes myself with GarageBand over the last year or so, but it has always restarted and been able to keep everything intact. Still very annoying and I hope the crashing issues are fixed in iLife ’09, which I guess is what we will get with Snow Leopard.
but…I’ve been told that Apple software “just works”?
If you use more than one operating system, then you’ll know that all software has flaws.
This was in iLife’09
After 15 mins recording, it stopped saying that it had run out of memory (for the waveforms). It must be a memory leak somewhere, and I hope Apple fix it soon.
I don’t see one:(. In the future episodes could you include an ogg?
We gave our answer to this in the show, right at the end. OGG simply is not practical enough right now. We will look into it in the future, but we don’t want to double the space used on the server for each episode when mp3 will be able to reach 99% of the audience. We’ll have to work with the server people to see if bandwidth/space-wise we can provide OGGs, and I don’t know that at this moment. Apologies.
So, use some other place to host it. E.g. the internet archive (archive.org) hosts some podcasts.
The Internet Archive has no backup. When a hard disk dies, a part of the Internet’s history is permanently lost.
It’s also not really the place for our banal banter.
If someone could share a compelling reason to host the podcast in OGG format knowing that iTunes – likely the most popular podcast host app – cannot support it and that it’s likely that 99% + of our users already have MP3 codecs installed, I’d like to hear it.
It’s an idealist request with little practical value.
The only thing I would change for next time is the volume of the music at the start, end and between topics. It is a bit too high in contrast to the talking.
Other than the above I’m enjoying the podcasts, keep up the good work.
I would like to hear in the next podcast your thoughts on wine and crossover games:
http://www.winehq.org/
http://www.codeweavers.com/
Thanks for this feedback. If I stick with the same music I will lower the level again. It was difficult to judge given how many volume levels (input and output) there is. Also, I think the intro/extro could do with being shorter.
Wow. Who was responsible for that terrible electro-synth music?
Please tell me it’s from some obscure ’80s game and is a joke and doesn’t actually reflect someone’s taste 🙂
Hmm honestly, I thought it was kind of a catchy little tune. Agree though that it doesn’t need to go on as long in the intro.
The podcast is nice, but what’s become of the OS News comic? It’s been gone so long I don’t even remember its name. 🙁
I miss those doors.
And while on the subject of creative new practical implementations of multi-touch interfaces, I suggest you guys check out one of the presentations at nVidia’s NVISION ’08 conference. You made passing mention of Perspective Pixel, the company that makes of the famous CNN Magic Wall, but the NVISION ’08 presentation blows away anything John King did with the wall during the U.S. election.
The demo begins 1 hour and 24 minutes into the day one keynote video available here http://www.nvidia.com/content/nvision2008/keynotes.html.
I hope this sheds new light on the way you think about future computing interfaces. I know it sure did for me.
To further improve sound quality i suggest using levelator to adjust speaking levels of different persons automatically. It’s free and available for mac,win and linux and was specifically designed for podcasts.
If you want a sample with your podcast:
http://blog.serophos.net/wp-data/original.mp3
http://blog.serophos.net/wp-data/output.mp3
More info here:
http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator
You can do this manually of course but it’s much more work and doesnt usually give the same quality.
Thank you so much! I have a very quiet and softly spoken voice and Thom is very direct and much more clear. I already had adjusted our individual audio levels, but that program definitely made a difference. I’ll add that to the toolchain for next time
– Clicked wrong link to reply –
Edited 2009-04-14 08:47 UTC
What I really liked about the Podcast was how Thom came across as much gentler than in some of his comments. I find that, on the website, sometimes he sounds very egocentric or arrogant. (Sorry, Thom! Not meant as an attack.) Not so while listening to him talking. I can’t put my finger on it, so whatever is different, I’d like to see more of it in the comments.
The English of both of you also is very easy to understand, for me as a non-native speaker. Very good.
There also were some things I disliked, though.
I, too, didn’t like the music. However, that’s not an issue for me – to each his own, I’ll just fast forward.
But, the amount of talking about Linux wasn’t for me. I know, I know, it’s OSNews. Still, checking the article after listening, I was surprised that it said the topic was “Bump Top” from 12:26 on. While listening, I didn’t even notice the introduction of the topic change (must have not been paying attention or something for a minute, not sure) and it was “Linux this, Linux that” all the time to me until the discussion about Firefox.
Furthermore, I didn’t like that you discussed almost nothing new, asides from the e-mail responses, of course. I constantly had the feeling of “yeah, read that in a comment. yep, that too.”. I see that it’s hard to come up with new points on OSNews’ stories, considering that most stuff gets discussed extensively. Perhaps “interpreting the stories currently on the OSNews.com homepage” is the wrong concept in the first place. I think you should talk more about background information not currently written here.
So, well, that’s my (hopefully) constructive criticism, hth.