Today is the late Bob Hope’s birthday. Turns out he was born in 1903, the same year as my grandfather. Bob was two months older. I don’t believe they ever met.

From Doug Kaye comes a pointer to Freesound, which:

…aims to create a huge collaborative database of audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps, … released under the Creative Commons Sampling Plus License.

It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting here in Timothy’s Coffee in downtown Charlottetown. My friends Rob and Cynthia are having a high-powered meeting over in the corner. On his way in I mentioned to Rob that I was here making a podcast (more on that in the next post, once I’ve made it!); when Rob expressed interest in podcasting himself, I promised to blog the “how to make a podcast” process. Read on to learn how to make your first podcast, with your Mac, in a few easy steps.

Recording. You’ll need a piece of software that lets you record sound with your Mac. I suggest, at least to start, a surprisingly capable piece of open source software called Audacity (it’s available for many platforms, not just the Mac). So to start, go to the Mac download page for Audacity and download and install the program. Because you probably want to save your podcast as an MP3, take the extra step of installing the the LAME MP3 encoder.

Microphone. Although there are many better alternatives, the easiest microphone to use is the one built into your Mac. That’s assuming you have a relatively new Mac that actually has a built-in microphone (I’ll assume you do). You might not even know you have a microphone; here’s mine:

It’s that little dot on the upper right corner of the screen. My 17” iMac has a microphone in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen; it’s even more subtle. The sound isn’t “studio quality,” but it’s better than you might think.

Go. Fire up Audacity. It will look like this:

Audacity has lots of bells and whistles that you can ignore to begin with. All you need to focus on is the “record” and “stop” buttons:

Press the “record” button and start talking, singing, dancing, or whatever else you want to do in your podcast. When you’re done, press the “stop” button. You’ll see that Audacity displays the “sounds waves” of your audio:

To save the audio, select “File,” then “Export as MP3” from the Audacity menu:

Give your audio file a name — like “MyFirstPodcast.mp3” — and save it somewhere you’ll remember, like your desktop. Audacity will prompt you to enter “ID3 tags” for the audio file: enter appropriate information, as below; this is the information that will be displayed in your listeners’ audio players while their listening:

Listening. That’s it: you’ve now recorded your podcast. Drag and drop the audio file you saved into iTunes to see how it looks and sounds:

Uploading. Turning your audio file into a “podcast” is the most cumbersome part of the process, mostly because there isn’t a standard way to do this, and it’s supported by some blogging platforms/software and not others. Best solution: look in the help or user support section of your blogging system for references to either “podcasting” or “RSS enclosures.” If you’ve got more information on this process, or links to helpful sites, please post them in the comments to this post.

Done. I’ve gone through this process, uploaded the MP3 file to my home-brew blogging system, and that little audio file is now a bona fide “podcast.”

So here you go, Rob: podcast on!

I’ve been doing a lot of talking about podcasting recently: explaining to people what it is, and how they can do it, and how they can listen, and how it works. I thought it might be useful to provide a very simple step by step illustration of how to “subscribe to a podcast.”

I’ll use the podcast for BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent as an example. If you visit the show’s website, you’ll see a new “XML” button labelled “subscribe to the series of podcasts” and providing a URL for the “podcast feed:”

The “podcast feed” URL is the address of a specially encoded page on the BBC’s server that contains information about the podcast. If you look at it in a web browser, it will look confusing

But you’re not meant to look at this “raw” data; instead you copy the URL into a piece of “podcatching” software — a sort of “radio” to podcasting’s “transmitter.” There are many different podcatching applications available, and there’s something for you no matter what sort of computer you have.

I use NetNewsWire myself: it’s a very well-designed and mature application that exists primarily as a “newsreader” tool for reading weblogs, but has recently been extended with “podcatching” capabilities. So I start up NetNewsWire and then click its Subscribe icon, paste in the “podcast feed” URL I got from the BBC website, and click the Subscribe button:

The result? Following the arrows I’ve added in the screen shot below clockwise from the top-left, you’ll see an entry for the From Our Own Correspondent in the list of podcasts I’ve subscribed to, a list of the recent “episodes,” with the “publication date” for each, and, because I’ve selected the Thursday, May 26 episode, the details about the episode below, along with a link to download the audio into my iTunes:

In the case of NetNewsWire, the program doesn’t automatically go out and fetch the audio for existing programs (this prevents it from downloading hundreds of megabytes of old shows); however the next time the BBC updates the From Our Own Correspondent podcast, NetNewsWire, because of the way I’ve got it set up…

…will automatically download the audio, transfer it to my iTunes, put it in a playlist called “Podcast” and set the genre to “Podcast.” Here what my iTunes “Podcast” playlist looks like after NetNewsWire has been running for a while and a bunch of new podcasts have flowed in, including, highlighted at the top, a new From Our Own Correspondent:

And that’s it. The whole idea is that I subscribe to a podcast and from then on the audio for each new episode automatically shows up on my iPod.

Although the process above is certainly more complex than it will eventually be, it’s become easy enough to grasp that most anyone can become a podcast listener without much effort.

If you have any questions about how to do this yourself, feel free to ask in the comments to this post.

I’ve owned an iPod Shuffle for almost two months now, and I thought it was time to share some of my impressions.

Form-factor. It’s hard to get a handle on how very tiny the Shuffle is until you hold one for the first time. When Apple compares it to a “stick of gum,” they’re being literal, for that’s about how big it is. It’s also very light. Every person I’ve showed it to remarks on how small it is compared to what they expected. I had a regular old iPod for several years, until it stopped working; while it was small too, it was “deck of cards” small, and when it was in my pocket, I noticed it; I don’t notice the Shuffle at all.

Controls. There are two controls on the Shuffle, one on the front that controls play / pause / reverse / forward and volume, and another on the back that is the on / off switch and controls whether the unit is in “playlist” or “shuffle” mode.

The front control is very well designed: I often use it in the dark, and it’s textured enough so that I’m never confused. Although there are only two physical pieces to the control — an inner circle and an outer ring — those two parts do a lot: everything from locking the controls (press and hold the “play” button) to “fast forwarding” while playing (press and hold the “forward” or “reverse” buttons while listening).

The on / off control at the back is the Shuffle weakest design feature, for two reasons. First, although the control is made out of the same smooth plastic as the rest of the unit, so unless you’re wearing rubber gloves, it’s too slippery to control easily (a slightly wet finger helps). Second, the “playlist” mode requires moving the switch halfway on, which is neither intuitive nor very easy to do without practice. Adding some texture to the button, and a better “switch position” mechanism would help here.

Random Shuffle. Although Apple has been marketing the Shuffle as a “listen to lots of random music” player, I seldom use it with music: I use it to listen to audiobooks and podcasts. As such, I use its rarely mentioned non-random “playlist” mode to listen to songs. I generally load it up with 10 to 20 podcasts, and then simply listen to them in order. For reasons I don’t completely understand (regular old iPods don’t do this), but which I find very helpful, if I turn off the Shuffle mid-program (or mid-song), it starts back up right where I left off when I turn it on again. This is great for listening to podcasts in more than one sitting.

No display. The biggest difference, besides storage mechanism and size, between the regular iPod and the Shuffle is the lack of a display on the Shuffle: the only visual feedback on the Shuffle is two LEDs on the front (used for things like “okay, I see you pressed that” and “I’m charging now”) and an LED on a button on the back that, if pressed, gives an indication of the battery’s charge. I thought I would miss having a display, but now that I’m used to it, I don’t really mind at all. I never really used the address book, calendar, clock and games functions of my large iPod; if I was used to those, I might miss the display more. And because of the way I use the Shuffle — more of a “take some audio off the PC for a while” rather than “hold my hole music library” — I don’t really find myself needing to “look things up.” The only drawback I’ve found of not having a display is if I have a couple of dozen podcasts on the Shuffle and want to listen to a specific one, I have to jump through the playlist until I find the one I’m looking for; having a display would mean I could jump right there, but I’m willing to take the hit for the size, lack of fragility and increased battery life.

Syncing. There a small plastic cap on the end of the Shuffle; pull it off (it’s sturdily connected with a ball-bearing mechanism, and doesn’t seem prone to falling off on its own) and a USB connector is revealed that lets the Shuffle plug right into the USB port of a Mac or PC. On my Mac I’m using a Logitech cordless mouse USB extension cable that I didn’t need for the mouse itself; this lets me sit the Shuffle right out by my keyboard rather than having to reach around the back of the machine.

The Shuffle needs Apple’s iTunes to sync up music from the host Mac/PC. Apple made some clever modifications to iTunes to accommodate, adding a feature called “Autofill” that lets you set how the Shuffle gets filled up:

In this example, I’ve got iTunes set up to fill the Shuffle with audio from a playlist called “Podcasts” that I’ve created. Autofill is most useful, of course, when you have more music on your PC or Mac than room on the Shuffle; with it, iTunes selects a “random mix” of music, and fills up the Shuffle with as much music as there is room.

Without USB 2. My older iMac 17” doesn’t have a new USB 2 port, which means the transfer of audio from the Mac to the iPod is a lot slower than it would be otherwise, something I worried about before purchase. This hasn’t proved to be problem: a couple of hours of podcasts takes only a couple of minutes to transfer, and because I generally leave the Shuffle plugged in to charge anyway, I don’t even notice that amount of time.

As a Thumb Drive. There’s a setting in the iTunes configuration panel for the Shuffle that lets you set aside a certain amount of the storage space in the unit for use as a USB “thumb drive:”

Once you set aside some space for “disk use,” the Shuffle appears on the Mac desktop every time you plug it in, just like a regular USB “thumb drive” does, and you can copy files to it and basically treat it like a floppy disk or hard drive:

I’ve used this feature a couple of times to transfer documents from work to home, and I carried around a set of basic reference files and applications on the Shuffle on a recent trip to France just in case I needed a copy of Firefox or my address book on a foreign computer.

Battery Life. As the Shuffle has never run down, I’ve got no real experience with its battery life, other than “it seems to last forever and ever.” I’m not a heavy user — an hour or two a day at most — so I’m not sure how often I would need to charge the Shuffle if I was wearing it around all the time.

Sound. I’m not an audiophile, so whether the Shuffle reproduces music well, I cannot say. The audio of podcasts, which tends to be fairly lo-fi, is just fine. I alternate between the included standard white iPod earbuds (more comfortable than you would think, but a lot of “sound leakage” if you have neighbours) and pair of Shure e2c in-ear headphones (which cut out a lot of the noise in a room — or on an airplane, which is especially nice): the sound is equally fine for me with either.

Conclusion. Because the iPod Shuffle is so much smaller than my old “bulky” iPod, I’ve found myself carrying it around a lot more. I listen to it a lot when I’m falling to sleep, and I don’t have to worry about dropping it, or rolling over on it. I bought the 1GB model thinking I wanted to be able to hold a lot of stuff; I find I could have made out just as well with the 512MB model, as I’m never away from my Mac for long enough to need than much audio on the Shuffle. With the exception, noted above, of the slippery back switch, I find the controls easy to use, and I don’t miss the LCD display of the larger iPods at all. For my use — a portable, lightweight gizmo to listen to podcasts on — the Shuffle has fit the bill well.

Back in October I posted this photo from Disnik, Croatia in this space. Last night a man named Ivan living in Ecuador happened to be searching Google for “Disnik,” came across the photo and left this comment about how we might be related.

This morning I emailed Ivan with some information about our family, and an hour later he emailed me back “Yeahhh we are family.”

It turns out that we share the same great-grandfather, making us second cousins. Ivan’s branch of the family moved to Peru after World War II, my branch moved to Canada in the 1920s and, with the exception of a visit to Peru by my grandfather in the 1970s, we’d heard nothing from Peru, and assumed that contact with family there was lost forever.

By lunch this afternoon, Ivan and I were having a Skype chat, Charlottetown to Ecuador, filling each other in on the last 75 years of family history.

It’s a small, small, small world after all.

Since I received my iPod “shuffle” in March, I’ve had a device that lets me listen, easily, to a lot of podcasts, so I’ve upped the number of ‘casts that I subscribed to. So far my tastes, outside of the obvious Adam Curry and Dave Winer “required listening” podcasts, tend to lie towards repurposed radio content, although I’m finding some independent diamonds in the rough emerging from the podosphere.

Here’s what I recommend so far (all links are to podcast RSS feeds):

• Mark Kermode’s film reviews, from the BBC: like a more caustic Anthony Lane, with a lot of listener email/text message interaction.
• John and Elizabeth Edwards’ podcast is a very low-tech, low-key affair, and has much more appeal than I thought it would. The Edwards grok podcasting, and seem to understand that they can’t be scripted and still earn respect. It’s not quite total “cutting loose,” but it’s still unusually candid.
• From Our Own Correspondent, from the BBC, is akin to those “our journalists do stories about doing journalism” programmes that CBC Newsworld airs on occasion. The show’s subtitle is “personal reflections by BBC correspondents around the world.” The first show I listened to had a fascinating report from Uzbekistan that filled in much of the context missing from the 30 second “chaos in the ‘stans” clips we hear otherwise.

• Catholic Insider, “podcasting from the heart of the Catholic Church” is an unlikely early podcasting breakout show, mostly because of the well-spoken host, “Father Roderick.” I especially enjoyed his segments covering his love of Star Wars.
• IT Conversations, a melange of IT-related interviews, webcasts and panel discussions, continues to be a good source for interesting material. I don’t like everything — the purpose-built interview shows are the weakest aspect of the feed — but there are some excellent episodes to be found.

More as I listen.

The Advice of the Day on Almanac.com today is:

Use roll-on deodorant bottles again by filling with sunscreen, bath oil, or kids’ paints.

I never would have thought of that. You can get daily advice from the Advice of the Day RSS Feed.

Hot on the heels of Blue Cross changing their name to Medavie, Radio Shack, here in Canada, is changing their name to “The Source by Circuit City.” Details, such as they are, at radioshack.ca.

I don’t care how much the sub-licensing fees from Radio Shack in the U.S. were, this doesn’t make any sense at all to me, as Radio Shack has one of the strongest, most identifiable brands in the country, and the one most closely associated with its products niche. Somehow I can’t imagine saying “I’m just going to go down to The Source by Circuit City to buy a capacitor.”

The new website is at TheSourceCC.com, which is an equally dismal URL.

Here’s some coverage of the insane change:

• Digital Home Canada
• Marketnews Canada
• Wikipedia

Charlottetown is alive with the sound of jackhammers:

• A new Home Hardware going up on the St. Peters Road, presumably the new location of the store currently in the Ellis Bros. shopping centre.
• A new Bank of Nova Scotia going up next to Vogue Optical on St. Peters Road.
• Renovations to the Parkdale Pharmacy.
• The hill under Future Shop and across from Wal-mart is being carved out to make room for new Old Navy and Michaels Crafts stores.
• Something’s happening in the vacant lot between Shaddy’s and the former Melons location on University Avenue — lots of dozing and digging.
• The Mike’s location next to the Charlottetown Mall is closed for renovations.
• The new Holland College residence on Grafton St. is nearing completion.
• The new monster residence on the UPEI campus is stretching ever taller by the day.

I don’t think we’ve seen this much new construction since the Kirkwood fell to the wrecker’s ball ten years ago.

By the way, if you’re creative, rich and entrepreneurial, both the old YMCA and the Basilica Rec Centre are for sale.