Apparently there’s an Amazing Race DVD on the way. No release date yet, and you can’t place an order, but word is it’s in development.

Through the magic of BitTorrent and UKNova we’ve been able to watch a lot of BBC and ITV television recently. Here’s what I liked:

• A Short History of Tall Buildings, a series on the Imagine programme hosted by Alan Yentob, is a series of vingettes on skyscrapers and other tall buildings all around the world.
• Horizon is the BBC’s science programme, a British Nature of Things. We enjoyed a couple of episodes: An Experiment to Save the World about the search for workable nuclear fusion, and The Day the Earth Almost Died about the mass extinction of 95% of all life on the planet 250 million years ago.
• Martin Bashir, famous over here for his Michael Jackson programmes, hosted a programme in 2003 called Major Fraud: Charles Ingram’s Millionaire ‘win’ that examines how Charles Ingram cheated on the British version of the Who Wants to be a Millionaire show. The show is somewhat over-produced, but it’s an interesting tale nonetheless.
• A series called The Tube does for the London subway system what the ITV show Airline does for easyJet: it’s a “day in the life” sort of show, going behind the scenes into various aspects of the Tube’s operations.

If you use the BitTorrent search engine, searching for “BBC” or “ITV” to find British TV works well; UKNova has only British TV (although it does require registration).

Remember that School Trustee Elections are this Monday, May 30, 2005. You can find you school district, a list of candidates, and the your local polling location on the Elections PEI website.

France votes today on the European Union constitution. Here’s a sampling of the “Non” posters we saw there earlier in the month:

One small orange, one large orange, a Kinder Surprise Egg and a bottle of mineral water:

There is a store we saw many times in France called France Loisirs that sells books, CDs, DVDs and develops film. Oliver and I went into the branch in Limoges in search of a colouring book; we found a good one, but when we went to pay we were told we had to be a “member” to purchase. While I wasn’t entirely clear on the details, it seems as though you must be a resident of France to qualify. Fortunately, the kind clerk let us proceed without membership, although she made it perfectly clear with her body language that we shouldn’t return.

If anyone knows more about France Loisirs and how its works — perhaps it’s a coop like Mountain Equipment Coop? — let me know.

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.