Testing Mail2Blog Functionality

Just checking that this actually works, am sending this as email via my Gmail account.

Chris Pirillo Show
Well I gave it a chance, but my first impressions of the Chris Pirillo podcast is that this is going to be a love fest with Microsoft.

Maybe someone could go and count the number of times he mentions Microsoft but it made my eyes glaze over after a while.

I think he is after Scoble's job.

Speed up Firefox

Check out this page for suggestions on speeding up Firefox for broadband users. Seems to work fine for me on cable.

Goodbye TechTV, Hello Podcasts

I used to spend 5 hours of my time a week (ok more like 3.5 hours after Tivo'ing through the ads) watching The Screensavers on TechTV. Back in the day with Patrick Norton and Leo Laoporte hosting the show there was a great mix of humor and tech that satisfied my inner geek.

Things started to go wrong when Patrick and Leo left the show and then Paul Allen sold TechTV to Comcast's G4.

G4 is a games network, and boy did it show, the content of the flagship Screensavers show veered towards the youthful games player and other non-tech content began to creep in.

They recently did a facelift on the show, took it off for a few weeks, sacked a bunch of people and brought in some new faces. It didn't help - the content still sucked. The G4 message boards were filled with complaints about the new format and new hosts and a lot of the complaints were against the big Comcast/G4 management.

Now I don't know why G4 bought TechTV because it seems they didn't like any of the shows having changed or cut most of them. So I have decided to utilize my executive privelege and just stop watching it.

I now get my tech fix from the variety of podcasts I listen to, such as Engadget, and at least I know the content of these podcasts will not change on the whim of big corporate management. Of course it could change on the whim of the individual podcaster, but I am more comfortable with that.

Mr Ballmer - People in Glasshouses ...

When Steve Ballmer said "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'" he should think about how the music gets on the iPod in the first place. There are a lot of copies of iTunes for Windows out there and songs have to be downloaded to iTunes before they can be loaded on an iPod.

He also fails to acknowledge the millions more songs being downloaded illegally to Windows PCs that don't end up on an iPod (or other MP3 player)- the users either listen to them on their PC or burn a CD.

Will Podcasting Kill Satellite Radio

I was listening to Adam Curry's interview with Doug Kaye from IT Conversations and Adam was commenting that people are just bored with the current offerings of broadcast radio. I agree with him which is why I became a "podcatcher" early on.

It seems to me that satellite radio just offers more of the same as you get on broadcast radio - albeit in some cases without commercials, but to be honest I don't travel cross-country very often so am not to interested in listeningto the same station from coast to coast.

The other thing is that satellite is a very expensive way to distribute audio content - those birds don't come cheap and they will have to sign up an awful lot of people at $10/month to recoup that cost.

Lastly I'm just not interested in paying $10/month for basically the same content as I have on broadcast radio.

Now Adam has 50,000 subscribers to his podcast - how many podcatchers are there in total then, at least 100,000 would you say? And this thing is only, what, 4 months old. How many will there be in a year? And how many of those people might have become subscribers to satellite radio if not for podcasts?

I know myself that even if I was given a free satellite subscription tomorrow I just wouldn't listen to it, I don't have the time. My listening time in the car and at home and work is already taken up with content I want to hear in the form of podcasts, there is already just too much for me to listen to. Now I don't claim to be unique and I reckon there will be a lot of people in the same boat as me.

Maybe the audiences are different, maybe your typical satellite radio listener is not the type of geek who would listen to podcasts, but my feeling is that podcasts just have to be taking potential subscribers away from satellite radio.

Junxion Box - turn your Aircard into a Wireless Access Point

This is a great idea, if you find yourself needing internet access for a few folks where there is no ethernet or 802.11 then turn your data card into a Wireless Access Point.

It is called Junxion Box and I don't know what the status is, but I wish them well.

There is a review of the product here.

Windows Sound Control & Skype

Anyone who is experimenting with Skype or podcasting has probably come across this, and that is the pain of working with the Windows Sound Control application.

Invariably when you start with Skype you can't hear your callers and they can't hear you. Thankfully Skype has a test account - echo123 - that you can dial up so that you can test your sound configuration, but that is only successful after you have minced around for ages trying to figure out which microphone is being used - the one in my Thinkpad or my headset - and which speakers are being used.

It really is painful. And when you get that set up you find your other apps don't work - like TotalRecorder - it records from the microphone instead of the incoming audio stream from the internet. Jeez!!!

And don't even get me started on trying to record your Skype calls.

A long time ago in a Galaxy far far away I used to be a recording engineer and was used to patch panels where I could route the sound from one device to another - wherever it needed to go. I wish we had something like that in Windows. Anyone who has seen the beautiful Reason will appreciate being able to patch from one device to another.

Or maybe what we need is to be able to save Sound Profiles, so that once you get a setup that works for Skype you could save that profile. One that works for your TotalRecorder recordings - save that profile. Then be able to switch between them whenever you like. Now there is an app I would pay for.