This is a video podcast that will appeal to those who fit the following. You are an extreme geek who is interested in following the tech news, and you have a tendency towards cynicism and grumpiness. Great, I’ve just traced out a stereotype, but watch an episode of this, you’ll see what I mean!
John C. Dvorak at the helm of Cranky Geeks.
This is a weekly podcast, about 30 minutes long. Every week it is hosted by the infamous John C. Dvorak along with “co-crank” Sebastian Rupley as a permanent panel member, in addition to two guest panel members every week.
If you are familiar with the “This Week in Tech” podcast, then you’ll like Cranky Geeks. In fact, I find Cranky Geeks a good substitute for TWiT simply because it packs in as much debate in half the time.
Also, Cranky Geeks is supplied in a range of formats, which I may as well give you the links to now:
Formally known as the “Crave Podcast“, the “CNET UK Podcast” is unsurprisingly produced by CNET UK, which you, guessed it, is the UK wing of CNET. This is a weekly audio show, hosted by the members of CNET UK’s “Crave” editorial team (don’t worry if the names are confusing you, you’ll get used to it), shows are usually between 30 to 50 minutes.
Nate Lanxon interviewing Dr Pamela Gay of Astronomy cast for episode 117 of the CNET UK Podcast (Copyright 2008, Nate Lanxon. Used with permission)
Before getting into the content, I’ll give kudos to the guys who produce this for being one of the most ever-evolving shows I’ve listened to. The format of the show often reinvents itself, so the following run down is subject to vary. All that said, every week you can at least expect to hear discussions about a selection of news stories from the tech world, followed by reviews of new gadgets and products from each host, followed up by answers to listener submitted questions from the CNET UK Forum. The podcast has its own dedicated forum section, called the CNET UK Podcast Lounge. Time for full disclosure, I have been a listener of the podcast for so long that they made me a moderator on the Podcast Lounge, so please take my bias into account when I say I think you really ought to come and join the Podcast Lounge where you can discuss and rant about tech to your heart’s content!
One last thing to throw in, another reason I enjoy the CNET UK Podcast is that it is one of the very few UK tech podcasts. Most of the podcasts I listen to are American, which is fine, I like Americans, although nothing beats a topic you enjoy being covered with people from your own culture.
At the time of writing, episode 123 was the latest episode, which you can listen to here:
About time I paid my dues to one of my favourite computer applications, besides my web browser. Miro is a free and open source HD video player and it is also a podcast management system. This means that Miro will not only download all the video (and audio) you’ve subscribed to, but it will play it for you too.
I have been using Miro for almost a year now. In fact, I gave it some small coverage on the CNET UK Forums, although I forget which version number it was back then. However, I am pleased to say that the major niggles I had with it back then have now been fixed with the 2.0 version. Not least, the ability to skip back and forth within a Adobe Flash video files (.flv), the VLC project has recently overcome the same hurdle.
Before I continue, I am going to let the Miro people tell you in their own words what this is all about:
The new user interface is a big improvement. The Windows version of the 1.x branch had a sexy-black design, which I miss, although it is more than made up by the increased responsiveness. Also, Miro used to be a terrible memory hog, not anymore, the application loads up in a small amount of time and I no longer feel as if I’m going to have the perform the Heimlich Maneuver on my laptop!
Miro 2.0 in action
Another nice new feature is that the video pane will detach from the main Window so that you can still browse within Miro while playing a video. This was something of a problem before verison 2.0, as I did sometimes wish I could do other things in Miro while I had a video playing in the background.
Miro is based on the same core of code that the Firefox web browser is (that core of code is known as “Gecko“), which enables one of Miro’s nicest features, the Miro Guide, to appear within the application itself. This is the easiest way to browse content and subscribe. If you want to subscribe to things the old-school way, you will go to the web site of the show you want to follow, get it’s RSS feed copied to your clipboard, then go to Miro and hit Ctrl-N where it will pick up the URL you have in the clipboard. So yes, Miro Guide is good. However, there is an alternative method if you use Firefox 3. Firefox 3 has “Podcast detection“, which means that when you click on the RSS feed of something Firefox can recognise as a podcast, it will not only ask you if you want to subscribe to the feed, but also ask you if you want to choose a podcasting application. Well, if you use Miro, you select it. From then on, whenever you click on a podcast’s RSS feed Firefox will automatically enter the feed into your Mrio subscriptions, nothing more for you to do!
Also, another nice little feature for content creators who can’t afford the bandwidth of serving their shows, is that Miro seamlessly supports the Bittorrent protocol. This means that you can subscribe to a feed that only serves out the .torrent file, then you’ll download your content from other people who are also downloading the same material. This helps content creators, and you don’t notice any difference in how you get your content.
The Miro Guide, in Miro
As well as adding internet video to Miro, you can also tell it to watch folders on your hard drive so that you can watch content you already have saved. This combined with Miro’s search box, turns Miro into a pretty competent video library management application. It isn’t meant to do this, so there’s no metadata for videos you already have. Still though, as long as you use helpful file names, it’s almost as good.
Lots of talk about video, although Miro is just as happy getting audio podcasts and playing them. One of the listed “features” of Miro 2.0 was better audio podcast support. All I can actually see that they’ve done with this is create an “Audio Feeds” heading in the sidebar. Personally, I find this pretty useless, I prefer to organise my feeds within folders on the sidebar. So as you’ll see from my screen shots, I already had a folder for audio feeds. However, while you can just about use Miro as a video library manager, it is by no means an audio jukebox, I would not recommend Miro for handling your music collection. For that I would recommend another Gecko based free and open source application, Songbird.
For me, Miro is the centre of my multimedia life. Most of the content Miro downloads for me, I watch on my mobile phone. Although, since I let Miro take care of the downloading, I just have a batch script which synchronises Miro’s downloads with my phone’s memory card.
Talking of my mobile phone, I also use the Nokia Podcasting application, which can import feeds from OPML files. Well, another benefit of Miro being free and open source, is that it works on open standards like, OPML, which it can import and export. This means that whenever my phone and I are going to be away from my computer and I want to download podcasts directly, I can simply export my feeds from Miro, and put that file on my phone. Being able to import and export OPML files also helps you if you’re setting up a new computer or Operating System (OS), and you want to carry across your feeds to your new installation of Miro. Simply export on the old computer/OS, and import on the new computer/OS.
Phew, I’ve said all I have to say. I seriously recommend Miro to everyone. Television is moving to the internet, and scheduled broadcasting is being replaced by content on demand. Miro is a great way to find lots of fantastic and expertly made content away from all the mainstream networks and corporations.
Just to finish off, I thought I’d include another review of Miro, this time in video, by @ChirsLAS:
Related links
For another review, @Rarst has just written a new first impressions review on his blog.
One of the most awesome features of Spotify is that every track, every album, and every playlist has a public URL. This means all you have to do to show something to someone is send them a link, which they then click, and their web browser automatically launches Spotify with the instruction to play whatever you sent to your friend. This is a truly fast way to share music amongst friends, and as far as we can tell, it’s stopping short of infringing anyone’s copyright.
The Spotify Playlists website
Well, I have discovered a website, with such a simple mission, if it didn’t exist, you’d really have to invent it. Spotify Playlists is a public directory of Spotify Playlists. With a simple design, custom built on top of a Wordpress back-end, you can easily browse by recently added, genre, most ratings, and highly rated. The ratings system is something I’m particularly pleased to see, since I recently said myself that ratings should be part of the Spotify application.
It’s also nice to see that the listings have album art included. The album art is something you have to upload yourself as part of making a submission to the site.
On the left you find a sidebar with collapsible lists of the recently added, highly rated and most rated. On the left, above the list of playlists, you’ll find a drop downlist of the genres.
Since selecting a genre can sometimes be less obvious than others, I am hoping that the backend code of the side will develop to either let visitors vote for what genre they think a play list should belong to, or allow playlists to have multiple genres.
Of course at this early stage, you might not find the selection you are looking for, but it is early days and the number of submissions can only increase. You can help yourself by submitting your own playlists, which is also the top widget in the sidebar too.
One thing that concerns me is that it is just as easy to submit a whole album as it is a custom playlist, perhaps this doesn’t matter, though. I think this site definitely fills a gap that even I didn’t think of in my blog post. The Spotify application doesn’t suggest things you might want to hear (that sites like Last.Fm does). While Spotify Playlists doesn’t take into account your listening patterns it does (potentially, subject to sustained user participation) provide a broader way to search than the Spotify application does natively.
Finally, in researching for this post, I have also come across another site that does the same thing, “Spotylists“. Although I have to say, SpotifyPlaylists definitely has the edge on a cleaner design, more genres, and just a generally less intimidating to get started with.
Thought I’d start a little series of posts sharing the things I like to watch and listen to. So, the next few Mondays will have my favourite audio podcasts, and Wednesdays shall be my favourite video podcasts (which I like to call Internet TV).
AstronomyCast
So, since this is the international year of astronomy, I thought honour of first mention should go to AstronomyCast. This is one of the great rare few podcasts for which you really need your thinking cap on. It is presented by Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela L Gay. What I like most about this podcast is summed up in the show’s slogan, “a weekly fact based journey through the cosmos, helping you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know“. Emphasis needs to be placed on that last part. It is one thing to laud and lecture on the achievements of any branch of science, but actually backing that up with how such conclusions were reached supplies a degree of tangibility. This is something sadly lacking on our mainstream television and radio, and is why science is so badly understood by the general public.
AstronomyCast usually produces an approximately 30 minute episode twice a week. One episode is dedicated to talking about a particular subject in either; astronomy, astrophysics or cosmology or space technology; the other episode is a question & answer session where the presenters answer questions sent in by listeners.
For good measure, at the time of writing, this was their latest episode:
[audio: http://media.libsyn.com/media/astronomycast/AstroCast-090122.mp3|titles=Question Show - January 27th 2009|artists=Fraser Cain and Dr Pamela Gay]
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