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Audio: Recommendations for good mobile news? What can you trust?
Tue, 07 Nov 2006

It occurred to me that I've been remiss in my duty to rant on about everything ... well, else. I know I went on about podcasting months ago, for instance - back in the summer (or last summer?) when I was listening to RetroGamingRadio. I must have had the blinders on recently, with life being so busy and whizzing by: babies, funerals, trying to get life under control, working on new builds of Shadow Plan.. busy. I suppose I've not been listening to as much music of late for some reason, and I generally don't take in podcasts too often anyway - this time of year I tend to just take in the quieter city sounds and enjoy the brisker air as I walk anywhere.

But I do check news websites each day.. from nerd stuff to CBC and CNN for the mainstream goingsonabout. And the radio, while in the car.. 680 or CFNY or the like.. background noise and traffic alerts. It occurred to me that I'd like to hear what other parts of the world think about us, or the US, or the like. Every once in awhile I get that urge to rip through random podcasts or streaming-radio from across the world.. catch some Japanese music or news, hear whats going on in Croatia, find out what the Italians are reading. Not that I can understand much of it, but occasionally I'll catch an English language broadcast from some random world station. Cool stuff and one of the great benefits the net brought us.

Usually I just pick up some BBS or UK stuff, since I've always had a soft spot for my distant ancestors and that lovable accent. Of course, I'm always paranoid about what they're telling you -- for a set of countries that amount to some of the most surveiled in the world, can you really trust the broadcast media?

So tell me .. where can I get some English-language audio news, free and in a handy format like mp3, that talks about interesting news in the world with a freshly non-Americanized viewpoint?

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Audio: You are in a maze of twisty little ringtones, all alike
Tue, 14 Jun 2005

I never quite understood the whole ringtone marketplace, but heres my take on it. Until relatively recently, cellphones were limited to rudimentary audio reproduction - beeps, whistles and essentially FM tone generation. I'm not sure if it was done in software or hardware, but you could play short MIDI tunes in place of built-in ringtones, which was terrible cool. (MIDI is the preferred notation and sequencing protocol that musicians use, so songs are available in MIDI format all over the place.) Cool stuff and people downloaded them like mad .. via SMS or MMS or phone-email or infra-red beaming or any number of methods, and thus an industry was born. With each ringtone selling for $1.99 to $4.99 for 'premium tunes', this was big business -- especially when most of the ringtones were reproductions of commercial music and totally unlicensed -- which soon attracted the long tentacles of the RIAA. At the same time as all this happened, the 'mp3' and mobile-audio phenomena grew up and ultimately created iTMS -- Apple's iTunes music store. Here (and in similar joints like allofmp3.com and the other copy cats) a real mp3 recording could be had for a fraction of the ringtone cost .. $1USD per song on iTMS and more or less elsewhere. This is for a real recording folks, and not some cheesie FM-tone MIDI knockoff made by a 13 year old in his basement. My take -- my question -- is how did these two things occur separately and end up with such radicly different pricing schemes? Who would pay three or four times the amount for a lower quality tune?

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Audio: (Wireless) Headphones and a review of the Koss "The Plug" earbuds
Thu, 02 Jun 2005

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been into podcasts of late (in my case, mostly RetroGamingRadio and 1SRC's Jeff Kirvin though iPodder and other search services list an enormous volume of available podcasts. The trick is how to get the audio signal to the brain, and that means headphones, so I've done some research and tried a few products out and thought I'd share my experience and hopefully insight.

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Geekery: Podcasts and Mobile Media ..(or, What Is This Infernal Racket?)
Thu, 26 May 2005

I'm sure many of you are like me and have heard the term "podcast" but didn't really catch on to what they were until relatively recently. (Well, I knew what they were but didn't fiddle around until a few weeks ago. Like blogs, they just snuck up on me..) In a way, they're like an audio blog -- where a blog allows any old body to post articles or news to a site for others to read, a podcast allows anyone to post an audio clip. But like many things, it is more than just this simple fact (face it, people have been posting audio clips to the net and BBS's for decades) that adds intrigue -- podcasts have a simple yet relatively formalized distribution method, and have caught on, which makes them great. So, before going on, let me summarize bystealing a line from the all-new CBC Podcast page. (Note that since the CBC is on top of podcasts, either its a well established technology or CBC is really hip, and I think its more the latter.. podcasts have been around awhile, but not all that long.)

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