Wings Over the Pyre - February 10th, 2005

05:04 am - The Revolution Will Be Advertised

Technorati Tags: podcasting, podcast, radio, music, Redoubt, bittorrent, Skype

The title comes from the latest Kleptones album, and frankly, my favourite song off the album as a whole, but my tastes have often been questionable.

But that's not what this post is about.

No, what this post is about is Podcasting.

Now, I can hear the voices rising in concern now. "What th'Hell you mean, mate, podcasting? You've already got your own bloody damn Internet broadcast system and shite. Why do y'need to put out some crazy damn thing like a show that folks get from you anyway?"

Well, part of it is that its not all about just making podcasts, its about listening to them. In fact, I just finished writing the coding architecture that'll let me schedule and inject podcasts into my musical database without Station IDs piling up in ugly ways all around the feet of the system on the back end. This'll open the door to writing scripts that more readily deal with things like rebroadcasting webcasted feeds and the like, as well as regularly scheduled podcasts.

Since I've been beating my head on this process for weeks without much luck, I'm glad I finally found the magic combination of coding bits to make it all happen.

So, that brings us full circle, why am I looking to create a podcast for myself?

In part, its the challenge. In part, its the fact that it alleviates a lot of issues that I otherwise might have with going "live" on a show. You can't edit yourself live, can't do a quick retake if you sound like ass. Podcast creates the intimacy of DJ'd radio with the flexibility of pre-recorded TV. You can research, get witty, mix cute things up, and generally prep like crazy without actually having to look like you're working hard. To someone of my perfectionist bent, that's huge.

The current plan, then, is to do Squid's Redoubt, Top Five Song Podcast. Typically, this'll be the five most requested songs for the week on the Redoubt (if I can get SAM3's reporting facility to cooperate), but I'm certainly not above getting whimsical and going for "Top Five Heavy Metal Ballads To Break Up To," or other bizarre things. I'm perverse that way. And I like it.

My current podcast tool-set looks like this:

• Skype: Yes, I can hear the questions now. "Skype? But that's a voice comm system, mate!" Exactly. And its a voice comm system with configurable output channels and, if you're clever, the ability to run two copies at once on a single system, one to talk and hear through, the other to channel voice output out elsewhere. Like, say, to a sound recorder. Want to do multi-party interviews or talk shows? Done. Multi-party DJ'ing? Done. Easy as pie. And for a few bucks a month, you can do phone interviews anywhere on the planet. Want to get the perspective of the Iranian prime minister on some such, or prank call the Kremlin? Have a tool, record it, and get famous. Of course, you need a little extra tech to do all this audio patching. You need ...
• Virtual Audio Cable: No one wants to spend $200 or more on multiple sound-cards. Nor should you have to. Really, all you need is a sort of virtual pipe you can route in and around and between virtual interfaces, hooking in here and there with audio tools. VAC does exactly that for $50. Pipe the output of your clone Skype session to your audio recorder, then just conference that user in when you want to get multi-speaker input. Done. Need to do crazier things? No problem, VAC can clone inputs/outputs and support up to 64 cables at once. Trust me, that's far, far more than you'll ever need at once. But where do you route this stuff to to record and manage the raw audio? Some folk might use the Windows Sound Recorder for that, but I like heftier tools. I use ...
• Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio: No, not the scarily expensive Sound Forge 7.0, I mean its far cheaper and more straight-forward little brother. Its really all you need for basic audio clean-up, marking regions so you know where to split the track to insert Station IDs or short musical bits, or promos, etc. I find it extremely easy to work in for getting the straight-up audio recorded and tweaked. But, really, its just not sufficient for my needs to actually start laying down multi-track audio with fade-ins, fade-outs, and carefully crafted overlaps. For that, I resort to ...
• ACID Music Studio: Not the hyper-powerful and crazily expensive ACID Pro 5 suite, no. I don't need anything that crazy. But for putting together a nice, smooth integrated system, its hard to beat AMS for the price. I've become decently proficient at the use of such a thing, I like to thing, and it should be just the thing for working with sensibly straight-forward podcasts. Plus, it exports/renders really nicely tweaked MP3 files, with all appropriate tags set, and that's a good thing. So, now you have a clever MP3, and a webserver to host it on. What next?
• Easypodcast: This is the tool its taken me until tonight to find. This lets you take an input MP3 file and a set of basic file directories, and output an RSS 2.0 with enclosures feed that's needed for podcasting. This is the final link in the chain. When people subscribe to your podcast, its the RSS.XML file created here that they're actually subscribing to. EPC creates the file and updates it whenever you release a new podcast. Good, handy, useful stuff.

There's really only one other thing I might be interested in pursuing. In theory, a lot of podcast aggregators can take a .torrent file in the encapsulation and start up a torrent client to grab it down to the right place. I can certainly create .torrents for my podcasts and put them in the right place. I can easily run my own BitTorrent server with Azureus. The question becomes "is it worth it?" It certainly might be; this bears considering.

Ah well, the tools are assembled, the plans are laid. Now ... just to accomplish!

Again, if anyone wants to get a time slot for their particular podcasted show, let me know. Plenty of early-morning slots left. ;)

Current Mood: accomplished

05:46 am - Look to Me For Guidance To The Future

Technorati Tags: octopus, robotics, National_Geographic

National Geographic News brings us much joy:

Octopus Arms May Point Way to New Robot Designs

Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News

February 9, 2005

Octopuses, those boneless, brainy, denizens of the deep, use their arms for some tasks in much the same way humans do, according to a new study.

Theoretically, there are any number of ways an octopus could use its long flexible arms to move an object. But the method they actually use is surprisingly close to how animals with rigid skeletons—including humans—do it, scientists say.

When hunting and grabbing dinner, the octopus uses all the flexibility the arm is capable of. But to bring captured prey to its mouth, the octopus turns the arm into a semi-rigid structure that bends to form quasi joints. Just as a human arm has joints at the shoulder, elbow, and wrist that allow our arms to bend and rotate, the octopus bends its arm to forming three segments of roughly equal length.

Understanding how the octopus controls eight flexible arms all at once could be the basis for developing the next generation of flexible robotic arms—long a goal among robotics engineers.

"Our specific aim in this project is to learn from nature how to build and control a flexible-arm robot," said Binyamin Hochner, a biologist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the co-authors of the study. "And indeed our studies show how the octopus simplifies the complex problems associated with controlling flexible arms that have an infinitely large number of degrees of freedom. This in turn inspires the development of new strategies for the control of flexible robotic arms."

I'm certainly not objecting to my brethren in the briny deep being the model for new robotic arm control systems. In fact, I'm thrilled at the very idea.

How else am I going to get my Doc Ock tentacle add-ons, so I can return to a state closer to my original?

Current Mood: pleased

07:55 am - Scheduling the Nightmare

Technorati Tags: Redoubt, podcast, podcasting, radio, music, podcasts

In a rare fit of productivity, I've not only scheduled a series of podcasts throughout the week, but even coded up a special show for Saturday nights run by Autobot Omega himself. I feel strangely ... accomplished.

There's a new schedule at the bottom of the Redoubt webpage, but I reproduce it here for completeness' sake.

I'm pretty proud of it, though I need to automate some bumpers for the Covertunes Saturday Night and get the system set to inject them at 5min after the hour and 5min before the end. Neatly sidestepping trying to do it perfectly. Either that or I'll write the program as a manual loop.

Finally, progress!

Current Mood: accomplished