Don't you hear that?
When I’ve got a work contract, I’m upstairs in the office (rear bedroom) hacking away and like to listen to either music or podcasts of different kinds including Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, the Rock and Roll Geek Show, Air America Radio shows, Reel Reviews, iPodio news, RasterWeb! Audio (silly jokes), and lots more. A visit to audio.weblogs.com shows you the last 100 podcasts to be put on the Net, which you can also have feed right into your player to let you listen to a wide variety of things.
While this started to give yet another cool way to use your iPod, if you don’t actually own one you can still listen to the mp3s for it on your PC, or on your own mp3 player of another company. (Though you’re probably still reconsidering your choice and looking at the iPods of others with a bit of envy, right?) The iPodder client is available for MacOS and Windows, with a Linux version being worked on as we speak. Right now I use the bashipodder scripting hack, though it’s got one bug: sometimes a revised mp3 on a server can trick it into downloading it again. (Update: a tweak to cache the RSS file for comparison based on modification date reduces the need to repeatedly download the full file, and a look for the local file using the basename of the URL to get the name of the mp3 avoids multiple downloads.)
Anyway, I was working away with my headphones on listening to the awesome Rock and Roll Geek Show. Elana came into the office and started cracking up. She said, “Don’t you hear that?” I took off the headphones because I didn’t know what she was talking about.
Only to hear the podcast coming out of the speakers on my desk. I’d not actually turned them all the way down. Duh!
(What’s a podcast? It just started in August 2004; a small blog post offers some history behind it.)
