Baggas' Blog

For anyone who, like me, didn’t catch the Apple event last week with Steve Jobs et al, here’s an incredible, really nice, abbreviated version where they discuss their fantastic, great products…

Ever wished there was an easy way to save YouTube clips on your iPhone or iPod, or even to have them download automatically?

Here’s a great website I’ve discovered : http://www.rsshandler.com This site allows you to enter the details of a YouTube Feed or Playlist, and then creates a URL which you can use to subscribe to a “podcast” of the clips in that feed. That might sound a bit complicated but the instructions on the site are very easy to follow. Once you’ve generated a feed URL on the website, open iTunes – go to the ‘Advanced’ menu, then ‘Subscribe to Podcast’.. copy the URL into the box that comes up and Bob’s your uncle.

It works great. You can susbcribe to YouTube’s feeds (eg Featured, Most Popular etc) or create your own playlists (for example I’ve created a Humour, Music, and Family playlist. The only drawback is it seems not all clips can be successfully converted into iTunes format, but most can.

Give it a try! If you need any advice about it send me an email and I’ll try to help.

Cheers

CNET : Is microSD the music medium of the future? This story is something I don’t really see the point of.  Sandisk are partnering with the major music labels to release albums pre-loaded onto Micro-SD cards – the idea being to “bridge the gap between the physical and the digital”

Doesn’t make sense to me. I either want my music in one of two formats – either a digital file for my iPod or a physical medium such as a CD with artwork and liner notes that I can file on my shelf. The other advantage of CDs being the quality of the sound is generally better than most compressed digital files such as mp3, aac, wma etc. The disadvantages of the Micro-SD concept are many. If I want digital files I will download them from somewhere like the iTunes store or just rip them from CDs I have bought (my method of choice since that way I have the best of both worlds) – I’m not going to go and physically buy cards with songs on. This would mean either having to continually swap cards every time I want to listen to a different album or to use a computer to transfer them onto a larger card or hard drive based MP3 player (like my iPod). One of the big advtanges for me of an iPod or similar MP3 player is the ability to carry around a library of music so you can select what you want to listen to based on your mood, or just randomise it. So why would I want to carry around a bunch of little fingernail sized cards that can easily get lost? Crazy. Plus it will also necessitate people going out and buying new MP3 players and phones which support Micro-SD. In an age dominated by iPod and iPhone, I can’t see this happening to the extent required for this to be successful.

The future of music is continued growth of online downloads and ongoing improvement of MP3 devices to play those downloaded files. Wireless purchasing like on the iPod touch and iPhone will gradually become more widespread for those who want to get new music while they are out and about and listen to it immediately. Hopefully at some point a worthy successor to the humble CD will catch on and gain wide acceptance (like Blu-Ray is succeeding DVD, albeit very slowly). This will be some sort of high definition audio contained on a standard sized disc, with all the usual booklet/notes/lyrics etc. I know there have been a few candidates in recent years but none has really caught on. This is where the industry needs to get together to build consensus but in times dominated by digital music downloads and the recent video format wars I guess it’s not a priority issue. Whatever the future of audio is, Micro-SD is a dead end alleyway.

United Airlines offers in-flight iPhone and iPod Connectivity | The Apple Blog

Over the last couple of years I’ve spent many hours on planes, huddled over my iPod watching shows and movies on the little screen. In fact I watched the first three seasons on Battlestar Galactica (awesome show) in this manner. And almost invariably if you look around the cabin on any flight you will see several people with those characteristic white earphones in their ears. So the above story definitely appeals to me and I’m sure many other travellers. In a nod to the increasing ubiquity of these devices, United Airlines have installed iPod connectors in some of their planes so you can browse your iPod or iPhone and watch or listen to your own content on their screens, as well as keep your device charged. Certainly beats huddling over a tiny screen and definitely good to have more choice beyond the usual in-flight entertainment. Hope this comes to Australia soon…

In other iPod news, I noticed today that you can now purchase some TV shows via the Australian iTunes store. Only a couple of years behind the rest of the world! Hopefully movie rentals will follow. My guess is they’ve finally got their act together and done this because of the upcoming Australian iPhone launch.

Heard an interesting statistic yesterday – apparently only around 1% of those who have the iTunes software installed actually purchase music from he iTunes online store. The inference being that most of the rest of people are filling their iPods with illegally downloaded content. I doubt this is the case. Certainly  proportion of people will be using downloaded tracks, ad most probably it is much more than 1%, however I’d still say the vast majority of those 99% of non iTunes store users are not. Rather these people are the millions upon millions of people who have bought or been given an iPod, and simply use iTunes to transfer their CD collection to it. Mums and dads and teens and kids – most iPod owners probably wouldn’t know where to find music on the undernet if they wanted to. As I commented in another post, I rarely buy stuff from the iTunes store, but I do still buy a lot of CDs, which I always immediately rip to MP3 and load into iTunes. I think most people are in the same boat, using iTunes simply as a way of getting their music onto their iPods, rather than as a way of getting new music. It would be interesting to see a statistic of how many people actually use the full capacity of their iPods – my guess is a lot would not.

Interestingly though, even though only 1% of iTunes software users shop through the store, it has still become the number one music retailer in the US, surpassing Wal-Mart. I would imagine we will begin to see that 1% figure start to rise a little bit, in view of that.

A bittersweet look at ten years of MP3s

Excellent article here looking back on ten years since the first MP3 players were produced. The author mentions some of the good things about digital music, but also some of the things he misses such as borrowing and lending music, shopping for used music, album liner notes and artwork, and (my favourite) music as furniture.

I can relate to many of his points. I jumped on the MP3 bandwagon fairly early, using my dialup connection in the heyday of Napster to download hundreds of tracks. It was slow but fun in a way, and challenging -like trying to find that elusive final song you were missing from an album, or the rare album that few people had. And although it was anonymous there was still the pleasure of finding a user with similar music tastes and a huge collection of songs – even better if they had a fast internet connection to leech from. And there was the built in chat box that added at least a little bit of human interaction into the process. None of the P2P software I’ve used since has been quite the same, although I did use one called DC++ a few years back that came close. But by then we had broadband, which took some of that challenge out of the whole thing and gave us the ability to flood our hard drives with vast quantities of files that we were unlikely to ever seriously listen to. And after a while the whole downloading thing just lost it’s shine. Now we have bit-torrent which is easy and fast, but no fun.

Going back to the points in the article above I guess I’ve come the full circle as well. I now purchase more CDs than I ever have before. Admittedly it’s partly because I have more income than before, but it’s also because I like to have the CDs in my hand, reading the notes, looking to see what track is coming up next, and sitting on my shelf as a reminder of what I have and what I like, instead of being tucked away on a hard drive. I totally get the whole “music as furniture” appeal – a bit chunk of the wall in the room I’m sitting in is full of CDs (as you can see in the photo, taken from the couch I’m sitting on with my iSight camera). A related concept is the “books as furniture” one – few things make a room or house more inviting and appealing than shelves and shelves of books. If you’ve been to my house you’ll know I’m definitely a big adherent to this.

I love my iPod and having a collection of digital music at my fingertips, but it’s still just not the same as having something physical to hold, to collect, and to enjoy as part of the overall experience of the music. I’ve bought a few albums over iTunes but probably at least half of those I’ve then gone on to purchase the physical CD. Nowadays I don’t bother as much with the iTunes store unless I’m in a real hurry to get something or if I just want an individual track for some reason (like this Reindeer song I sang at our Christmas carols event last year). I did get one album on iTunes last month – Luka Bloom’s Before Sleep Comes (which is a brilliant mellow acoustic album) but I liked it so much I’ll definitely be getting the CD. I rarely acquire music now by less legitimate means, but even then it will usually now lead to a purchase. For example I’ve had the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack languishing on my hard drive for years (I think I actually got it when I traded some MP3 CDs with a friend rather than downloading it myself) – never listened to it until a month or so ago, and when I finally did I immediately went out and bought the CD at the next opportunity.

So from my perspective at least the music industry need not fear the death of the CD just yet. For all it’s benefits digital music is still just not quite the same.

CNET : Will ‘the beat go on’ with a new iPod?

Keep your ears open, it looks like Steve Jobs is set to make an iPod related announcement this Thursday – hopefully concerning the release of a new generation of iPods.

With all the hype around the iPhone and other products like AppleTV, the humble iPod seems to have been forgotten the last couple of years. My old 60gig one is still fine for music but in these days of video it doesn’t quite cut it. I used mine a lot on our recent trip watching TV show episodes, and it was fine but it would be great to have a larger screen.

So my wish list for the next generation iPod would include :

1. Larger, brighter screen
2. More storage – how bout a 120Gig iPod?
3. Touch-screen controls
4. More connectivity options – maybe bluetooth (for headphone and care stereo connections), ? wi-fi, or a built in FM tuner or how bout a built in FM transmitter!

I look forward to seeing what Jobs pulls out of the bag. The other thing that the article mentions is the likely iTunes release of The Beatles catalog. Long overdue, no doubt, but for any serious Beatles’ fan it shouldn’t really matter. I’ve had all The Beatles’ albums on my iPod since day one, since I already own the CDs. And I wouldn’t have it any other way – as much as I am in to iPods and downloading music etc, it still doesn’t beat having a big wall of CDs in your collection to choose from. If I really like an album, I’ll still go and buy the CD. Maybe I’m just showing my age…

Big news in the tech world at the moment, with the coolest geek in the world Steve Jobs, delivering his highly anticipated annual Macworld keynote speech yesterday.

The biggest new announcement was that of the iPhone – this cool device combines the features of a widescreen iPod, smart-phone, and mobile internet. You can check out the details at the Apple Website. Now I like te look of this gadget, it’s beautifully styled, and the user interface looks elegant and intuitive, like all Apple products. As an iPod lover, I particularly like the look of the iPod functionality, which is a big advance on the current generation iPods. The widescreen looks great and I could believe this would be a device that you might actually watch shows on (if Apple ever gets it’s act together and makes TV content available outside the USA!) – if nothing else, watching the demos on the Apple site makes me want to check out The Office, a show I haven’t really watched before (the little clip they show is pretty funny).

Father Roderick from SQPN has a good review of the Macworld announcements on his latest Daily Breakfast podcast, and I heartily agree with his comments, including his reservations about the iPhone and Apple TV (Apple’s new media server device). The biggest problems are :

1. The storage capacity is way too small – only 4 or 8 Gigabytes. To be taken seriously as an iPod replacement, particularly if you want to store and watch a lot of video, the capacity needs to be greatly enlarged – I would say a minimum of 20 Gig, and hopefully up to 80 Gig or beyond. With 8 Gig capacity this is still not the killer “one gadget to replace all others” that we’ve been hoping for.
2. The iPhone will not be available in the US for at least 6 months, and not available in other parts of the world like Australia until 2008! I’m getting tired of this constant lag in the release of products behind the US. In the 21st century there is no excuse for this sort of thing. It simply shows a lack of effort and a lack of care on the part of the big companies like Apple – people outside the USA are treated like second class citizens…. However this delay may turn out to be a blessing in disguise, as hopefully by the time this product is released here Apple may have got around to a second generation iPhone, with much better storage capacity, thus I won’t give in to the temptation to get the first generation product but will be forced to wait for the better next one.
3. They haven’t released an updated iPod. The widescreen Video capabilities and new software of the iPod component of the iPhone look so cool – why couldn’t they have released a stand-alone 120Gig widescreen video iPod at the same time? The technology is already there.
4. The Apple TV product is underwhelming in it’s functionality. As Fr Roderick says, you can do more in terms of media serving using a Microsoft Xbox-360. I use a great program called TVersity to stream media from my PC to my Xbox 360 which works well in streaming a large range of media formats. Apple have some catching up to do here.

Overall though, it’s exciting news for gadget freaks. I just think it will probably be another year or two before this stuff starts to reach it’s potential. Until then, I’ll still keep carrying around the combination of my trusty Treo 650 phone and 60Gb Video iPod. The hope of the “one gadget to rule them all” is still a little way off, but it’s getting closer…

For some reason I seem to have bad luck with clock radios. After a period of time something always seems to go wrong with them, either the alarm or the clock or the music fails in some way. Anyway I hope my luck is going to change with my latest purchase, which I picked up on Saturday at Target – it’s a Jensen iPod clock radio. As well as a standard digital AM/FM alarm clock this baby is a charging docking station for my iPod, which means I can choose to wake to whatever tunes I like in the morning. I could even wake to a Podcast if I wanted to – maybe I should start the day with the Daily Breakfast (although that would annoy two people – Jennifer at 5:30am and Owen on the way to school. He loves listening to the podcast and just today was asking “What’s Father Roderick talking about now?”)

Anyway it comes with a remote control which allows you to work all the functions of the radio, as well as Play/Pause and skipping tracks on the iPod itself. The speakers are quite good for such a small unit and the sound is very listenable, unlike most clock radios I’ve ever owned. Even at higher volumes it still sounds good, which has already provided the soundtrack to some heavy duty dancing on the bed by the kids. Perhaps the only negatives about it are that it doesn’t have dual alarms (which I’ve found to be quite useful in the past) and the clock is not very clear from across the room. Oh, and it only lets you “snooze” 3 times in a row, which may turn out to be a little inconvenient on these cold winter mornings. But overall, I’m very happy with it so far.

FOXNews.com – Beatles, Stones Top Hillary Clinton’s iPod Picks – Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum

Likely US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is the latest US politician to reveal the contents of her iPod (a gift from husband Bill), in what seems to be becoming a standard form of political disclosure. In the future, in addition to disclosing investments, academic record, and other pieces of information, will all candidates be required to submit their iTunes playlists for public scrutiny?

I haven’t been able to find the full list anywhere online, but the news summaries of Hillary’s tunes suggest she hasn’t got bad taste – lots of Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Motown. Certainly seems to be a substantial improvement on the current First iPod of George W Bush. I’m not sure if I would want to know the contents of Australia’s leaders iPods. I wouldn’t be too surprised if PM John Howard has one, considering the amount of power walking he does, but the contents might be a little too scary for me (Slim Dusty, anyone?). Peter Costello (was was looking very comfortable in the Prime Ministerial chair the other day) might have a much cooler list. And I certainly wouldn’t hold my breath on Kim Beazley’s list being very interesting at all.

Five out of six patients didn’t turn up last hour – that’s gotta be some kind of record. It’s not only frustrating but it costs me money – for every patient that doesn’t turn up is lost income. Which at the moment is definitely a concern given that we have a big new mortgage and I’ll have a full week off work next week for our holiday (I don’t get paid holidays)

On a positive note, my new iPod just arrived so I’ll be able to start playing around and transferring songs to it tonight. 60gig, yet it’s virtually the same size as my old 40gig one, yet with a much larger, clearer colour screen. I look forward to trying out the video capabilities of it

And being an iPod lover, it seems I’m in pretty good company – it seems the Pope loves his iPod too, having been spotted around the Vatican with those distinctive white earphones. Wonder what podcasts he subscribes to?

Sadly this evening my iPod seems to be no more. As I was rushing out the door to go out, a guitar in one hand, bag on my shoulder and iPod in the other, I managed to drop it onto the hard wooden floor. Now it is simply refusing to work, no matter what tricks I try. Tis a very sad day….
I guess I’ll have to console myself by replacing it with a new 60 Gig Video iPod – that just might help me get over the pain.

Never thought I’d be able to combine the categories iPod, Medical, and Humour in the one post but here you go. This is from one of the medical magazines I get from a few weeks back…

The gospel according to iPod – The Other Side – Breaking News 24/7 – NEWS.com.au – yet another iPod story. This time news.com.au are reporting the upcoming release of some software from Zondervan and Talking Panda Software which will allow you to listen to an audio Bible on your iPod whilst at the same time being able to read the text on the iPod screen. This will go on sale in February and will cost $US49.99.

I hate to burst their bubble, but this product isn’t so innovative as it seems. My favourite PDA Bible software company, Laridian, a few months back released iPocketBible, which does exactly the same thing. This is one of the few Laridian products that I don’t own (since I already have an audio Bible on my iPod) but it looks very good, as you can see in the screenshots below. So if you don’t want to have to wait til February to hear and read the Bible on your iPod, then check out iPocketBible (the cost is the same).

The one thing that did amuse me from the news article above is their little pun, “The product, which wits have dubbed the Book of Jobs, after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, will cost $US49.99 ($66)” It’s a pretty lame joke but it gave me a smile. Speaking of Job, check out this cool passage from Job 22:23-30 that I came across earlier today.

Twenty four hours after Australian iTunes launched, so I thought I’d give my first impressions. Like the other stores, the site is well laid out and easy to use. The range of music is good, but will hopefully be improved substantially when Song/BMG comes on board in the near future. Actually purchasing and downloading tracks is smooth and fast, once you have completed the easy registration process. Sound quality of the tracks are very good.

As a test case I got Ben Lee’s album, “Awake is the New Sleep” which is excellent. I’ve always enjoyed listening to Ben’s music on Triple J, but until now have never tried one of his albums. Wish I had’ve earlier. This leads me to the one reservation I have about iTunes, and in fact paying for music downloads in general – the materialistic side of me still likes actually having the physical CD, complete with the book and lyrics etc. It feels much more like you actually own something tangible that way, plus it’s easy to slip it into your Hi-Fi or car CD without having to plug the iPod in and navigate the menus, saving half a minute or so. Not forgetting the undoubtable fact that CD music is better quality than a compressed download, even of the good quality of those from iTunes. As far as convenience goes once you own a CD you can always rip it to your iPod anyway (notwithstanding Australia’s vague and stupid copyright laws which perhaps make that technically illegal – does anyone care?) I went through a phase of downloading a lot of music in the heady days of napster in the late 90s, but ultimately I came back around to buying CDs again, and in recent years have rarely downloaded anything. Perhaps it’s just because I went from being a “poor uni student” to actually working and having some money, but ultimately I’d much prefer to own a CD if I have the choice. So while I’m glad to see iTunes up and running, and will probably use it a bit, I still think most of my musical purchases will be of the old fashioned tangible compact discs.

It’s been a long time coming but we finally have an Australian iTunes Music Store. I don’t know how long it’s been up but I haven’t seen anything elsewhere on the net, so perhaps you might hear it here first! Can’t have been going too long as the Top 100 Downloads only has 18 songs in it at present.

Apple – iPod – well the inevitable has finally happened and Apple has released a video iPod, capable to playing movies and TV shows (which you can download via iTunes, if you are lucky enough to have it in your country, unlike us Australians.) I’m glad they’ve made the step but I can’t help but feeling there are other devices that probably do it better – why would you want to seriously watch video on such a small iPod screen when you can get a slightly bigger hard drive based unit with a screen 3 times the size? Also I don’t know how restricted is the format of the video that can be played on the iPod. Can you watch movies that have been downloaded elsewhere or rip your own DVDs or record TV shows to play on there? If not, then the utility of this new device will be limited. I don’t think I’ll be rushing off to upgrade any time soon.

How cool is this? It’s the new ipod Nano. The size of a business card, the thickness of a pencil and the weight of a CD case, yet it’s a fully featured iPod with a colour screen that displays album covers and can store a thousand songs in flash memory. Simply beautiful. Already my 40 Gig iPod that I got a year ago is beginning to feel antiquated.

But what I’m really looking forward to is seeing further convergence of items. In two years time I want a fully featured 3G phone that’s also a PDA with a quality 5 megapixel camera for stills and video, and 60 Gig of storage for media including MP3s, photos, and movies. And all of this in a format that has a crisp clear colour screen for all PDA, camera and video watching but in a device that’s small enough to carry comfortably at my hip. I have no doubt that such a device wil come – there are many that do all or most of these features, but don’t do all of them well. For example my Treo 650 is a great phone and PDA but the camera is poor quality and the storage is limited. Sony Ericsson now have a phone with a good 2MP camera but without the features of a Palm or Pocket PC PDA. I just can’t wait to see a device that covers all these bases well – my ideal wish would be a collaboration between Palm and Apple, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Now it’s official – iPods are no longer a geeky new gadget for technological early adopters – they now have the official sanction of the establishment, from the very top : CNN.com – Bush bares soul with ‘iPod One’ – Apr 12, 2005. The US President was given an iPod by his daughters as a present and now regularly uses it when out cycling, and at other times. I can’t say I like his choice of music very much (mostly country music and folk rock) by I’m impressed that he has one. Even if he does only have 250 songs on it (what a waste), “no black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles”, and has a personal aide who’s job it is to download tracks from the iTunes music store for him.

I just put this together for the Warnbro page as an introduction to Podcasting – so if you want to know more about this cool subject check it out – Podcasting 101

Discovered this over at Phil’s blog this morning. It’s an early advertising campaign for one of the first iPod models – take a look. That’s classic!

More on podcasting – for once the mainstream media seem to be relatively quick to catch on – Austereo gets serious about podcasting – www.smh.com.au. The Australian national radio network Austereo has been secretly trialling podcasting for a while now, as has my favourite station TripleJ, who generally lead the way for Australian radio in many ways. Actually I checked out the Triple J podcast a week or so ago but unfortunately all it was was recycled shows from last year, rather than fresh content. Hopefully now that Austereo has jumped on the bandwagon, Triple J might start to get even more serious about it, cos there’s no way I’m gonna listen to the sort of music they play on Austereo if I can avoid it. Either way it looks like podcasting hasn’t killed off the radio star just yet.

EDIT – just revisited the Triple J Podcasting site and it is showing a lot of promise – more stuff there including Dr Karl. Looks like they are starting to really embrace the idea. So I’m off to add a few feeds to my Doppler client. Go the J’s!

No more songs in their pockets: school bans iPods – now I’m a big iPod fan, and getting more into it every day, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of listening to music in class when I was at school. As a result of so many kids doing this with their iPods in Sydney, a private school has taken the step of banning them. I don’t think they should be banned entirely (nothing wrong with kids having them on the bus on the way home) but certainly listening to headphones in class is just plain stupid. Seems like such a short time since I left school (though in fact it’s like 12 years ago) but things seem to have changed incredibly – iPods, mobile phones and sms at school – it’s a different world now.

Now I want one of these babies – JamPod – it’s a little device which allows you to plug in an electric guitar to your iPod, mix the signal and play along with the iPod’s music. As the slogan says … “Use Your Two Favorite Toys… Together”

For those who are into podcasting, I’ve discovered a great Podcasting client which is a huge improvement over the basic iPodder software – Doppler. This has a heap of extra options including the ability to automatically edit the ID tags of the MP3 files, purge old files, and resume brokern downloads.

Plus for those using iPods with iTunes the benefits are even greater. Doppler will get the mp3 files converted into an audiobook (m4b) format which is great for a number of reasons. Firstly this allows “bookmarks” where the iPod automatically remembers where you are up to in each of these files – so you can listen to half a podcast, then go and listen to some music, and then resume your podcast at the same point. Secondly, when playing music, the iPod will automatically skip audiobook tracks, so you won’t end up listening to the Catholic Insider or some other podcast in the middle of a party mix. And thirdly, iPod has the ability to speed up audiobook files, so you can listen to them at a faster (or slower) tempo if you so desire. These features are a huge improvement on the whole podcasting experience for me. Doppler is an awesome program. Check it out.

Anyway I’m off shortly to pick up Jenni from the airport.

Well Jenni’s gone off to the airport now for her trip to Sydney and so it’s just me and the two boys for 3 days and 4 nights. I’m sure it’s all gonna be fine at this end, though I need to start thinking up some fun things for us to do. Tomorrow we’re going to go shopping for a new DVD player, as 2 out of the 3 we have at the moment are on the blink (maybe my clever brother might be able to fix em) – I’ve got my eye on one from Harvey Horman which also plays DivX files, which will save me having to watch my Battlestar Galactica episodes on the laptop (i could hook it up to the TV, but can’t find the right cords). Actually tonight I was pretty stupid – I’d planned to watch it later in the night after Jenni had gone and our small group had finished, but in the end we had to reschedule our small group cos most of them couldn’t make it, so I had free time. At 9:45 I went to watch the episode on the laptop, and then realised that I could have been watching it properly on the TV since 9:30. Oh well.

Also wasted a few hours today trying to find a audio bible of the NLT in MP3 format for my iPod (see my last entry for the story behind that). I found the perfect one here and fairly cheap too, but after emailing them I discovered that they will not ship outside of the USA. It always annoys me when places are like that – like the rest of the world doesn’t count. Anyway I spent half the day googling to find the same DVD-ROM elswhere but with no luck, until after 9 o’clock when I finally found it here, and at a cheaper price too! It’s a DVD-ROM of MP3 files of the NLT translation, which I plan to transfer to my iPod. Once I’ve got it, I’ll let you know how the audio-bible experiment goes.

Anyway speaking of DVDs and iPods, I’m just about to reflash my DVD burner firmware, and then go off and listen to some Podcasts before heading to my big lonely bed.

I’ve always been a little skeptical about the concept of audio-books. Being a fairly avid reader I thought the idea of sitting and listening to a book read by someone else was a pretty dumb idea, especially as I read pretty fast normally. And I still cringe at the idea of an audio-novel, complete with character voices and sound effects etc. But I’m a little more open now to the concept in general, and I think that the iPod revolution may help audiobooks finally come into their own.

A few weeks ago when I started re-reading Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” I searched my P2P software for a PDF version of it to put on my PDA – I found one, but at the same time I also came across a 370Meg audio version of it, which I downloaded and then forgot about. But after my recent uptake of the whole podcasting thing I remembered it, and loaded up the last few days onto my iPod. And it was surprisingly good, hearing Rick Warren reading his own book, and following along in my own copy, closing my eyes at times and just listening. I can forgive the tacky intro music and the irritating American female voice reading the verses at the beginning. For a book with a brief daily reading like the Purpose Driven Life I think this format has potential, but I’m still dubious about it overall. I can’t see myself being able to maintain concentration very long to “read” a full-length book that way. And as I said before audio-novels just annoy me. I’m rethinking the idea of an audio-bible though – it’s something I’ve never seriously considered before, but combined with iPod might be quite cool…

The other new book format is the eBook, which I might discuss later. For now, I have patients to see I’m afraid…
Tonight is the final night of our 40 days of purpose group, plus Jenni will be flying off to Sydney for the Hillsong Women’s Conference, which looks like it’s going to be a full on few days for her. It’s going to be not quite as full on for me, and hopefully a lot of fun, looking after the two boys – I hope they don’t miss their mummy too much – I know she’s going to miss them (if she get’s time)

It’s great to have an overcast day today and a bit of rain for a change. A perfect day to spend at home. Actually it turns out I’m on-call for obstetrics today as one of the other doctors is unavailable and they asked me to fill in, but like all my calls thus far this year nothing has happened at all to this point.

So as well as playing with my boys and doing a few odd jobs I’ve spent a little while on the computer playing around with things. At ob1’s suggestion I’ve been playing around with Podcasting but it’s been a bit frustrating getting it to work smoothly with my iPod setup. You see, a couple of months back I abandoned Apple’s iTunes software for a better Windows alternative called Anapod explorer which is much more powerful and useful, but unfortunately the iPodder software sends podcasts direct to iTunes which created problems by erasing all the music tracks off my iPod. So as I write this there’s 5000+ songs being copied back from my hard drive onto my iPod again.

In the meantime I’ve given up on iPodder and turned to a more versatile program Feed Demon 1.5. I’ve been using an older version of this software for quite some time now as an RSS reader, but the latest version has podcasting tools and I can get it to send to my Anapod music folder instead of iTunes. Definitely worth checking out this software – it’s a very powerful program that allows you to read all your favourite blogs and newsfeeds without having to load them up individually in a browser.

But after all that I’m still not convinced podcasting is for me. I love the idea and the use of technology behind it, but I just don’t have the time to listen to these podcasts. As it is I have more reading and viewing material than I can keep up with, especially now that my work is less than 10 minutes from home. But it’s good to play around with, and I definitely think that this has potential for the church website, with audio sermons etc.