Well, after a week’s wait, it’s finally up: the latest Katsu Show podcast. Sorry about the delay, I’m a worthless bum, I know. Anyway, here’s some show notes for you:
I tried, I did try, but, to be frank, it sucked. Maybe if I’d been at one of those huge massive LAN parties with dozens of players, but this one was fairly small, and really didn’t make for an interesting show. Still, it was pretty fun, and I’ll be going on about it on tonight’s show, so keep an ear out for it. Got a few other things too, including a follow-up to the Steve Jackson e23 stuff, and a couple of other things. It’ll be up tonight for you guys. 
Allright, I’m doing a scientifical experimentation. You might have noticed that I changed my usual tagline, the one that brags about my well-deserved STFU award, for a snappy little phrase that reads: ‘Free Porn Magic For You‘, which leads right back to this page. Whyfor did I do this? Well, you can blame this article by John C. Dvorak. Apparently he’s discovered that this phrase is the ‘magic phrase’ that automatically draws people looking in search engines for pr0n to your site. So.. just as a simple expeiment, i decided to change the site’s tagline with a link to itself with those words, just to see what happens.. now to wait a few days while the search-engine bots trawl my site, and then sit back and enjoy the hits.. I’ll be checking the logs and let you guys know if there’s a sudden upsurge in people arriving to this site thanks to this.
Well, Show #9’s up and running, recorded earlier today (while I was driving again), so it should be in your iPodder feeds allready if you’ve set them up. Not too shabby, and some cool music at the end. Check it out!
Show notes:
Allright, so I have this little link there on the side of the blog that says ‘Who Links to Me‘, and it goes to this page that provides a free service, letting you know what other sites are linking to your blog. Now, i’m used to going there and seeing 0 sites linking to me, that’s okay.. once I saw a single site had linked to me, and it totally made my day. But then I stop by a few minutes ago and, among the rest of the typical ‘So-and-so.com has found 0 links to your site’, I get this:
MSN Search has found -1 links to this site.
Negative one links to my site? How the fuck can I have a negative number of links from somewhere? I mean.. damn. That’s just uncalled for. 
Well, better late than never. I recorded this show today during my morning drive, intending to clean it up and post it from the office, but events conspired against me, and I had absolutely no time to do so during the day. So now that I’m back home, I cleaned it up, added some music, and posted it up.
Show Notes:
I’m also trying something different with today’s podcast: I’m Coralizing the download of the MP3 file, and seeing if it helps save some bandwith, might even work a little quicker for some of you out there downloading. Let me know if it works out for you guys, and if you have any trouble downloading the podcast!
Hey there folken… there’ll be another podcast up a bit later today, I just finished taping it this morning on the way to work. I’ll also be trying something kinda interesting with this podcast: distributed mirroring.
As you know, I’ve previously talked about some concerns with possible bandwith problems with podcasting. In short: the more popular you get, the higher your bandwith costs. A few solutions have been suggested, from using bittorrent to commercial services such as libsyn.org. But recently I ran across something interesting that I don’t thinkg I’ve seen many people even mention or talk about: a podcast that was being distributed through Coral. To quote from Coral’s site:
Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.
Publishing through Coral is as simple as appending a short string to the hostname of objects’ URLs; a peer-to-peer DNS layer transparently redirects browsers to participating caching proxies, which in turn cooperate to minimize load on the source web server. These volunteer sites that run Coral automatically replicate content as a side effect of users accessing it, improving its availability. Using modern peer-to-peer indexing techniques, Coral will efficiently find a cached object if it exists anywhere in the network, requiring that it use the origin server only to initially fetch the object once.
Bascially, all you do is add the string ‘.nyud.net:8090′ to the end of the domain for the download or website you want to be automatically mirrored, and that’s all. People don’t need to download plugins or learn how to use new software, you don’t have to install anything on your own server, it’s simplicity itself. Just do this:
If your link looks like this:
http://www.techgnosisweb.com/podcast.mp3
All you have to do is add ‘.nyud.net:8090′ to it, like so:
http://www.techgnosisweb.com.nyud.net:8090/podcast.mp3
… and that’s all! When people click on the link, or iPodder picks it up from the RSS feed, Coral takes care of automatically mirroring your content into its network the first time it’s requested, and every other time it’s requested, the content gets distributed throughout its network of mirrors, thus distributing the bandwith load away from your server. Really cool! And to top it all off, it’s completely free and easy to use, you don’t need to sign up anywhere or pay anything to have it mirror your stuff. I’ll be trying it with today’s podcast.. let me know if you notice any hiccups.
So, the official Wordpress version is 1.2.2, which I think is the one I’m using on this here blog.. but over on the development side, they’re up to 1.5 or something like that… and I’m starting to feel left behind. I’ve heard rumors of nifty things like built-in support for enclosures and stopping comment spam (no more need for pluins for these things!), and a few other nice things.. So I’m wondering if it would be worth it to take a chance, download one of the latest nightly builds and try it out here? I’d still have to do some hacking on it to put in the floaty code and stuff like that, but.. I’m like .3 versions behind!
Well, I just found out recently that there’s an RSS reader application for my iPaq that can download enclosures, and you know what that means: podcasting support! It’s called Egress, and it recently hit version 2.01, where they added the podcast/enclosures support.
I currently use ilium Newsbreak as my RSS reader of choice, and it’s pretty spiffy, but the enclosures support in Egress really has me intrigued. Right now, getting my subscribed podcasts onto my iPaq is a multi-step operation: once iPodder downloads the MP3 files to my PC, I sync pu the iPaq, click ‘Explore’, navigate to the folder on my SD card where I store the podcasts, and copy the podcast files over (deleting the old podcasts while I’m at it). The addition of MightySync to allow me to sync directories on my PC directly to directoris on my iPaq’s memory card, as well as xxcopy to automatically clean out old podcasts whenever a new one is downloaded, have helped, but I would still love to just sync up my podcasts directly to the iPaq without doing extra steps. So I can do my regular RSS newsfeeds and my podcasts all on one app in my iPaq.
Of course, we’ll have to see how well it handles getting rid of old podcasts, since they can fill up my SD card really quickly… I’ll be trying it out over the week and I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got the podcast/RSS/iPodder problems I mentioned previously solved. I kept goofing around with the settings on the enclosures feed, and finally, the second part of this weekend’s podcast downloaded properly through iPodder. So I looked at what I had done different between part 1 and part 2, and found out that on part 1, I had set the MIME type for the enclosure as ‘audio/x-mpeg’ (and it didn’t download), while on part 2, I had put it as ‘audio/mpeg’ (and it downloaded fine). So.. I went back, changed the type on part 1 to ‘audio/mpeg’, and it downloaded properly.
Apparently, the server was receiving the request for the file with the ‘audio/x-mpeg’ MIME type set, and was responding with an error message as it didn’t recognize that MIME type. But iPodder didn’t know, it was expecting an mp3 file, so it just grabbed the text of the error message, stuck an .mp3 extension on it, and plopped it into my download folder, thinking it had done its job. The clincher was when i opened up one of the imporperly downloaded files in a text editor and saw the text of the error message there, clear as day: Error 400, file type unknown.
So, the podcasting lesson for today is: MIME matters.
The second part of what was supposed to be Friday’s podcast is now up. I’ll get some proper show notes up with links to most of the programs I talk about, later today. For now, enjoy one of my longest and lowest quality podcasts yet, 45 minutes of me driving around aimlessly and spewing out nonsense about my PocketPC.
Show Notes:
I think that’s pretty much all of them.. if I missed any, let me know!
Well, the podcast that was supposed to be up yesterday, is finally up today. To make up for being late, though, this is a long one, two parts, the first part a history of my experience with PDA’s, and comparing the Palm, PocketPC, and Linux PDA platforms throughout my experience with each. The second part will be up later today, and it was taped on the road, where I talk about my curent PDA, and cool PocketPC apps. Enjoy!
Download Part 1 of today’s podcast here.
Pimp : the Backhanding - I’m just going to leave it to a someone more capable than I to describe my reaction to this perfectly: r*k*milholland of Something Positive:
The gloomiest game company around, White Wolf has a new card game coming out titled, Pimp: the Backhanding. A few weeks ago, this generated some VERY unhappy responses in their forum (which, I’m ashamed to admit, made me happy because I’m glad to see someone else get bitched out for once) who felt it was degrading to women and promoted violence. Then they all went into their basements and pretended to be -534 Generation Assamite vampires and pretended the bottle of ketchup they were sucking on was the neck of every girl who blew them off in high school. Later, there was masturbating and crying in the dark.
… so, yeah. Podcast’s not ready. Will be up later today. Will mainly be me ranting and raving about my iPaq. Be sure to tune in. No, I mean it. Tune in. I’ll be watching you…
Well, I made some minor changes to the RSS information for the podcasts, based on what I saw on other site’s podcast feeds.. specifically, I’m ignoring the ’size’ requirement for enclosures, and just putting in ‘1024′ as the size.. let me know if it works for you, I’ll be recording another podcast tonight, so if your podcast client is allready subscribed to our feed, let me know if the podcast downloads correctly tonight/tomorrow. And if you’ve been downloading the MP3’s directly, you’d be doing me a huge favor (not to mention making your own lives easier) by snagging a podcast client, like Doppler for Windows or iPodder for Windows/Linux/Mac and subscribing to our feed, and then letting me know if it’s working fine for you or not.
I still don’t know what’s wrong, I’m just copying stuff I’ve seen on feeds that actually work for me. I wonder if there’s a bug in the ’size’ processing measurement in current podcast clients, or is it an RSS thing, or is it just my server not sharing the mp3 correctly? Dunno.. but I’d like to start ruling out the possible causes, so any help will be appreciated.
Allright, I’m getting some complaints, and I’ve verified that this does happen, where people who’ve subscribed to the podcast RSS feed are finding that their content aggregators aren’t correctly downloading the podcasts. It’ll download a file that’s 200-some KB in size, but that won’t play.. and then it marks it as downloaded, so of course you can’t tell it to try again. This is really weird, and I don’t know why it’s happening with some podcasts and not with others. I’ve re-checked my rss feed 3 times but I can’t find what’s wrong. The MP3’s themselves seem fine too. Anyone out there with a better knowledge of xml and rss than I willing to take a peek and let me know what’s wrong? Thankee-sai.
Allright, falling into schedule here, posting this up late Tuesday night so it’ll be fresh and in your iPodder inbox tomorrow morning, it’s installment #5 in the increasingly innacurately named Katsu Podcast Trilogy (we miss you, Douglas Addams!). Tonight I’ve scoured the internets (yes, all of them!) to bring you the latest in meme-worthy tech news. Behold!
Show notes:
Download the MP3 of today’s show here.
Hey there, inkernets! Finished a podcast last night, finally. Not among my best, I have to admit, still suffering from a bit of podblock.. and I’m supposed to do another one tonight if I want to try and fall into my self imposed Mon/Wed/Fri publishing schedule. Anyway, this one’s a little short, but considering the quality, that’s probably a good thing.
Show Notes:
at username katsushiro Download the mp3 here.
Sorry about the lack of podcast last night, folks.. ran into a serious case of podblock last night, wasn’t able to get much done. I’m gonna shoot for tonight, and get it done. It’s an odd day today, I’ve got the day off, although I didn’t know I did, so I showed up at the office all dressed up and the guard tells me we’re closed today… so I’m taking the day to do some research for my S00P3R S33KR1T project.. more about that later.
Sorry about the delay, folks (I wonder how many posts I’ve started with these exact same words). I had a few days off at work, for once, and decided that I needed to spend them doing as little as possible, hence my lack of activity here. Anyway, just a heads up that there’ll be another podcast tonight. I’m tweaking the schedule a bit. I want to do 3/week, and have them available on Monday/Wednesday/Friday mornings, so that means doing them on Sunday/Tuesday/Thursday nights. Hopefully tonight’s podcast will mark the beggining of a steady schedule.
I’m still working out the details of tonight’s show, but I’ll do my best to post up a preview before the show starts taping later today.
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