I use my ipod constantly, pretty much every day for at least a couple of hours, yet I almost never listen to music on it. Most everything I listen to on it is spoken word, and of that a goodly percent is podcasts. It occurred to me that despite this being the case for over a year now I’ve never really highlighted any of the spoken word content I’ve been enjoying, and I’ve never highlighted the podcasts I like. Time to start doing it. For my first entry I’ll point to one of my absolute favorites, the In Our Time podcast. It’s a podcast of a weekly BBC radio show. Each week they examine an issue, historical figure, period of time or any of a number of ‘big ideas,’ and break it down for discussion with a panel of experts. The host is pretty good about keeping things moving, and there’s a great variety of subject matter. You can subscribe directly using this link.

If the concept is unfamiliar to you – you don’t need an ipod or any portable music player to listen to podcasts, all you need is a computer capable of playing mp3 files, which pretty much any modern machine can do. Tools like itunes or juice make it easier to subscribe and receive the content automatically though, and are worth looking into if the idea interests you.

I’ll link to some of the other podcasts I subscribe to as time passes.

I’m on vacation this week in celebration of my birthday and one of the things I’m planning to do is a series of upgrades to the software and system that run this and other sites. As always there’s the possibility things will break, become unavailable, look funny, etc. Please bear with me as I upgrade everything.

Mind over matter baby! Who needs a joystick or a mouse when you have this thing: project epoc, which uses sensors mounted to a helmet as a control interface for computing and gaming devices. I’ve seen such devices before but my understanding is that the sensors won’t work through hair/without being firmly affixed to the skin of the head, so I’ll be very curious to hear how well this thing works after GDCthis year. Bring on the future! All I need now is my flying car.

If you’ve had the same laptop for several years at a time, chances are you’ve noticed how the batteries slowly become less effective. Usually by year three and almost always by year 4, they suck. Manufacturers are required to continue making replacement battery packs for a number of years after they cease making laptop models, but these can be very spendy, and depending on the vintage of your laptop they also may no longer be available. If your model was popular you can sometimes find after-market battery replacement solutions, but again for a high price. There’s another alternative though for those who aren’t afraid to get their hands a bit greasy. Most folks don’t realize that if they cracked open the battery pack for their laptop, what they’d find inside was a collection of power cells – basically imagine 4 or 6 c cells or overlarge AA cells in series, kind of like what you’d stick into the back of your television’s remote control, but with a hard plastic shell wrapped around it. If you’re handy you can crack open the plastic shell and replace the contents with new non-sucky lithium ion cells at a significantly lower cost than buying a replacement battery for your laptop would cost you, and often you can boost the capacity of the battery pack beyond what it was initially designed for. There’s a handy tutorial here with some photos that uses and IBM laptop battery pack as an example, but the same principles would apply to other models. If you’re interested in pursuing this make sure to google your laptop model so you can determine what kind of cells you’ll need to replace the ones it initially shipped with.

I’ve written about Keepass in the past, it’s a fantastic little tool for storing and generating all the multitudes of passwords and login credentials one must keep around in the web world. Last time I mentioned it I linked over to the Mac/Linux porting project, and I noticed today that this has moved and it’s gotten a new and much nicer home on the web. Check it out if you need a really good password manager. Free, open source, etc. The windows version can be found here.

I’ve written about outliners a number of times here, and today I happened across another great resource. It’s another directory of available outlining software. This one is pretty extensive, has write-ups for most of the outliners it covers, and tries to cover all platforms, including PDA and web-based tools. It’s wiki based so in theory you can contribute to the resource, and it also has coverage of ‘antique’ outliners. Check it out of you’re a fan of this kind of tool.

If you download video frequently you probably run into the problem of not being able to play back the downloaded file occasionally. Maybe the audio works but not the video, or the opposite, or maybe you get nothing. When that happens it’s time for forensics, and if you’re like me it also frequently means, ‘ehh, who has the time,’ and passing on watching the video. I noticed another tool you can use for analysis of these files today, mediainfo, a free, open source, somewhat cross platform (windows and linux) video forensics tool. Check it out if this is something you run into. It’s also useful if you frequently do transcoding so you can play files on your ipod, psp, gp2x or whatever.

Check out System Information for Windows (SIW), a free, very handy little system information tool. It’s tiny and standalone (no installer needed), meaning you can tuck it on your thumb drive. Next time you’re at a friends house and need to know the specs of their machine, pop this up and you’ll have everything you need.

Originally spotted via downloadsquad.

A brief explanation – I am consumed with work right now. The first phase of the project I was hired to work on at my new job is scheduled to go live for ~34k users in just a couple of weeks and I am completely swamped with things to do. By the time I get home at night I’m sick of computers and at best will play some zoomie games. More often I curl up to watch a movie or read. I’m also too busy to keep up on my regular RSS reading which is where a lot of the content on this site comes from, so…bear with me through mid-February, after which things should settle down a bit and I should return to my more regular posting habits.