Twelve Black Code Monkeys

I’ve talked about podcasting before, but I thought I’d write about it again as I get more into the continuously expanding list of programming that’s out there. As I listen, I have developed a stronger sense of which podcasts I like and are worth my time, and in the process I’ve had to put off my backlog of audible books for a while, but hopefully not too long!

For those new to podcasts, they are kind of home-grown amateur radio broadcasts, but not via radio. The programming is very diverse, ranging from completely informal BS sessions, to recordings from conferences, to group discussions on just about anything you can think of. Professionals have even gotten into the fray as they see this format taking off, so we now have programming from NPR and the BBC, among others.

So how do you actually receive these podcasts? Well, really you can get them on any computer connected to the internet, a client program (I use Doppler Radio), a program to play MP3’s (iTunes, Windows Media Player) and optionally a portable MP3 player to transfer the files to. For those lucky enough to have a smartphone with MP3 capabilities and a relatively fast (faster-than-dial-up) connection to the internet, one can download these directly onto the same device that will play them and do this from any location where a signal can be found.

To understand a little more of the technical details, I’ll just explain a bit of the background briefly. First there was RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication. This is basically a type of (XML-specified) scripting language that allows a content producer to create a file that has their content in a structured format. That file can then be pulled or pushed to an “aggregator” which will then make that content available to anyone who subscribes to it via a special program, usually called a “newsreader.” The bottom line is that the content producer doesn’t have to get visited by thousands of people, which might tax his bandwidth limits, and the subscriber doesn’t need to remember a url to go to. Rather he uses a newsreader and subscribes to “feeds” of the content, which are usually just text and perhaps some images, but none of the other stuff that might be on a web-page – read ADS! Then again, the content producer then doesn’t get the revenue of the ads that these readers might click on, but more and more content producers are putting ads in the feeds themselves, something that a lot of people question for obvious reasons. The newsreader will download every updated feed that one is subscribed to and present it immediately, without any fuss, so it’s a very convenient way of accessing lots of your favorite information sources in one small package.

RSS has another feature to it called “enclosures” which allow for basically attaching files to a feed entry. So, last year Adam Curry of MTV fame got together with some coders and developed a program that was kind of a newsreader but specifically for feeds with enclosures and even more specifically for MP3 enclosures. This program, called iPodder, was integrated initially with iTunes and thus the iPod, but other such programs have been developed that integrate with Windows Media Player which can then be synchronized with almost any device that plays MP3’s. The idea was similar to that of a newsreader. Just have your podcast “client” program download whatever MP3 files were available in any of the feeds you subscribed to, and then have it sync to your MP3 player. You don’t have to think about it much, just hook up your player to your computer every morning, have it retrieve any new shows, and off you go with a collection of new stuff to listen to.

As podcasting has grown in popularity, various people (including Adam Curry) have been looking at ways to make it more into a professional industry rather than just a bunch of folks fooling around in their spare time. Where this is all going I can’t quite tell you, and I think the number of people listening to this stuff is still very small side compared to traditional radio, but it does make listening a bit easier in many respects. In particular it lets you listen to things on your own schedule, instead of the radio station’s. Market insiders are seeing younger listeners (who aren’t being targeted by traditional radio) are going more and more for alternative formats like podcasting, so as these users get older more and more people will be used to this format, in addition to just the early adopters.

Anyway, as I said, I have a list now of my current shows I like to listen to, so here goes:

The Dawn and Drew Show: in my 10-course meal of podcasts, this is kind of my guilty pleasure, my junk food course. Dawn and Drew were I think the first podcast I listened to. They have been podcasting since I think last September or October and I’ve listened to almost all but their first dozen shows. They are basically just a married couple (Dawn Miselli and Drew Domkus) in rural Wisconsin BSing about tons of stuff. It’s very politically incorrect, but these guys seem to be that way just for the shock value and humor value. Drew is a bit of a geek and Dawn is kind a sarcastic ex-Punk type. Their repartee is just very funny as they kind of insult each other; make fun of the other, etc., but not in a really mean-spirited way. Occasionally they bring in guests, particularly family members, or even call them up for phone interviews. Their family – really mostly Dawn’s family – is as entertaining as they are. Each show is about 40 minutes long (including comments to their listener line) http://www.dawnanddrew.com/rss2.xml

Future Tense: this show is produced by NPR and are fairly short at around 5 minutes a pop. Each cover a topic related to technology, the internet, etc. A nice short digestible amount of content similar to a single story on NPR, although usually a bit more savvy than what you would get on one of their general news programs like All Things Considered. I believe they come out on a daily basis: http://www.publicradio.org/columns/futuretense/podcast.xml

Morning Stories: another NPR-produced show with Tony Kahn. These are also relatively short at about 8 minutes each. A nice format, where a theme is picked and someone reads a kind of audio essay. These are sometimes very humorous, sometimes sad, and often touching. Tony then comments about the essay and discusses the subject a bit more with his cohost. These are nice little tidbits, and I wish they came out more than once a week: http://streams.wgbh.org/podcast/morningstories.xml

Engadget: the blog Engadget recently got Eric Rice to reengage their podcasting. Last year they had come out with a bunch when Philip Torrone was still working there (more on him below). They talk about gadgets and technology similar to the blog, so it’s nice to have an audio source for this because they are often so prolific on their blog that I just get helplessly behind! But my opinion is not totally set with this yet. I’m not sure if I like Rice as a commentator and sometimes I’ve thought he missed some points or didn’t get everything right on a given technology. They don’t seem to have a schedule down, and I’m not sure if the show length is very fixed either, but check them out and listen for yourself: http://podcasts.engadget.com/

Geek News Central: Todd Cochrane records this show at home as kind of a supplement to his website. We get to hear about some tech news, what’s going on in the blogosphere and podosphere, and someone in the IT industry in general. But Todd also throws in a lot of personal anecdotes about himself, his wife, and kids, which make it a more interesting show, I think. Todd has an interesting voice that helps to keep you from drifting off. The show lasts for around 35 minutes or so and is put out twice a week: http://www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml

Leo Laporte The Tech Guy: Leo was one of the mainstays on ZDTV/TechTV before it was bought and put to a horrible death by GameSpot. Leo now has an am radio call-in show in Los Angeles at KFI where he helps users diagnose problems a lot like his show “Call for Help” on TechTV. But he also talks about new developments in computers, technology, gadgets, etc. One time he went on an Apple cruise and interviewed John Wozniak for the show, which was great. Leo is also just an incredibly upbeat and his desire to help anyone with anything really makes the show enjoyeable, even when you already know the answer he’s going to give: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kfi

The Laporte Report Audio Edition: another podcast from Leo Laporte, but this time it’s more of a BS session between him and some former The Screen Saver cast and crew, including Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, and potentially Yoshi. Leo initially called this the “Revenge of Bleep” where the bleep was a bleeping out of “The Screen Savers” which G4 owns the rights to. The show is kind of an insider’s view of what went on behind the scenes at ZDTV/TechTV, but much more. Actually, it’s probably mostly just about new technology, trends, etc. Basically a bunch of geeks talking shop. Nothing is dumbed down like the previous podcast, so be aware that not everything is explained for the benefit of listeners who may not be savvy. Still, it’s great to hear these guys again together and it brings back memories from the ‘good old days’ before G4 put TechTV/ZDTV to death…: http://leoville.tv/tlr/tlr.php (soon to change to now http://twit.tv/)

Reel Review: Michael Geohegen is a film fanatic who reviews generally non-current movies (DVD’s), at least since I’ve been listening. It’s possible he’s done some currently running stuff in the past, I don’t know. Michael’s knowledge of and passion for film really show in his reviews and I always feel like I want to go out and rent the movie after listening! If I had a Netflix account I’m sure I’d be adding the movies he’s been reviewing. Recently he even teamed up with another team of podcasters who have a show about wine (Grape Radio) and did a group discussion about the movie sideways. This was great because you got all the cinematic analysis from Michael and a bunch of wine connoisseur’s analysis about the wine and the various wineries, wine bars, and restaurants featured in the film. His shows are generally in the 20-minute or so timeframe and he puts out one or two a week. : http://reelreviewsradio.com/podcast.xml

IT Conversations: this podcast, founded and hosted by Doug Kaye, is starting to become a kind of IT-News and Views radio network of sorts! Some of the content is just recorded panels from various conferences like Web 2.0. It’s great to get such recordings for those of us who would love to be there in person but don’t have the freedom, money, or job that would put us there. But in addition to these, there are all kinds of interviews of various technology luminaries. These shows are hosted and produced by a variety of people who send their content to Doug who makes the best of it available on the podcast. Some of the stuff I’ve listened to has been way to wonky for me, but most of it is really quite interesting. It doesn’t just stick to pure technology issues, but veers into economics and culture often but as it relates to technology. I don’t know if there’s any real schedule, but you can usually count on at least several shows a week if not more. Those shows can range from 20 minutes up to two hours depending on the type of show (the panel recordings often being some of the longest): http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithEnclosures.php

Make/DIY: Philip Torrone used to be part of Engadget but left be part of Oreilly’s Make Magazine. While at Engadget he helped to write much the great DIY (do it yourself) projects and was the host of the Engadget podcast last year before he left. Philip definitely puts across his passion for technology and the technology industry, but so far he’s just getting started with this new podcast, so it’s not as “meaty” as his old Engadget shows used to be. This podcast is just getting started with just a handful so far, but we will hopefully see a lot more in-depth discussion in them soon. For now they are primarily some personal news relating to gadgets/technology as well as some news and info about the magazine: http://www.makezine.com/blog/index.xml

The Leonard Lopate Show: an NPR-produced talk show based in New York, this show features just one 30-minutes segment of what is a 2-hour show. Leanord interviews someone, often an author about a recent book. Generally really interesting guests and Leonard is a good interviewer. I think these shows come out on a daily or almost-daily schedule – during the week: http://www.wnyc.org/rss/show.py?show=lopate

The Catholic Insider: my highly atheistic brother-in-law recommended this podcast so I was intrigued! It’s hosted by a young Dutch priest, Roderick Vonhögen, who was gotten a lot of attention lately what with the pope’s death. He does a lot of “sound-seeing tours” (where you take a recorder with you somewhere and talk about your surroundings and what’s happening around you), and so he did a lot of these around the Vatican during the time period from when the John Paul II was dying up until the new pope, Benedict XVI, was chosen. He’s also apparently done some tours which I haven’t heard yet detailing the places described in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (the book he wrote before The Da Vinci Code, but which has similar themes). He talks about his past and his love for Star Wars and is generally very normal sounding and not the pious, unapproachable entity that is often portrayed on TV or in movies. You get the sense that he has a great sense of humor, respects all religions, and is not at all about proselytizing. He is also a good speaker, although he has a accent, and he really shows his passion for those things that excite him: http://feeds.feedburner.com/catholicinsider

Battlestar Gallactica: this podcast is produced by the creator and executive producer of the new remake of the TV series Battlestart Gallactica. Only a five of these have come out for this first full season of the show, and now that the season has ended, we’ll have to wait at least two or three months until the series starts up again this summer. For the most part, it’s like listening to an audio commentary on a DVD, although I was able to listen to it while driving and was able to follow who they were talking about. You get a lot of additional insight into the show and it seems as if it’s not at all something that is really stuck in stone the way some shows are mapped out for years in advance: http://www.podcastalley.com/redirect.php?pod_id=1819

The Brian Lehrer Show: Another NPR talk show based out of New York, and like The Leonard Lopate Show, it’s 30 minutes of a 2-hour show just about each day of the week (not weekends): http://www.wnyc.org/rss/show.py?show=bl

Slacker Astronomy: this is a short 5-10-minute podcast that comes out about once a week about Astronomy. It’s made by a couple of astronomers (Aaron and Pamela) and a production guy (Travis). It’s geared at those without a scientific background and they try to make it entertaining by being cute. This can occasionally get a bit annoying, like they are trying to target 11-year-olds, but luckily the show is in general informative and once you get over the cutesy stuff, they are fine: http://www.slackerastronomy.org/slack-live.xml

On The Media: this is yet another NPR show, but not a talk-show. The show talks about all forms of media, news, industry trends, technological trends, and lots more. It’s a really interesting show, I think. This is the first full-length NPR show to podcast its entire show of about an hour. It’s produced on a weekly basis: http://www.onthemedia.org/index.xml

Back a few years ago when I was watching very little TV, so-called “Reality-TV” made its appearance and I was glad that I had gotten away from the habit. Since then I’ve slowly inhaled more and more and while I still only watch an average of 7 or 8 hours a week, a chunk of that is on the Reality TV that on the one hand I think is just dumb, but on the other hand I have some morbid fascination with. The two such programs I currently watch are The Apprentice and American Idol.

The Apprentice is interesting because it is at least vaguely similar to life-like situations where you have a project to run and a team of coworkers. Of course it’s also very unrealistic because you are given lots of support on the one hand and on the other you may have no background in a given task (nor anyone on your team). Also, you don’t normally get what might be called an impossibly brief timeframe to get a project done, and then when your sales are a whopping $10 less then your competitor, you are deemed the “loser” and one of your teammates must be let go! But still, it is about making business decisions that I think most people can kind of understand based on common sense and it’s interesting to come up with what you would have done differently in order to make the project work better. Unfortunately, as with most of these shows, you only get to see what the producers want you to. They shoot dozens of hours of footage and have to bring this down to about 40 minutes. It needs to make sense, but also be entertaining, and finally it needs to not anger viewers too much when it seems obvious that Trump is making a horrible decision. Yahoo provides some extended scenes and some unaired scenes which each week probably add an additional 10-20% of footage! So you know there’s a lot of stuff we just don’t see. You can make someone look very bad or very good by selectively including or excluding a given scene, and I’m positive that the producers are very strategic about how they do this in order to portray who they want to win (or who they expect to win).

American Idol is another show that, like The Apprentice, I picked up last year just to find out what all the fuss was about. It is a nominally fun talent-show type of program, but the format has gotten pretty stale. Last year at least the contestants got to meet with some music giants like Elton John but this year it seems the venues for most weeks are just based on date ranges that the songs came out. The contestant performs, then the first judge, Randy, says “Hey Dawg, how’s it going?” and then gives what is arguably the most “real” impression of the performance. The Paula Abdul gushes about how the performance was great and in the rare cases she doesn’t like the performance she instead praises the individual instead of giving constructive criticism, although this does happen once in a blue moon. The Simon plays the evil foil and berates the performer for singing like a lounge singer, or someone at a karaoke bar, or one of the half dozen other analogies that he picks from a hat, and often complains about what the performer is dressed in. Occasionally he does praise performances, but 80-90% of the time his comments are negative and mean.

What is interesting is to see some of the discussion of people on the net that follow these two shows. I don’t get a group of friends together to watch these, being a 30-something most of whose friends are too busy with kids to bother with such trifles. My coworkers don’t seem to watch these shows either. In order to see whether others have similar impressions of the shows, I visit a couple of sites that discuss each episode. It’s interesting to get the impressions of some who are exactly what mine are, yet others who seem the diametrical opposite.

American Idol is a bit different from others in that the audience actually has a roll in the show in that they vote and their votes effect the outcome – namely who gets to leave the show each week. You can vote multiple times for as many candidates as you want and so there are some very motivated people who vote dozens if not hundreds of times for their favorites. One of the things I noticed early on in the competition which I felt wasn’t particularly fair was that back stories of certain contestants were aired while those of others weren’t. That means the audience became familiar with certain people whereas others seemed a lot less familiar and thus the familiar ones had a big edge in developing fan bases. It’s not a guarantee that someone with more initial exposure won’t make it that far and those with a lot will, but it does make these scenarios more likely. As I said, it gives an edge. If the person doesn’t take advantage of it, then it doesn’t mean much.

Anyway, this last episode of American Idol put Scott Savol, one of the contestants who have been in the “bottom 3″ for most of the competition, into the top group, despite any big improvement in his performance. This was surprising and then I heard of VoteForTheWorst.com. This is a site which is encouraging people to vote for the worst contestant (in their minds this is Scott Savol) in order to teach the American Idol producers a “lesson.” In other words, don’t try to steer or manipulate the audience into voting a certain way. So far I’ve never actually voted myself for one of these contests, but this site really does motivate me to do so. As the site says, all of these contestants are getting great exposure and will get record deals very quickly after the show ends, why must our “favorite” (if we even have one) win? Why not just make it more entertaining by voting for someone that most people think is a poor singer and performer? I have nothing against Mr. Savol. He had an arrest for domestic disturbance several years ago when he threw a phone at the mother of his son, but apparently this is something they’ve worked out and he’s expressed remorse. I don’t like judging people on stuff like this anyway, but I can judge his singing and performance at least as I experience it and my honest opinion is that he is the least charismatic, the worst performer, the worst singer and the worst communicator of the current group. As he and his parents have indicated, he’s not had the easiest haul growing up, so voting for him gives the added benefit of giving him some extra success that will hopefully allow him the freedom to do what he loves best – sing. Just as long as I don’t have to listen to his songs!

Well, it’s been over a month since Flickr confirmed that they had been bought by Yahoo!, but I am still seeing Google ads on their site! Has anyone else noticed this? It just seems a little odd that they haven’t yet switched over to Yahoo’s ads, which I would think would be a pretty trivial coding change…

Ok, I’ve been writing this blog for almost two years now and I thought it was about time to get an impression of how my users are accessing the content here. I know that some of you read entries on your web browser as I get traffic reports from Blog City as well as SiteMeter. I also get a sense of how many people may be subscribing to my RSS feeds, at least those who use Bloglines, because it tells you how many subscribers there are for a given feed – in my case there seem to be 28 at last count, excluding myself and counting all the various RSS feeds that I have set up. I also apparently have a whopping 4 people who have signed up with Blog City to receive email notifications when a new entry is posted (note: see below if you want to subscribe to this list).

As many of those who write blogs know, except for Bloglines, it’s very difficult to get statistics on how many people are subscribed to your blog via a news reader. This is due to the nature of RSS and aggregators which collect the content and distribute it, kind of like a middleman. So unlike a website, you are not getting people to come individually to access your content and so have no idea how many people may be looking.

So, with that said, I thought I would ask all you folks out there to fill in my visitor poll in the upper right corner of my site. If you’re reading this via a newsreader, just follow this link to my site. I’ve made it so that you can specify more than one method. For example, while I use Bloglines a lot to read content, I also use the newsreader software for my Treo 650 phone, QuickNews.

Don’t worry about filling this out if you just happened across this site today but don’t subscribe to one of the feeds or otherwise check the site every once in a while.

I really appreciate your taking the time to help me figure out how my readers are getting the content. In the future I hope to have other polls that will be a little more interesting and will let me get to know you better.

* If you want to get email notifications, you can do this by entering your email address in the text box on the left next to the “?” button, under the “GetFirefox” Button and “Mailing List” banner text. After typing in your address, click the “>> >>” button.

Not long ago, users of the Sprint-branded Treo 650 got an update that fixed some issues that have been annoying Treo 650 owners. Namely, the memory issue that caused much more memory to be consumed than for the Treo 600, and very low speakerphone volume levels. Now a version of the firmware for GSM Treo 650’s has been leaked via a Singapore Palm User Group. Users with Unlocked Treo 650’s as well as Cingular-branded Treo 650’s have been trying out this “test” version of the new 1.21 firmware. It seems a bit risky to be playing with an unaproved firmware version, but so far it looks like those who have successfully loaded it have had the same improvements to their memory and speakerphone volume as Sprint customers who’ve loaded their new firmware. So, for those who don’t want to play with this yet, just know that this bodes well for the update coming out for GSM phones in the near future. Stay tuned!

Update: There’s actually a detailed description posted by user 100th Monkey in the MyTreo.net Wiki, just in case you want to try this out.

I grew up in Manhattan in New York City, but whenever I would tell people this who were not New Yorkers they would be dubious because they said I had no “accent.” I suppose they were thinking of the typical New Yorker accent that you hear in movies which is probably more of a Brooklyn or Bronx accent. Manhattanites generally don’t speak that way.

Talking to friends and relatives I’ve discovered that I have or had certain peculiarities in the way I talked that seemed a bit odd to them, and one friend actually said he thought he could tell I was from New York, but I’m don’t know, I think some of these things may be my own inventions or just regional phrases. Ok, so for example, growing up I always pronounced “typewriter” as “type – uh- write –er.” Another phrase I use is “on line” in the usage “waiting on line” to get into a movie, etc. Apparently another way to say it is to wait IN line. Waiting IN line doesn’t sound strange to me, but waiting ON line comes out of my mouth naturally without thinking.

Blogging Burt passed on this little linguistic quiz from blogthings.com, which I thought looked interesting and so took the quiz myself. According to this I’m mostly general American English (thus the surprise that some have that I’m from New York) and only 25% Yankee. I’m also 10% Dixie, which is not a huge surprise since I’ve been living or studying in Virginia, DC, and Maryland for the last 13+ years. Not that a test like this is going to be all THAT accurate, since it only has 20 questions in it, but it’s still fun to take:

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Scrubs is one of my favorite shows on TV these days. Probably the only comedy show that I watch on a regular basis. The first season of Scrubs is coming out on DVD next month so I am helping Buena Vista get the word out on my DVDMon.com site. You have a chance of winning a box set of the first season if you fill out a short survey (takes about 5 minutes) about which of five commercials you like the best and least. The nice thing is that you find out immediately if you’ve won or not. You have an additional chance of winning one if you send a link to the contest to a friend. I’ve never won a contest like this online but hopefully one of you Scrubs fans will. If you do happen to win one following the link on my DVDMON.com site, please let me know!

Pa1mOne is giving away 144 Treo 650’s today! The giveaway started this morning at 9am and ends tonight at 9pm PDT. They are giving away one every five minutes so according to my calculations this leaves about 47 left to win. I don’t need another myself but I know of a few friends and family who would love to get their hands on one, so I’m giving it a shot myself. But don’t worry; I never win stuff like this!

Via TreoCentral.

Andrew over at Treonauts has a nice rundown of a PalmOS newsreader called Quick News. This was the possible “killer app” I was hinting about previously, and I myself wanted to write a review up eventually, but other things got in the way and frankly my overall opinion of it declined a bit as I continued working with it. I’ll try to supplement Andrew’s excellent review with a few thoughts of my own, but before I do that, I want to briefly go over some issues with another newsreader that relates to my overall effort to find a solution to the “portability” of this new type of application.

In the first place, the newsreader that I have come to know and love that I use on my home and work PC is Bloglines. This is a web-based newsreader, and while there are others out there, to my knowledge Bloglines is still the only one that allows you to hold large archives of old news articles. It doesn’t just retrieve the last X number of posts specified in the feed itself. Instead I believe it actually archives the content so that if you don’t check a feed for a week or two, you could have hundreds of entries piled up waiting for you and not just the last 20. Perhaps not everyone cares about this, but I find it very useful to be able to go back and see if there was anything I missed that I really want to read.

While Bloglines is “portable” in that you can access it from whatever computer you are on that’s connected to the internet, the problem is accessing it from devices that don’t have full browser implementations. For this reason Bloglines has a “mobile” version that is dumbed-down a bit to allow for mobile use. For example, it doesn’t use frames or JavaScript which many phone web browsers don’t support. This would be a fine solution but Bloglines for some reason set things up so that once you access a given feed, just as the regular version it automatically marks everything as read. That’s fine except that if there are 20 entries and I only have time to look at 5 of them, I need some way to tell Bloglines that I want to keep the rest unread. In the regular Bloglines there are a couple of ways to do this, but there is no way in the mobile version!

This problem has become increasingly annoying to me because I’ve emailed them (without a response) and posted on their discussion forum. Other members have responded, saying that they agree and find this a critical feature, but the only thing we have gotten from the folks at Bloglines about this is absolute silence. I’m a web developer myself and while I don’t know much about Bloglines backend, I bet you I could actually create this feature myself given a couple of hours. It’s just not, I don’t think, a very time-consuming request.

Quick News is by a company called Stand Alone which previously made the only full-featured newsreader for PalmOS called HandRSS. Quick News is really a whole new application. So many new features have been added. Honestly for me it took a while to become familiar enough to use it comfortably. Part of this has to do with some features that seem to me to indicate that it might do something similar to Bloglines in allowing you to keep old articles. But after playing with it for a couple of weeks, I could not get this to work and an email to Stand Alone confirmed that the current version didn’t do this but a future version might.

Other than the slightly unintuitive interface which means that you just need to spend a little more time playing with this powerful application before getting comfortable, my only other major issue with it was related to some stability issues. In particular it seemed that a lot of the time when it was downloading or importing news into the program, it would crash. Going back into the program, it would then try to re-import the news it hadn’t succeeded doing the last time and would crash again. Catch 22. I ended up finally figuring out that I could watch the display as it imported and determine the last feed it was trying to import when it crashed and then go and delete the two files for that feed. I have no idea what makes it crash – maybe some odd characters in a feed? Who knows? If you know what to do you can avoid it, but it’s still a bit of a pain.

The nice thing is that Stand Alone is constantly coming out with enhancements and bug fixes and as I was researching this article I noticed that there were two updates posted after the last one I downloaded just a few weeks ago. So perhaps the bugs I’ve mentioned have been gotten rid of, we’ll see.

The only issue for me is that it doesn’t allow archiving old messages, and also it seems that the files that contain each feeds’ content can only reside in main memory and not on the external card, something that would be crucial if you wanted to hold onto archives of lots of feeds. The other problem for me relates to how you mark things read. You can mark an entry read and even delete it, but the next time you go to update your feeds, it will simply overwrite this with what’s currently in the feed (which could include entries you’ve already read and even deleted).

Nevertheless, Quick News is simply the only option out there for PalmOS handhelds/phones unless you want to use web-based solutions like the (flawed) Bloglines or a subscription to a fee-based service like Newsgator. Its features are growing and hopefully it’s stability is increasing, this despite the lack of any competition, so I’ll forgive Stand Alone for their somewhat sluggish response time to inquiries (several days). At least they did respond, which is better than I can say for Bloglines after waiting for a response from them for months!

Matt over at PVRBlog sheds some light for those of us who use TiVo, DirecTV Satellite, and TiVo. Basically, there’s no easy way to have all three. When I bought my HDTV almost a year ago, I considered buying a satellite receiver that was both a DVR as well as an HD receiver. The only such one at the time had just come out and was selling for $1000. This was not that much less than my TV, which was already was taking some real financial courage (or stupidity) to buy. I had to hold off. A year later, that hasn’t really changed. You would have thought the prices for such items would come down, as they have for HDTV’s themselves, but this isn’t the case.

Another issue that I’ve had is with receiving local channels. If I want to get local channels in HD, I have to use an antenna. I called DirecTV about this last year and they said that I could petition for a waver. They did this for me and I got a note in my mail 6 weeks later saying all but Fox had denied my waver. The problem with this is that I have to switch the TV off of the satellite and use an antennae, and guess what, the antennae, despite being one that gets some extra power from AC, and has lots of ways to adjust it’s position, doesn’t work very well. In fact, the only network I’ve been able to receive is CBS, but it’s really a crapshoot whether I will be able to receive it on any given day. Occasionally I will be able to receive PBS signals, but like CBS, it’s a crapshoot. NBC, ABC, and Fox, forget about it. Meanwhile these channels are available in HD from local cable channels. As much as I hate the cable conglomerate that serves my area, if watching network shows in HD were critical to me, I would have to go with them as my only option.

Then again, I can’t get a Cable DVR that records in HD, so what’s the point? I would basically have to create my own DVR, which while fun, but probably wouldn’t cost all that much less than DirecTV’s $1000 unit.

Then there’s the issue of content portability. Even if there was an HD DVR available through DirecTV, Dish, or a cable provider, it wouldn’t provide content portability. What I mean by this is the ability to take the content that you are recording and archive it to DVD or transfer it to another device like your computer or personal media player. These companies are very nervous about letting the consumer have this kind of power because they are afraid that it will enable them to share recordings just as music recordings have been shared over the internet.

I’m often amazed at the ease my own solution has allowed for content portability, albeit not one that allows me to record in HD. The TiVo I own is a Humax DRT-800 which I reviewed a couple of months ago. It is one of the few out there that allow you to burn your TiVo recordings to DVD. By doing so, you can then take the DVD’s and create any open form of media file using one of the many encoding tools out there, like Dr. Divx. I did this as a test for a half-hour show which I was able to load onto a memory card on my Treo 650 phone. Because of the small screen size I was able to shrink the file size down to a puny (for video) 90MB and watch the whole show wherever I went. While it took me a while to get this working, I would guess that once I got the hang of it, I could do it in about 30-45 minutes – most of that time just being the encoding/decoding/burning processes during which I can do other things.

HD content is still something that I think most people don’t care about – besides us early adopters. Add to this the much larger bandwidth required and the ability for content providers to gum up the works by tricking legislators into thinking that HD is somehow different from other media types and so deserves some special protections. What you get is an environment that is killing the enthusiasm for HD by the very people (early adopters) who would trumpet it and encourage all their friends to become the next generation adopters. But the way that HD has been doled out as some precious commodity has only made people balk at the price they have to pay for a technology that while certain eye-catching, is simply not worth the hassle in many cases because it doesn’t offer the flexibility that standard definition does…