DL

I’ve been looking to replace Juice, a podcast receiver, for sometime.  It doesn’t work all that well for me (although still better than iTunes podcast support) and it seems that development on Juice has stopped.  The recent announcement that feed demon is now free and supposedly has podcast support means I’ll be trying it out with a focus on it as a podcast catcher.

For an RSS reader, I’ve pretty much adopted Google Reader and like the idea of an online reader that’s accessible anywhere.  Apparently feed demon has an online component so that wherever you have feed demon installed it will be synced with your other instances of feed demon.

We’ll see how this goes.

Trying last.fm Kindof a cool idea in general but it has one weakness that might kill it for me.

I have a lot of, I’m not sure what to call it, “Junk” audio on my iPod. Stuff that I like and listen to but that would not be interesting to many other people and would not help link my taste to others. Let me give you some examples.

I create my own music as a hobby and I have a lot of unfinished stuff, and alternate versions on my iPod. It’s part of the process. I start stuff, I load it on my iPod and listen to it over and over trying to figure out if I like it, if it’s any good, what should I change, etc. Those tracks have a lot of listens and they’re not available to anyone else.

I have a lot of weird novelty audio that I pick up at random places on the web such as the recent nasty recording of what’s-his-face, Baldwin, to his daughter, and various remixes people have made incorporating that audio. What’s the proper artist and album name for that?

There’s an LA radio personality, April Winchell that collects this kind of stuff on her blog. Well, I’ve downloaded a lot of that and it’s on my iPod with “April Winchell” as the artist and in a lot of cases I don’t even know who’s recorded this stuff. How likely will those tracks be to match anyone else?

I have a bunch of recordings of “numbers stations” that I downloaded from various sources.

I have a bunch of prank phone calls from different locations on the web.

I used to record a local college radio show “My Make Out party” run by a woman who went by the name DJ Whisper. I liked the music she played but also I got a kick out of her voice which was so high pitched I pictured her with a tennis ball sized head. Well, I’d often edit out the songs and just keep her voice as tracks on my iPod so that every now and then as I’m listening to music DJ whisper comes on to announce tracks that are all wrong.

What good is it to scrobble any of these?

So after a couple of weeks of scrobbling I’m finding this kind of stuff appearing as some of my most played tracks which I’m sure only interferes with the process of finding other users with similar interests to get recommendations from.

In one case I made up an artist name just to keep a bunch of similar audio clips together and the artist name I chose happens to match the name of an artist on Last.FM and so now it looks like he’s one of my favorite artists and I’m one of his biggest fans.

So the feature I really need in Last.FM is the ability to blacklist certain artists, genres, tracks, or something to tell Last.FM not to bother scrobbling this stuff. I know I have an opportunity with each scrobble to remove tracks but, I don’t want to do something – over and over again – that could easily be done one time.

Meanwhile, while it lasts, you can find my account on Last.FM here.

Late last Summer I got a new computer to replace the oldest of my two office computers and that meant I had to say good bye to a little device that was so good at its job that I never thought about it. My linksys KVM switch. It was great. Just a double-tap on the scroll lock key and switching was almost instantaneous. It emulated an idle mouse and keyboard well enough that neither computer ever recognized that the mouse and keyboard were missing.

Sadly though, my new Dell had only DVI out, no VGA and also no PS/2 keyboard or mouse connectors – only USB. The new Dell monitor had inputs for many types of video (VGA, DVI, s-video, etc.) so I had to make do with two mice, two keyboards and switching the monitor between its various inputs. What a hassle.

I had trouble finding a replacement KVM switch. It seemed that KVMs that handle DVI are very expensive. But then I discovered that DVI can be converted to VGA with a simple adapter. Then all I needed was a KVM that handled USB and VGA, which is more reasonable.

So I just bought a Belkin Flip and like almost all Belkin products I’ve had, it works but it’s just not quite what I want. Here’s some of my issues:

1 – It’s got a hardware switch to “flip” between the systems rather than a hot-key. They actually promote this cost enhancer as a positive. “no keystrokes to remember”. If you’re switch between systems rarely enough that you forget the hot-key, maybe you didn’t need a KVM switch in the first place.

2 – The computers sense that the keyboard and mouse have been removed. So when you switch you get a couple of bee-boop noises from the computer you’re switching from, indicating that it’s lost a couple of USB connections, along with the boo-beep noises from the system you’re connecting two, indicating that a couple of USB devices were just attached.

3 – and probably related to #2, switching is slow. It’s slow for the video to change and then you have to wait for the system you switched to to recognize that the mouse and keyboard are back.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be replacing this KVM switch with another one eventually – perhaps when linksys has one.