the stuff in my head

After many years of service, my old Altec Lansing computer speakers finally gave up the ghost and it was time to find a replacement. I purchased the previous set on a recommendation for an audio engineer friend, but now I was on my own.

I wasn’t just looking for a good deal, because not just any speaker system would do. As I edit audio on a pretty regular basis, I need a good but not phenomenal set of speakers: too good and I’ll be hearing things most people never hear causing me to over compress or over tweak a file; not good enough, and I won’t enjoy listening to my music collection on them.

I may have erred a bit on the side of “too good” but I went with the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX system. They were on sale at Best Buy and I had a gift card I’d been meaning to use so I went for it.

I did zero online research, read no reviews and didn’t even price check them against online stores. I lucked out — I didn’t pay too much more than I would have online. They are a great sounding set of speakers, are black (like my monitor and computer), and they have a headphone jack (a feature I very much missed).

In response to DJ Chuang’s request, I hacked together a screen scraper/RSS podcast maker script.

Basically it grabs the HTML from a page, finds the MP3 links and creates a RSS feed out of them. Some of the code is borrowed from various sources on the net (thanks Google).

WARNING: You could really piss off the recipient of the traffic this can generate. I take no responsibility for what you do with this, it’s a proof of concept, use it at your own risk.

I’m offering up the source code for someone else to take it and run with it, I don’t have the time of energy to improve it beyond where it is.

Grab the source file (zipped PHP file).

I’m not sure you need the condenser mic (a dynamic mic would be cheaper and not require AC power) but a good kit nonetheless.

We’ve spent a lot of time looking for high-quality gear that is also compact and affordable. This is our currently suggested podcasting kit. Note that you don’t need a computer in order to record your voice. The mic plugs into the preamp. The preamp plugs into the recording device’s line input, and the headphones plug into the recording device’s headphone jack. Only the preamp requires AC power. The recording device uses a single AA battery which lasts a long time.

Podcasting Kit

It’s not the lappy I really wanted and it ain’t no PowerBook, but it’s probably the best buy for me (in many ways).

Toshiba Tecra A3

I can’t wait until Monday!

Update: I’ll be keeping my desktop around (not selling it as planned) as the Tecra can’t replace it as my main workstation. It’s a great compliment though. I’ve got another 512mb of RAM from Crucial on the way. Someday I may throw a 7200 RPM HDD in there.

Unlimited bandwidth, a permanent archive, and automatic feed generation… all at a great price. LibSyn is doing PodCast hosting right.

This would be perfect for churches who have limited web space and want to archive messages for more than a few months and not worry if a particular message gets too popular. Bluer is lucky enough that Limited Web Group donates plenty of disk space and bandwidth for our needs (thanks Trav!).

Between this and DirCaster, I’m about ready to give up on my efforts (PHP script) to make podcasting easier for Churches- it appears to already have been done!

I just stumbled upon this great hosting service for podcasts- mega bandwidth and storage, not so mega cost.

A Small Orange – Web Hosting – ASOextreme