Peter Rukavina's Podcast

The DVR — or Digital Video Recorder — is sometimes known by its most popular manisfestation, the Tivo.  Indeed to “Tivo” something has become a verb. You can think of a DVR as a Video Cassette Recorder, but with a hard drive instead of video tapes used for recording. More importantly, however, is that DVRs are also computers, albeit ones with a features limited to TV recording and controlled by a remote rather than a keyboard.  And because they’re computers, they can be a lot more powerful and easier to use that VCRs. I don’t think anyone ever got user interface on the VCR to the point where it was universally usable.  And it’s not that there weren’t attempts — the crazy “VCR Plus” system comes to mind. With DVRs, things are getting pretty close to “anyone can use this.”  The printed TV Guide is gone, replaced by up to two weeks of electronic TV guide, navigated on the TV screen with a remote.  Want to record something?  Press the “RECORD” button.  That’s it. DVRs can also be used to record entire series

A bonus episode of The 3LA Podcast tonight wherein I take a stab at explaining why the airport code for Charlottetown is YYG.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast: ZIP, a brief tour through the US ZIP code.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast pulls apart RSS. In two minutes and fifteen seconds.

A sure sign that the procrastination gremlins are in full form: another episode of The 3LA Podcast. Today’s subject: PMT. While I tipped my hat to friend Ann (who has nothing to be ashamed about for not knowing how to use RSS in a sentence) there’s something else at work here: perhaps like you, I get lots of ideas in the shower, or on the way to work, or when I’m falling to sleep at night. Usually these ideas involve creating some sort of grand thing — a newspaper, a hovering rocket ship, a website for father with one child. And usually they go nowhere, as real life overtakes (and I realize that parts for hovering rocket ships would probably be too expensive anyway). I’m pretty sure that if I carried out all of my crazy shower schemes I would explode or be homeless (although I might be homeless and happy). But it occured to me that the effect of so many ideas not carried out was beginning to be a downer. So I decided to take just one — it happened, perhaps at random, to be exposition on three-letter words —

My friend Ann wrote the other day to ask me about RSS. I wrote her back a little description of what RSS is. This morning she wrote back to thank me, and added: The latent (or maybe not so) teacher in you is a side you should cultivate. That’s a nice set of gloves to throw down, and inspired me to whip up a brand new podcast: The 3LA Podcast. The idea is that in each episode I’ll decrypt a new “three letter acronym.” Like RSS. Or GPS. In two minutes or less. Episode one concerns the three-letter acronym TLA. You can grab the podcast feed, and learn more, over on 3la.ca.

Recorded on the Magdalen Islands during a family vacation in 2006. We both had stuffy noses.

My Nokia N70 has a built-in voice recorder that lets me tape 60 seconds of audio (the one minute limit is an annoying but sometimes useful feature). Over the past month I’ve pulled out the phone at various soundful times and recorded a minute here, a minute there. I’ve pasted all of the clips together, and you can listen to the entire 11 minutes, 11 seconds in one go. Audio is relatively low quality, there are only a couple of bona fide podcast-like bits and otherwise you should just treat it as a sort of raw audio montage of euro-audio. Among other things, you’ll here lots of buskers, a ride on an antique trolley, roller coasters at LegoLand, an ambulance siren, the bells outside our window in Copenhagen that rang every morning at 8:00 a.m., a minute inside a Porto coffee shop, and a little tour of a water wheel.

Recorded in our car at the old Rainbow Valley site in Cavendish.

On Monday night Catherine decided to go to the movies, leaving Oliver and I to our own devices. Unable to watch Frosty The Snowman another time, and without sufficient energy to properly engage the Little People, of course we decided to record a podcast. This is the result. We’re both particularly fond of the opening theme. There’s a big jump in volume about 1/3 of the way in — I think I hit the wrong slider in Sound Studio during post-production. Oliver hits his stride with the telling of the apple picking story.

I reached the zenith of my erstwhile career as a “technology commentator” in 1995. The previous summer I had produced a summer series for the local Island Morning show called “A User’s Guide to the Future.” It was all my friend Ann Thurlow’s fault. And, also, I suspect, due to Ann’s patronage, I found myself in the Morningside rolodex filed under “technology.” And so it came to be that I found myself standing beside a van in the field outside the Robertson Library at the University of PEI one May morning in 1995. The inimitable Barry Vessey was at the controls in the van and, through the magic of radio, I was hooked up with Peter Gzowski, Kevin Kelly, and Gerri Sinclair talking about, as Gzowski put it, “a swing of the pendulum.” We were gathered together as a part of a series called “The New World” to talk about the impact of the “new technology” on all of us. Thanks to my father’s compulsive documentary instincts, I’ve come into possession of a recording of the panel. Oh how young I sound — almost chipmu

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Session Five this afternoon over lunch. The focus of this episode was on Zap Your PRAM 3, the next incarnation of the Zap Your PRAM conference we organized in the fall of 2003. Zap3 is running February 16 to 19, 2006 in Cavendish, PEI; details forthcoming shortly on the new Zap3site. There is, alas, an annoying bit of electrical interference that runs throughout the episode — it’s most noticeable at the beginning. I tried various methods for filtering it out, but they all made Dan, Steven and I sound like drunken fish. Here’s a rundown of what you’ll hear: 00:00 — The intro and extro stingers are from Royalty Free Music. 00:15 — We start off with a somewhat dorky and stilted introduction to Zap Your PRAM (early-episode dorkitude seems to stike us every time). We get better as we go along.  Video and Audio of Zap Your PRAM One 19:45 — The “people standing in from of webcams” phenomenon. The Island Cam (Dan stood here). The YankeeCam. 21:15 

We recorded Live From the Formosa Tea House: Episode 4 this afternoon over lunch. At the Formosa Tea House. Live. We recorded in the coveted back room of the Formosa, with a very simple technical setup. We all sat around Dan James’ APEX435 microphone, which ran into Steven Garrity’s Behringer Eurotrack UB802 mixer. We took the output of the mixer and plugged it into my iMic, which was plugged into a USB port on my laptop. I did the recording in Sound Studio, saved as an AIFF file, then imported the file into iTunes and converted to an MP3 (24 kbps mono, VBR medium quality). This episode runs one and a half hours. It didn’t feel “too long” when we were recording it, so we’ve decided to release it completely unedited to maintain the “three guys having lunch” feel. It may feel too long to listen to. Things we discuss: Our technical setup. Recent travels by Dan to Peru and Peter to France and upcoming travel by Steven to London and Paris (for his honeymoon). [starts 2:42] London bombings, “terrorists are p

I grabbed the audio of the interview about Plazes that aired this afternoon on CBC Radio’s Mainstreet this afternoon. It runs just over 10 minutes. Thanks to Angela Walker for a good interview and producer and technician Eva O’Hanley for running the board.

In this week’s episode, Stephen Southall reviews Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the new Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie. After receiving some useful comments about the first Southall at the Movies, I did some experimenting with this one: I edited. The original tape was 34 minutes long; the version here is just over 12 minutes. I’m an apprentice digital audio editor, so the cut-down isn’t as smooth as it could be, and there were several instances where I was talking over Stephen so it was hard to make a cut where I would have liked. There are some other rough edges: I just up and appear half way through out of nowhere (I tried to but myself out, but it just didn’t work). I go back and forth on the trailer clips. And we did sort of ramble on out. But I think this one is better then the last. And I think we can get a lot better if we keep at it. Again, comments are welcome.

Evidently all computing innovations that we thought were invented by young technoturks in the 1980s actually sprang to being, formed almost as fully as we use them today, back in the late 1960s. So we learned by watching Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Demo tonight at reboot. Mice, hypertext, outliners, keyword searching, regular expressions, it’s all there. If you ever have a chance to see it do: you will be amazed. I’ve attached a brief audio excerpt from tonight’s showing, captured on my iBook in the hall.

Fifty-three seconds of the main hall at reboot, just before things get going. I left the headphones at home, so I’ve no idea whether there’s any actual sound here. Let me know.

A heavy early morning: woke up at 4:30 a.m., had an iChat with Catherine, who was just getting in, and slowly, slowly fell back to sleep, only yo awake with a shudder at 7:30. World only slowly coming into focus. Here’s 1:22 of sound recorded on the outdoor plaza at reboot, where I’ve just arrived.

Okay, so I wasn’t actually on a bike when I recorded this, but I can’t break the casting concatenation habit. More rambling from Copenhagen: borrowing a bike, visiting the Danish Architecture Centre, chicken salad sandwich, getting lost.

One final podcast before I finally get a good night’s sleep: the tale of how my hotel room door wouldn’t lock, and how I waited 4 hours to get it fixed. Good night.