Epicanis' HPR Follies

I’m still recording stuff: here’s proof! Yes, I know, it’s been far too long. Never mind my excuses, but I’m trying to ramp up and do this more often. It’ll probably help if I stop trying to make every episode a “full and complete” work on its particular topic, because that seems to always end up taking me far too long to research, write up, research some more, discover something…

This is the “enhanced” podcast for HPR1989 – in addition to being in the high-quality yet lower-bandwidth .opus format, the file linked herein contains proper Chapter markings in the proper metadata format along with a full complement of additional metadata, including an embedded copy of the show-notes. Therefore, if you download this file, you’ll have high-quality audio and all of the useful supplementary material all gathered together without having to…

I did it. It’s too late. Nobody can stop me now. I recorded a thing. No, really, and not only that, but I uploaded it to Hacker Public Radio! I’m pretty sure everyone assumed I’d been abducted by ravenous space-alien humanitarians (i.e. like “vegetarians”, but for humans instead of vegetables) but that’s not what’s kept me from getting recordings done at all. Now that the ordinary audio is uploaded into…

I started up a “grab-bag” episode covering three sets of topics and realized each one had plenty of material to be its own episode, so now I’m working on 3 episodes… An episode on “Things to do with discarded/obsolete Android phones” (part 1: stuff that you can do by just installing and running free apps without root access or custom firmware) has plenty of fun in it, and will end…

This is actually a show-concept I started playing with intermittently half a decade ago (before I became a Hacker Public Radio contributor), where I would find a scientific paper that was either over-hyped in the news OR (preferably) was about such an ordinary piece of useful scientific work that nobody’s University PR Department bothered to turn it into a breathless press release, and then record a “science news” show episode…

(Now that it’s come out in the official Hacker Public Radio feed, here’s the even-more-awesome opus version. If you want the Ogg Vorbis, Speex, or crappy-old-mp3 versions, check out the official Hacker Public Radio page instead) “Today’s episode discusses (and encourages) the use of metadata tags in audio files. Most of the episode is spent on id3v2.3 metadata for mp3 files) and vorbiscomments (metadata for opus, ogg vorbis, flac, and…

Finally, after taking too long again (but still maintaining the trend of reducing the time between episodes…), just a few minutes ago I finished tweaking and uploading my most recent topic: “Audio Metadata in Ogg, MP3, and others“. It’s about 45 minutes long, covering mostly id3v2.3 (MP3 metadata) and vorbiscomments (virtually-everyone-else-that-matters metadata), but I also talk a little about matroska/webm metadata, mp4 metadata, wav, and “windows media”. This one took…

Still working on things – version 1.1 of the Opus codec reference software is due any day now, so I’m waiting to see the final word on what’s new in it besides the general “even better quality”. Busy season is upon us here at the Asylum for the Sufficiently Nerdy, so it’s gotten somewhat more difficult to find large chunks of time to carefully research, assemble information, and record it…

I’m going to cover the Opus codec and posting legally-free audio on the web as the next episode. Ingress is just now starting to get some changes that should make it substantially more interesting (and it was pretty interesting to begin with, I think!), but not only do I want some time to actually try out the changes, I think the subject of the Opus codec is getting relatively more…

My third HPR contribution is now up at Hacker Public Radio. Now, if you’re interested in Google’s new location-based game, Ingress, this should hopefully be a reasonable, minimally-lame and hopefully unstupid introduction to the topic. Let me know what you think – I’ve got a followup episode to do, so now’s your chance to throw in suggestions to make it better. Thanks! Meanwhile, assuming you’re using modern web software, you…