August 2009 Archives

2009-08-22 22:52:24

An Example From Last.fm

This is what I get from Last.fm's "Paste Your Taste" feature:

I'm into podcast, soundtrack, dance, jazz and electronic, including:
Bear McCreary, t.A.T.u., "Weird Al" Yankovic, Daft Punk, Missy Higgins, Rammstein, Neil Patrick Harris, Spectrum, Edun, sloshy, Cascada, Dead or Alive, Basshunter, Henry Mancini, Brainbug, They Might Be Giants, Enur, Dan Ackerman, Ammonia, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, Darude, Emmanuel Top, Despina Vandi, Alison Brown, Demande Feat Lesley Scott, Armin van Buuren, Benny Benassi, Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, Metallica, Strong Bad, Elvis Presley, Stacie Orrico, Madagascar 5, Glenn Beck, Opera Trance featuring Emma Shapplin, Gloria Estefan, Henry Mancini & Ramon Rivera, Limozeen, Astralasia, DW-WORLD.DE | Deutsche Welle, The Chieftains, Frankie Yankovic, Original Broadway Cast, Nathan Fillion, Default, Linkin Park, Jonathan Coulton, Rick Astley, Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day & Nathan Fillion, The Muses.
Check out my music taste: [REDACTED]


When I looked at the Library Society of the World group on Last.fm, I noticed that my music compatibility with group members is either very low or non-existent. Can differing tastes in music indicate much? That is something I do not know.

Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-21 21:32:40

Git and Collaborative Programming

I eventually want to move to a more structured collaboration tool for gathering content for programs. This is not something where there is a pre-existing standard. While the TWiT Network handles material over e-mail between hosts and Leo, programs we produce for the LISNews Netcast Network need something more than that.

One tool that intrigues me in my searching is Git. Such is a version control tool originated by Linus Torvalds. It may not be the best solution for what I am thinking of having. It is the closest to target that I have located, though.

Some links about Git:

Git home page
Easy Git
Git by example
Git Magic


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-20 13:27:49

Change In Leaving Messages

Calling to leave a message for Erie Looking Productions or any program it produces like LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast or Tech for Techies is easy! Just click on the widget below for Google Voice to connect you:


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-19 21:49:02

Data Transports

The cost of moving data over broadband seems to be rather high in northeast Ohio's rural areas. This can be a problem when a program like LISTen: An LISNews.org Podcast wants to seek content submissions. A shift to physical carriers of digital content, though, removes some of the cost woes.

As to the matter of cost, it seems to be most cost-effective to just throw a CD in a #0 bubble mailer and send it using the United States Postal service. While FedEx and UPS both provide shipping options, both would be only feasible if you had money to burn. Unless it is burning material on the level of Deepthroat, it should not be necessary to deal with FedEx or UPS.

There is a shipping address available to send things to the eastern operations on The Farm. That address is:

2348 Dewey Road
Ashtabula, OH 44004-9656
United States of America

Segments submitted should be within 5-10 minutes. To ensure favorable handling, a heads-up warning that something is coming should be sent to erielookingproductions@gmail.com which will then be re-rerouted as appropriate. Ideally, discussion and coordination prior to a guest submitting material should take place via e-mail. Encrypted mail should use PGP key DC5A625B and the sending party must have a public key on file at pgp.mit.edu or else their message will be unreadable.

Submissions become the property of Erie Looking Productions. Keeping it simple, direct, and compelling is the best guidance as to what is sought.


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-18 22:19:15

An Explanation

What follows was posted to blip.tv earlier as part of LISTen: An LISNews.org Vodcast:


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-17 11:11:54

ELP at South By Southwest

It appears that a proposed panel from Erie Looking Productions has made it into the voting process for South By Southwest Interactive 2010. The solo panel is filed under "Blogging, Community / Online Community, Journalism 2.0, Other / Out There". It is not purely-related to library science as it deals more with knowledge ecology issues raised by the Iran incident earlier this year.

To look at the proposal and vote on it, visit the SxSW picker. Other library-related panels are discussed here.


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-16 23:37:20

LISNews Summer Series Almost Finished

The LISNews Summer Series is beginning its penultimate week this week. M. L. Jacobsen will be contributing essays this week. Next week will see wrap-up essays from Blake Carver.

The LISNews Summer Series has been a project facilitated by Erie Looking Productions since May.


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-14 22:19:19

Broadband Issues And More

Ah, the joys of rural broadband. Time Warner Cable's RoadRunner service gives us an extremely low upload speed at The Farm. It might actually be possible to upload a podcast to LISNews faster using a 56k modem.

For now compression is going to be harder than listeners are used to as of late. The file size cap on the Drupal end of things is twenty megabytes. To ensure an upload does not time out it may be necessary to keep files under ten megabytes. While this does not mean a shift to the harsh encoding settings of 11.025 kHz mono with an 8 kbps sample rate, it does mean a change.

Is there a way around this? Unfortunately, there is not such yet. Switching to dial-up networking would make the situation worse. While satellite Internet service is in use in some parts of Ashtabula County such is expensive yet restricted. Spending one dollar per megabyte with a cap of five hundred megabytes per month is just not possible as there are no greenbacks behind the budget but instead only moths. The only mobile broadband provider with consistent coverage of The Farm is Verizon as we have learned experientially that iPhones utterly fail here. While Verizon's mobile broadband solution would solve the problem the issue arises that there happens to be no funding available to cover such an expense for LISTen.

Eventual solutions that may have to be considered might well include file transfer via UUCP and a dial-up modem to a remote server that can be remotely accessed over an SSH session either tunneling X11 or using a text-based browser. Theoretically a shell account could also be used for this as an upload through a Lynx session to LISNews would be possible. There are some providers out there. Unfortunately there is insufficient data on-hand as to this which means further investigation would be required prior to potential use.

In the midst of operating the farm, we have yet to carry out a Skype trial. TeamSpeak seems functional when used in conjunction with World of Warcraft but that may not necessarily be indicative of overall infrastructure possibilities. The fallback all along to Skype was to shift to AOL Instant Messenger voice chat but that has not been tested either. Until that is resolved the only way an interview is going to happen is if somebody is in studio. With Erie International Airport within easy driving distance such merely becomes a matter of initiative and cost. Cleveland Hopkins International Airport would also be doable. Their respective short codes are ERI and CLE.

No submissions have been received yet via mail. Folks are probably shocked at that. Simply put, physical media remains the easiest way to get large data files into rural areas. Ashtabula County most assuredly does not have the same quality of service in terms of Internet access that Cleveland or New York City might have. The number to call for leaving voicemail, which we can download as MP3 files thanks to Google Voice, is 702-714-0397. While we previously had foreign numbers via Skype, financial pressures caused those services to be cancelled.

There is still plenty of work to be done and there remains much to be investigated. New challenges arise from operating in a rural area. Hopefully they will be mitigated soon.


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-09 20:19:10

Links for LISTen 81

Here are the links for the episode of LISTen to be posted in less than four hours:

Profile America transcript on the Smithsonian Institution
Bloomberg Report on Unemployment Figures Release Friday
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Release Bloomberg Reported On
Internet Engineering Task Force RFC 976: UUCP
Wizzy Digital Courier
Offline Mirror Options Relative To Wikipedia
Additional Option For Mirroring Wikipedia In Bandwidth-Impaired Settings Where Collaborators Exist
Gnash
Low-Bandwidth Feed of This Week in Tech
LNN Experimental low-bandwidth feed
Bashpodder
The Cited Terms of Service From the BBC as to Podcasts They Release
BBC Podcasting Portal
Diggnation
NIH on Collaboration With Wikimedia


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-08 14:07:50

Content Pre-Release From LISTen 81

Here is the original scripting of the western engineer's part that will air in LISTen #81 on Monday:

TECH FOR TECHIES – MJK

Hello Friends! It has been a while but I have a new Tech for Techies segment for you. When we put LISTen on hiatus roughly a month ago, operations in Nevada could not continue as it was set up. LISTen has moved to a split where Stephen will be east of the Mississippi River producing in Ohio. By the time this episode is released I will have returned to Southern Nevada and will be able to contribute content from there as I feel so moved. With the move there was limited space for what could be brought back east. Several bulky items were sold or donated off. At present we are running the Behringer mixer with input from the microphone and the MacBook to a cassette deck to record to. The transfers are from the cassette deck through the mixer to the MacBook for editing and compression for the net. Bandwidth is more limited in rural Ohio, so the use of Skype will be limited. The tape deck is only temporary till we can get the recording computer back up and running. Every effort is being made to get LISTen back up on line.

Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-06 00:52:34

The New Rig (Cross Post)

The move back to Ashtabula has been an interesting one. This is the current general computing rig in play:

Desktop One

The desktop is a PowerMac G4 (Bondi Blue, even!) that is presently running Ubuntu 9.04. It was fairly difficult to get up and running. Few Linux distributions play nicely with PowerPC chips so selection was a trial-and-error matter. A nice side effect, though, is that it does not appear Ubuntu has had to load any restricted drivers so far.

This is the recording rig:

The microphone

This is greatly scaled back from operations in Nevada. The edges of production may be slightly rough for now. This is what happens in perilous economic times like this where finances of even John Q. Public are questionable.

And here is one of our mascots, Purrzy:

Barn Cat

If you click on any picture above you'll be whisked away to Flickr to view larger sizes. We're not quite there yet in restoring operations for Erie Looking Productions but we will surmount those obstacles soon.


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link

2009-08-01 15:47:10

SitRep--After Crossing The Continent

It has been a busy week for Erie Looking Productions in establishing the Ohio-based facilities in the Ashtabula County community of Sheffield Township. At present ELP is not fully operational. Audio hardware is not set up to record anything. Video hardware remains mostly in mothballs. Something may or may not post Monday to LISNews as an interim measure.

While unpacking and reassembly continues, the following blast from the past is presented for your enjoyment


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link