Podcasting Has A Conference!
May 9, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
I will be speaking at the LA Podcast Expo on Friday, November 11 from 11:45am-12:45pm. With any luck I’ll be able to talk my fellow TWiTs into coming with me. I’m also planning to participate in Chris Breen’s Playlist panel from 2-3 that afternoon.
Visit the Podcast Expo web site for registration and information.
Two New TLR postings
May 7, 2005 by · 3 Comments
There are two new postings in The Laporte Report podcast:
- My regular Friday appearance with Bill Handel on KFI, Los Angeles – this week I talked about the new Palm LifeDrive.
- My regular Saturday appearance with John Donabie on CFRB, Toronto covering this week’s big stories in tech.
Subscribe to The Laporte Report podcast at feeds.feedburner.com/tlr (paste that URL into your podcast software).
Starting tomorrow this WEEK in TECH (the show formerly known as The Revenge of The Screen Savers or ROTSS) will no longer be on the TLR feed. It will have its own feed at feeds.feedburner.com/twit. Please add that URL to your podcast software, as well. For other formats and the BitTorrent feed URLs visit the new TWiT web site.
The Last ROTSS…
May 2, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
…And the first TWIT. This WEEK in TECH is up for May 1, 2005. This edition is an hour long, because we had so much good stuff.
In this episode: We come up with a new name and new URL. Patrick reviews WinHEC. John C. Dvorak visits from beyond the grave. We answer listener questions about Tiger. And Kevin picks our site of the week: http://boxedthoughts.com. Join Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, Robert Heron, and John C. Dvorak for a look at This WEEK in TECH.
Thanks and a tip of the Red Hat to Mark Blasco for the very fun TSS clone theme we end the show with. Now that we have a name, please email me your logo ideas, theme music, too, to ThisWEEKinTECH@gmail.com. I’ve registered ThisWEEKinTECH.com and TWIT.tv and we’ll be moving to that domain later in the week.
Subscribe to the podcast at http://leoville.tv/podcasts/tlr. (In future the feed will be at http://twit.tv/hi – there will also be a twit.tv/lo, aac, and vorbis – these are Coralized feeds that should work with any RSS or podcast client.). Or download from the BitTorrent feeds:
If none of the above feeds work for you, you can also download the 29MB high-quality MP3 directly from http://leoville-downloads.com/tlr/TLR20050501.mp3 – but please use this link only if you have to.
If you’d like to donate to support TWiT, click one of the buttons below…
Recurring $2/month subscription
Recurring $20/year subscription
One time donation of any amount
Subscribers will receive special access to the TWiT site, coupon codes, and other benefits as soon as we can con some companies into giving them to us.
ROTSS: TNG
April 29, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
I can’t believe the response we’ve been getting for The Return of the Bleep. The BitTorrent tracker I’ve been running for serving the torrents has logged 984,000 hits on announce.php in less than four days. I don’t know how that correlates to actual downloads, but it’s a lot. (If anyone knows how to correlate these hits to downloads, please let me know!)
We’re getting ready to unveil a name along with new feeds and a new web site. We’ve received over 2,000 entries in our contest to name the show, and I think we’ve got some good candidates. We’ll reveal the new name and new feed URLs on Sunday. The response to this is so incredible – better than anything Patrick, Kevin, and I have ever seen. It’s given us new excitement about bringing tech programming directly to you without involving mainstream media.
To that end, I’ve added a Paypal subscription button to the torrent pages. The podcast is free, and always will be, but we’d like to avoid putting advertising in it. If enough people contribute a modest amount to the show, we won’t have to and we can upgrade the production and maybe even do a video version. Who knows, we might even be able to re-grow TechTV from the ground up.
Cick the button below to pay just $2/month. That’s 50 cents a show. Your subscription will renew each month until you cancel it.
As always, thanks for your support. You’re proving that it’s possible to create quality tech shows by users for users without involving big media.
Difficulties Getting ROTSS
April 25, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
I apologize if your podcast client is having difficulty getting ROTSS. We totally overwhelmed the Coral mirrors and Coral isn’t failing gracefully. I don’t think they’ve ever seen demand quite like this.
The direct link does work however: http://leoville-downloads.com/tlr/TLR20050424.mp3 – as does the Vorbis link: http://leoville.tv/tlr/ROTSS002.ogg.
Your podcast client will get the file as soon as the flood of requests dies down. I will move the feed from Coral to bittorrent later today and for all future releases.
For those who are confused about which podcast feed to subscribe to, ROTSS is on TLR http://leoville.tv/podcasts/tlr for now. Once we get a name I’ll set up dedicated feeds. There will be four feeds, high and low quality MP3, Vorbis, and bookmarkable AAC for ipod users. I’ll give you those URLs as soon as we settle on a new name for the show.
Thanks for your patience.
The Revenge of the Bleep
April 19, 2005 by dane · Leave a Comment
It is done. The first ROTSS has been posted. Subscribe to the podcast to get it by midnight every Sunday, press the play button to the left, or download it directly.
It’s a 56kbps MP3Pro file weighing in at around 14MB. Join Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, Robert Heron, and me for 34 minutes of Skyping fun as we discuss driving in the dust, cell phones, Kevin’s new webcast, systm, and the demise of TechTV. We plan to do this weekly with a rotating cast of characters. Your input is welcome. (Anyone want to design a logo? – Update: Thanks to all of you who sent in logos. The one you see here is by Lori LeBeau-Walsh. G4 has told us that they intend to reserve rights to the name “The Screen Savers” so we’ll be considering other choices.) Theme music this week from Wayne and Wax’s CD “Boston Jerk.”
Incidentally, I’m very happy to report that another Screen Saver alumna, Megan Morrone, delivered twin boys on Friday, Huck and Milo weigh in at over seven pounds each. All are doing well, but don’t expect Megan to make an appearance on ROTSS any time soon!
UPDATE: Welcome slashdot readers. By popular demand, I’ve created Vorbis and plain MP3 versions of the show. I had hoped to upload them to OurMedia.com but it’s not working right now. For the time being I’ll host them locally. To defray bandwidth costs, please use the Coral Mirror unless it’s not working for you. I’ll do this for all future episodes. We plan to record again this Sunday and Yoshi will be joining us.
Plain MP3: Coral Mirror - Local
Ogg Vorbis: Coral Mirror - Local
Podcast Meetup
April 16, 2005 by · 39 Comments
Ross Rader is hosting a Toronto area meetup for podcasters at the Lone Star Grill this Tuesday evening. Two Californians, Eric Rice and I, will be there, too. RSVP at Ross’s blog.
Speaking of podcasts, there are two new postings on TLR:
- My weekly visit with Bill Handel, Fridays on KFI – we talk about the Harmony universal remote
- My weekly tech news summary with John Donabie this morning on CFRB
Sunday evening Kevin, Patrick, Robert Heron, and I are going to try our first Skype-based podcast. I’m calling it TROTSS – an acronym for The Revenge of The Screen Savers. If all goes well I’ll push it out on the TLR channel Monday morning.
Podcast Change
March 7, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
I‘ve been working with Michael Freedman at Coral to come up with a solution to the podcast issues some of you have been experiencing.
As you may know I use Coral to distribute the bandwidth costs for my podcasts. To quote from the Coral site:
Coral is peer-to-peer content distribution network, comprised of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers. It allows a user to run a web site that offers high performance and meets huge demand, all for the price of a $50/month cable modem.
Coral is part of the IRIS peer-to-peer network project funded by the National Science Foundation, and it’s an amazing community service.
Essentially, Coral is a distributed network of volunteer servers that cache content for web sites. When I post a new podcast I use a modified URL: http://www.leoville.tv.nyud.net:8090/airchecks/20050306-1.mp3 for example. A request for that file goes first to nyud.net over port 8090 – that’s Coral central. It will route the request to the geographically nearest Coral server. The server will check to see if it has a copy of the file. If it does not it will check with other Coral servers. If none of them have a cached copy of the file they will download it from leoville.tv and cache it for future requests. For the next 24 hours requests for that file will be served by Coral not leoville.tv.
This map of US Coral servers is from the Coral site and is, itself, Coralized.
This greatly reduces the bandwidth requirements for leoville.tv and provides users with faster servers that are closer to home. Because there are many Coral servers no one server should have to do too much work, but to protect the volunteers there is a quota system in place. When any one site, like leoville.tv, draws too much bandwidth, that server can decline the Coral request with a 403 FORBIDDEN error. We have exceeded quota with every single podcast release. In fact, Mike tells me we’re one of the top 5 Coral users.
This has caused a problem with some podcast clients. Instead of retrying later, they give up, saying the file does not exist and you’ll miss a podcast. Michael has implemented a new system that allows me to tell the Coral servers to redirect excess traffic back to leoville.tv. If I’ve saturated Coral’s bandwidth I will serve the file directly for a while. That means my bandwidth costs go up, but it doesn’t confuse podcast clients.
This system has been implemented starting with the current KFI podcast (shows from March 5 and 6). Please let me know if your podcast client has any problems with these files. You shouldn’t see any 403 errors.
Thanks for your patience. Just so you know, you’re involuntary guinea pigs in a brand new medium. But the combination of podcasting and Coral P2P makes it feasible for anyone, even with very limited bandwidth, to create programming that the whole world can download, and I think that’s tremendously exciting. You’re helping change the face of broadcasting!
PMA Second Day
February 22, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
Day two of my PMA coverage is up on DigitalCameraInfo.com.
In this one I cover the new 8-megapixel Canon Digital Rebel, the CoolPix 7900, and new cameras from Kodak and Pentax.
Live from Orlando, It’s Saturday Night
February 20, 2005 by · Leave a Comment
I’m in Orlando covering the big PMA digital photography show for digitalcamerainfo.com. I’ll be doing three video reports from the show. The first one is up now.
Please be gentle – We’re still learning about web video! (Requires Flash player.)
