Slashdot Mirror

Check out Snackboy for a good Vlog example!

Not podkeys fault vegan forgot that he actively submitted his information and asked for the service.

...'It turns out that more than year ago, I responded to an email somebody sent me about podkeyword.com, and I gave the site a visit and submitted my URL for a few listings. When I launched my show in October of 2004 I went everywhere I could to post its URL, and I quickly forgot all about my five minute visit to podkeyword.

Some bloggers have since seized on this point and claim that I am at fault for what happened. One writes:

"It looks like Erik Marcus had 'asked' for this service, in the beginning. If he never requested the keyword, there would be a problem."

The truth is, it is irrelevant how podkeyword.com obtained my show's referring URL'...

I'm taking this opportunity to invent another word, fuckingpretentiousmoronfuckpodder. Use at you leisure. On another note, Taco, where's your podcast...I seem to recall the /. crew was doing poddish stuff LONG before these fucks. Anyone recall Geeks In Space.

They did.
 
It was called Geeks in Space.

They stopped putting them out there shortly after some of the gang moved. I'll have to go back through and listen to the archives - it will be interesting to revisit what was exciting and new around that time...

My favorite tech radio shows is Technology Bytes on 90.1 KPFT in Houston, Texas.

What I really want to see is a Geeks in Space podcast. I think it's time to revive the show in some form, and Podcasting is an ideal way.

  Podcasting is just another hip-to-be-cool term coined by some luminary metrosexual in the blogosphere.

Thank you. Beautifully worded.

What the article title, especially combined with the whole issue of the word "Podcast", reminds me of is this: I can't be the only one who remembers that back in ~1999-2000, the Slashdot guys had their own internet "radio" show, GEEKS in SPACE ...?

They would record themselves rambling for a half-hour or so about whatever had been big on Slashdot that week, then post an MP3 of that recording. Sure sounds like a "Podcast" to me, though I'm sure it wasn't the first either, despite having been years before the iPod first came out.

Okay, color me clueless on this one. What's the big deal about podcasting? As far as I can tell, it's just making audio files available via an RSS feed. Is that really so life-changing? Couldn't this have been done years ago without the RSS, just by listing the files as links on a web page or even by dropping them in an ftp directory somewhere? Heck, I even remember a little something put out back before the turn of the millenium, definitely predating the iPod and almost predating RSS. There's nothing new here, except the name and the tangential link to Apple via the iPod. So really, what's all the fuss about?

Whats the difference between a podcast and a regular shoutcast/icecast/etc stream?

By thinking about streaming, you're on the wrong tack. Take a step back in time to when we just used to upload MP3s of our shows - an example being Slashdot's own Geeks in Space talkshow back in the late 90s. The 'new' thing about podcasting is that they tie those MP3 files to an RSS stream, so you can download them automatically.

There's nothing propriatory about it either - they're just MP3 files that you can listen to on your PC or any other brand of portable audio player, not just the iPod.

Once you get past the pretentiousness of most podcasters (they're even worse than bloggers, and that's saying something), it's actually quite convenient. Even though there's nothing special about the technology, its popularity has led to a much better selection of downloadable talkshows compared to a couple of years ago. I personally recommend LUG Radio, but there are thousands to choose from.

Sounds like it might be cool. But not as cool as Slashdot Radio was.

Geeks in Space, but alas the crew hasn't done anything for quite some time.

Yes, talk radio for geeks. That's never been done before.

Have to give it a listen.

We haven't seen that around here for far too long...

..there were Geeks In Space. * Note: just a little humor. Not a flame or whatever. *

I followed a geek radio show, but then they stopped making any more.

--
Evan

My Solution

There has been a spate of fish hacking (what else do you do with a Big Mouth Billy Bass after the five-minute period it can hold your interest?)

Recently I exhibited my seven-bass animatronic work called School of Fish Pain at the DC Museum of Contemporary Art. I used Audacity to edit the audio clips the fish say. The fish cry out and whap their tails in pain. It hurts to be dry.

Just thinking out loud here... A Slashdot Channel would actually be pretty informative, covering lots of different aspects. Maybe even have guest Slashdoters invited to cover stories not covered already on the front page.

If you want to have this idea stepped on; if you want to ask yourself "WTF was I THINKING!?!?!"; if your desire for self respect has just vanished...

Go and listen to the last episode of geeks in space.

Well there used to be the slashdot radio show geeks in space but I don't think they make that anymore. And to be completely honest, it wasn't all that great. Primarily because anything you'd get from the show, you could just as easily grab from the frontpage in a couple of minutes instead of listening for 30. It was a nice thought though and I had hoped it would be better.

That would have come in handy for the chat with Iraq I organized between a coffeehouse near Washington, DC, and the Baghdad Internet Cafe.

I just heard this on the radio, Geeks in Space is dropping OGG support in favor of closed and scummy Real Networks format. Even if you didn't like OGG and had no clue what the name represented, you can still appreciate the audacity of this action.

Truly a Slashdot icon.

I organized a chat between the College Perk coffeehouse near the University of Maryland and the Baghdad Internet Cafe. The Cafe has about 50 computers, and during the chat they had six people in the Cafe for an Internet training course.

They reported being able to buy cheap computers ("200 USD FOR P4"), but power was an issue - it goes down a lot - fortunately the Cafe has a generator.

I plan to do another chat with them in February.

It is important to keep in mind that during the mid-70's, Baghdad was practially a "European" city in terms of infrastructure, based on high oil prices and Saddam's desire to create a showplace for the glory of his regime. Things didn't really go downhill structurally there until the war with Iran, then Gulf War I, the sacntions, etc.

Also, a lot of businesses now depend on email for communications to and from Iraq, as the phone lines are often less than dependable.

The Baghadad Internet Cafe opened August 1. It is my feeling that it would not have been possible to have an open public Internet chat like the one we had before operation Iraqi Freedom without some kind of government political official there to monitor things. I'll have to ask next time.

When I was chatting with the Baghdad Internet Cafe, there was at least one woman present at the Cafe who was a "student in computer college."

The College Perk coffeehouse in College Park, MD, has free wireless.

Another place in the area told me "we don't have wireless because I don't want people coming in and just using the Net and not buying anything."

OK, well, guess where I buy my coffee now?

Also at College Perk, I organized a Chat with the Baghdad Internet Cafe that brought in many customers.

Hwuuuhhhh? /Jon Stewart

On Saturday, I had an Internet chat with Iraq, between a coffeehouse just outside of Washington, DC, and the Baghdad Internet Cafe.

One of their questions went like this:

baghdadic: LATEEF ASKS U HOW MUCH THE LATIST MODEL OF COMPUTER IN US ?
techartvideo: U can get good computer for 350 dollars, very good for 3000 dollars.
baghdadic: IT IS EXPENSIVE
techartvideo: How much for a computer in Baghdad?
baghdadic: 200 USD FOR P4 ( ASIAN ORIGIN ) TO 1300USD FOR LAP TOP

Which goes to show that the world is pretty much the same everywhere, especially for geeks!

The Jennishow was the best thing about the whole Jennican phenomenon. Viewer mail was great fun, the new car, the cooking show, and going to meet her family was just surreal. It made Jenni "real" in a way that the cam never did. Lots of good stuff was on "The Sync" in those days, but nothing came close to The Jennishow.

Good job, thanks!

Check out how to make ball lightning in your microwave at /etc video show titled "Fun with High Voltage Electrical Discharges".

Geeks in Space - not exactly "Knowledge by Ear", but what could beat "slashdot by ear"? :)

at /etc (fun with liquid hydrogen) in Realplayer format. The same guys that host the Geeks In Space shows.

screw JonKatz...I want my slashdot radio!!!!

MAE EAST isn't really just a "place" any more, it is more of a concept, and exists in several places. MAE EAST is operated now by MCI.

I remember seeing it when it was a small room in an underground parking garage. Net techs left their cans of Mountain Dew in the corner.

Today MAE EAST ATM service is avalable in Vienna, Reston, and Ashburn. It has ceased to really be one room, one floor, or even just in one building.

Near the original MAE EAST is also a major AboveNet (now MFN) collocation facility. That is where Geeks in Space: Slashdot Radio used to be served from.

Episode #36: We're Really Dancing!
RealAudio 8.5 kbps | MP3 Instant Play 24 kbps
Download MP3 24 kbps

Rob, Jeff, CowboyNeal and Nate are back in effect! Hear exciting updates on Tivo and Napster plus tales of a trip to Tokyo. You can also join in the discussion about Geeks in Space.
Interview with Cmdr Taco at Linux World Expo

Find out what's new with Slashdot this year, what kind of personal computer Taco uses, and what's hot with Linux at the show.
Ground Control #2
RealAudio 8.5 kbps | MP3 Instant Play 24 kbps
Download MP3 24 kbps

Geeks in Space listeners talk about DMCA, Cyber-Selfish TechnoLibertarianism, viruses, and much more!
Find out how to submit your own audio clip.

"Geeks in Space" is a nearly-weekly audio show hosted by Rob "Commander Taco" Malda, Jeff "Hemos" Bates, Nate "Mix Master" Oostendorp and "CowboyNeal" Pater of Slashdot about "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". Drawing from the stories and discussions on the Slashdot site, the dynamic hosts discuss Linux, open-source, and cool technology. Have suggestions or comments?
Mail to: geeksinspace@thesync.com

In a related vein, I'm working on Angry Fish. In addition to the first fish that cries out in pain, I am working on a school of seven Linux-controlled fish, which will soon be decrying their position in life.

Hense, the section has effectively been retired. I suppose it could be repurposed, but I somehow doubt that will happen. Besides, a new section called "music" would make more sense.

Is it possible that this whole "blogging" craze has been the fastest flash-in-the-pan to hit the technology world yet? Dare I dream that the even the uber-geeks and posers have already come to the conclusion that "hey, you know what? I'm not really that exciting, and nobody cares what I had for breakfast today"?

If that's what you think Blogs are, you're reading the wrong ones. Nice strawman.

Decent blogs are either link centric, or commentary by someone who's smart. There are a number of crappy ones, but so what.

I think video blogs are a bad idea, because it eliminates some of the advantages of the text and static image based web; you can browse, skim, and follow links from text, and you have mroe flexibility in how you parcel out your attention (close read all at once, reading here and there while doing something else, etc)

I think there's *some* room for this kind of format though; anyone remember the very funny daily (and now defunct) Internet show "Computer Stew"? ZD Net pulled the plug alas, but they had some funny stuff...and the got started with less than $3000 of consumer grade hardware.

(Hmm, looks you can still see episodes -- I should see if they still have their music video tribute to Notepad.exe ....

Just remember that internet radio can to terribly, terribly wrong.

The Libertarians' flawed belief that a Corporation Can Do No Wrong is what got us into this situation in the first place."

I don't see the problem.

I can purchase 100 channels of digital cable television if I wish. I could get another hundred from satellite. I receive about 20 broadcast TV stations, several of which are in high-definition DTV. I can get hundreds of channels of digital satellite radio. I have $40/month DSL with over 600 kbps downlink. I could get 1Mbps cable modem connectivity if I wanted. Some nights, I play first-person-shooters with people all over the country.

I have Internet and a webcam on my cellphone. I canceled my slow CDPD service for 1xRTT. I chose from five different cell carriers. I can ever power up my shortwave and listen to hundreds of stations on there.

I can order all kind of DVDs through Netflix, and never have to go down the street to Blockbuster. There are three new movie theaters in town that specialize in independent and foreing films, all with stadium seating!

Should I get sick of television, I can always make my own and broadcast it on the Net.

Yes, I'm sick of Clear Channel as well, but evidently the majority of listeners like hearing pop...so I'm thinking about going XM. Sorry about change, that's life, but it wasn't like there was a Hindi or techno radio station on FM here anyway! I listen to Shoutcast at home as it is...and did I mention that FM stations will soon have digital sound using iBOC?

I am inundated by far more media than I could ever use. Never in my life have I felt more capable of getting the information I need or want, or being entertained should I need to.

20 years ago I had no cable, DSL, cellphone, digital TV, or Internet access! My media life revolved around a handful of TV networks, a few radio stations, and a few movie studios.

Why all the whining?

My wife uses Sprint PCS Vision to upload images for her webcam site. The "killer app" part of this is the form factor of a webcam in a cellphone, which you would carry anyway, and actually has a lot of battery time. Check out the images in her gallery to imagine how this might be used, especially by teenagers at parties!

She used to carry around a stylus-based computer in a purse-like fashion using CDPD, which was easier to use (just turn on and it snapped pictures every few minutes), but suffered from low battery time (a few hours) and was just too heavy and bulky.

Of course, using Web browsers on Sprint PCS Vision phones sucks. I haven't checked out a Treo on the network yet, but I know that my Palm V with AT&T CDPD (Omnisky) had much better web browsers that could handle frames and such.

We went Sprint PCS Vision because we needed a cellphone anyway, and paying for unlimited Verizon 1xRTT $100/month was just too much. With Sprint we pay the same we would just for voice service, and possibly $10/month more once the introductory period is over.

FWIW, I have a system that talks hostnames hitting my web site.

My wife has used a mobile webcam I built from a tablet computer, a USB microcam, using CDPD communications.

One of the biggest problems we found was battery power, always a problems with computers, but enhanced due to the power sucked by the webcam (lots of pixels to move to the computer at high bandwidth, even if they are just to be compressed using JPEG), and the power sucked by CDPD transmission. Of course, the cam was sending out an image every 5 minutes or so, and the camera was "always on."

I think the naysayers on the camera wireless phones are totally wrong. I don't expect everyone to purchase a camera phone, but I think a lot of people (especially young people and several business niches) will. It's really fun!

The uses of a camera phone do not intersect much with a high-quality megapixel digital camera used for "archival quality" pictures. PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...a bunch of friends at a bar (which will totally change Mardi Gras!), to show a potential purchase while shopping, to show a map with directions, to see if you like the night club, or a "hey I'm in Vegas, look" call while travelling.

My wife has used a mobile webcam I built from a tablet computer, a USB microcam, using CDPD communications.

One of the biggest problems we found was battery power, always a problems with computers, but enhanced due to the power sucked by the webcam (lots of pixels to move to the computer at high bandwidth, even if they are just to be compressed using JPEG), and the power sucked by CDPD transmission. Of course, the cam was sending out an image every 5 minutes or so, and the camera was "always on."

I think the naysayers on the camera wireless phones are totally wrong. I don't expect everyone to purchase a camera phone, but I think a lot of people (especially young people and several business niches) will. It's really fun!

The uses of a camera phone do not intersect much with a high-quality megapixel digital camera used for "archival quality" pictures. PhoneCams will be used much more for quick little shots where quality matters little...a bunch of friends at a bar (which will totally change Mardi Gras!), to show a potential purchase while shopping, to show a map with directions, to see if you like the night club, or a "hey I'm in Vegas, look" call while travelling.

see here for someone who was doing it back in the day(of dotcom's)
and see here for some software to use to convert a video stream to any number of formats for streaming.

The biggest problem is of course bandwidth, and coming up with shows to put on...maybe you could pick up some of the stuff from thesync--it looks like they aren't doing much with it anymore.
The set up for streaming is pretty simple--let me know if you need some help, etc...I have set some of this stuff up before.

Already there is the Virtual Sex Machine.

You can see a video of it about 2/3rds of the way down the page here. Scary stuff!

I saw 'GIS' and thought "Hurrah! New Geeks in Space! Woo!".

Then read the whole thing.

*sigh*

Moving back?

Does that mean the return of the oh-so-popular Geeks in Space ?

This would be a perfect way to listen to geeks in space!

It doesn't really matter anyway; at the rate they put out Geeks in Space, they'd never finish the dubs. ^_^

I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.

This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.

The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.

The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)

Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...

Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)

Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.

Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.

(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)

I completed high school just over a year ago in Victoria, the other major Australian state.

This is nothing new in Victoria. New South Wales is just catching up.

The IT teacher used to gloat about being "god" and how she could (and did) read any e-mail, and about the filters setup so anything with swearing would be blocked and redirected to her. High school age kids throw words like "shit" and "fuck" around like nothing, so this was a little unfair, especially considering it wasn't documented until a year later.

The web access was worse. They had this state-wide thing called EduCache. It was just a great big filter, allowing only officially checked websites in. It was at the school's discression to activate it; you can guess our school had it on. (I also won't mention how this made the web virtually useless for most students, and I spent half a year teaching people how to change their proxy settings to bypass it. But I digress.)

Students could submit sites to this cache. I requested many tech sites, from here at Slashdot, to Be Inc, to Enlightenment, just to name the ones I remember. I also tried to add The Sync, just for Geeks in Space. It was rejected. Probably something to do with JenniCam...

Look, these schools don't care about privacy. Eventually, they made students sign sheets saying they wouldn't do bad things. Bad things like look up porn or submit anything anonymously to the net. By this stage, I had 12 months left at the school, and refused to sign. Didn't use a school computer for a year (well, not with my own account at least...)

Oh, and before you think I was some rebel kid hacking the school network; I wasn't. I was one of 3 students that sat in on the IT committee meetings. They were all just too busy bickering about their different areas of education to do anything constructive.

Sorry, ranting. Probably bad grammar from the rush. I just don't seen this as a surprise.

(I'll leave the 'My IT teacher called a mouse a GUI' and the I got in trouble for opening a command prompt in NT, because I was "accessing DOS"' rants for another day.)

They already offer a CDPD service that is 28.8, but it is unlimited usage for $40 a month. In addition, the CDPD service goes ANYWHERE Verizon does

I'm a big user of Verizon CDPD. 28.8kbps throughput is a significant overstatement. 14kbps is good for CDPD, 9.6kbps is what you get in general. That said, my wife uses it for her webcam, and it generally gets the job done. I've used CDPD on the Amtrak from DC to NYC. Both Verizon and AT&T (carrier for Palm-based Omnisky) have good coverage along the tracks with a few holes.

Of course, 144kbps sounds much better, but I can't imagine it being priced reasonably.