macintosh

Podcasting is now far, far easier and cheaper even than I’d imagined — even for complex productions. I’ve been experimenting. Here’s a very quick summary of what I’ve learned so far about doing this on a Mac, my platform of choice.

Now if your podcast is just you talking then you can take a much simpler approach. Read no further.

However this investigation was inspired by the “live recording” of the 2 Web Crew. Having an audience contributing comments and questions via text chat created an interesting dynamic — similar to talkback radio but less formal. I wanted to explore further.

The technical challenge is combining all of the audio elements before the audio or video stream is piped up to Ustream or wherever. There’s probably quite a few ways to do this, but my starting-point was The UStream Tool Kit — which also covers Windows.

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I just found this while cleaning up the office: the start-up disc for Apple’s Hard Disk 20 from 1985.

This was the first hard drive for the then-new Macintosh. My beloved Fat Mac — “Fat” because it came with 512k RAM, not the original 128K — had two 800kB 400kB 3.5-inch floppies, one of which held the operating system

So this drive extended my data storage from under 1MB half a megabyte to a gargantuan 20MB. I was in heaven!

Later that year, a legal settlement from a traffic accident provided the funds for the other cool tool for geeks: the original Apple LaserWriter printer. I remember being extremely chuffed because it was on special: marked down from the list price of AUD$10k to a mere $7.7k

Yes, seven thousand dollars! In 1985 money!

This was the desktop publishing revolution!

Everyone — simple everyone — wanted to look at the glorious 300dpi print quality. And because I’d gotten hold of JustText, a code-based tool for professional typesetting, I could pass raw PostScript commands through to the printer and do complex layouts. TAFE offered me a job on the spot — which I declined.

It all seems so passé now…

This disc looks in pretty good condition. I wonder if it still works? Anyone got the hardware?

Some days (like today) I get thoroughly annoyed with society’s continual states of denial. Yes, “states” plural. This BBC news story about the “first” Trojan Horse for the Mac is wrong in four important ways — and it perpetuates another “myth of denial”.

[T]he first serious threat to Mac users has been observed “in the wild”.

It’s a Trojan Horse, a piece of code that pretends to do one thing but actually compromises your computer.

This one spreads through online video sites…

That puts my son right in the middle of the vulnerable population because he likes to watch video clips via sites like YouTube and Flixster…

The Trojan sits behind an online video and when you try to play it you get a message from Quicktime telling you to get a new codec, and if you follow the link you’ll be sent to a site that hosts the malicious software.

Click “ok” and enter your systems administrator’s password and it will be installed on your computer with full system access after which you are, to use the jargon, “pwned”, or scuppered.

And you don’t even get to see the video you were after….

At the moment the fake codec is being spread via porn sites, but it will quickly spread to more mainstream sites, and that’s when it will get dangerous…

Here’s why this article is wrong…

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