Just as soon as I build my life around my little media player, things start to break.
The first problem, which has actually been sneaking up on me, has been the increasingly poor sound quality coming out of the player’s headphones. Most of the time I only had one earbud working, and even then it was pretty quiet.
So the first thing I did was put some carb-cleaner on a swab and try and clean out the audio jack. ‘Cause as my old man always said, life’s a lot easier if you have a good solvent.
As is clearly evident, the solvent got out a lot of gook:
But it had little effect on the sound quality.
So I cracked open the player and discovered that nearly all of the solder points that held the jack onto the circuit board had come loose.
A little application of solder and a hot iron, and now the MP3 player is incredibly loud.
Whatever breakage is preventing the FM receiver function from working wasn’t visible.
The next thing to break was Juice, my podcast receiver. The damn program stopped in the middle of download and then refused to startup again, even after repeated uninstalling, re-installing, and deletions. This was upsetting because I had about 70 podcasts that I was downloading on a daily basis, and they were all lost.
The open-source program Doppler Radio (beta version) proved so incredibly slow as to be unworkable. So now I’m back to jPodder, which I had tried before and abandoned, but I can’t remember why.
But at least I’m not using iTunes. What sort of an idiot uses that giant wad of spyware?
So I’m busy rebuilding my RSS empire.
One podcast I haven’t mentioned before is "The Skeptics Guide to the Universe." This is the weekly podcast from the New England Skeptical Society, essentially the Amazing Randi crowd, people who spend all their time telling people that their unproven beliefs are actually unproven beliefs. Because the hosts are working scientists, the show amounts to very intelligent people systematically brutalizing the rational fallacies of the ignorant and gullible. Listening to it, one has the same sick fascination one has while watching a jock beat up a nerd. Only in reverse.
My favorite part of the show is the science news quiz, where the co-hosts have to guess what news headline is an actual scientific discovery, and what is made-up. I have yet to get this right. The moral of the exercise is probably the difficulty in differentiating between verifiable truth and total hogwash. Or something.
There’s a series of short stories associated with the inestimable Mike Wallace, the Parsec-Award-Winning author, called Variant Frequencies(RSS). I can’t get the Variant Frequencies feed to work with jPodder, so I may have to do without for a while. This is a podcast that does well with the "tempo" function of my media player. I can speed up the pace of the audio so that it matches what would be my normal reading speed. It’s like having a pressure-hose of fiction feeding into your ear.
Matt Wallace is the brains behind the Failed City Monologues, a brilliant interpretation of the podcast novel medium. He also wrote the Latchkeepers series on the Stranger Things podcast video series. And it looks like he’s responsible for the Deck Gibson Farreach Commander series on Decoder Ring theater(RSS), which happens to be the neatest re-interpretation of classic radio space opera that I have ever heard. And it doesn’t make fun of the genre as does SVT’s Intergalactic Nemesis (sorry Jessica, that’s just the way I feel).
I learned about Matt Wallace, this genius of speculative fiction, through the Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing podcast. This is typically an hour-long show, or longer, with long, unedited phone interviews. Previously I had decided that nothing in the world was harder to listen to than unedited hour-long phone interviews, but then I discovered the "tempo" function, and the kicked-up speed makes it actually fun.
Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing has interviewed genre stalwarts such as Neil Gaiman and Patrice Sarath. In a recent episode on the Clarion workshop there was an interesting moment where Mary Anne Mohanraj discussed the Turkey City Lexicon, going so far as to quote large parts of it, refer to it by name, and say that it came out of a writing group, but she did not actually know which writing group put it together.
And then there’s Starship Sofa, a podcast that’s sometimes short fiction readings, sometimes roundtable forums discussing the short fiction, and sometimes it’s the host, a Scottish man, driving in his car and talking about his job as a water-quality administrator. Apparently you shouldn’t drink the water in Scotland because of all the "sheep dip."
