I drive too many hours each week, so audio content is a good thing for me. No, I’m not a proud iPod owner, but I got a Rio last year, and it works just fine. I even built a dashboard mount for it…
So where do we find good audio content? Let’s take a look.
The Linux Show is one I usually try to catch. The sound quailty isn’t the greatest, probably due to 4 or more people all talking on phones from various places, sometimes airports, or hotels, or in the deep tunnel project… Besides that, the content is good if you’re into the Linux/open-ource stuff… They’re always looking to upgrade equipment, so it should only get better.
Your Mac Life used to provide downloadable shows each week, but have stopped since they now sell these through an Audible.com subscription or individually through the iTunes Music Store. Definitely a show for Mac-geeks. Hardcore Mac-geeks, though not hardcore *nix-Geeks, as they don’t get into tech issues quite that much but tend to focus more on the Apple-as-a-lifestyle and the Mac as your ‘digital hub’ type stuff. Still, an interesting show it is. It runs about two and a half hours. Oh, if you think time-shifting is an option, you can just record the stream, which they offer free for one week after each Wednesday night broadcast. If you do this, don’t tell them about it, as it will upset them because they feel they are losing money this way. I won’t go into business models here, do what you will…
WebTalkGuys Radio Show. Ok, we’ve covered Linux, and the Mac, what about Windows? ;) Ok, it’s not a Windows show, it’s a ‘web’ show, though you can tell it’s got a slight Windows lean to it. Anyway, they do have some interesting content. The show feels almost squeaky clean though. It’s definitely got a professional feel to it, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard any sort of controversy on the show, which makes it seem a little limp compared to the others. The do tend to have good interviews, but they lose points for suggesting that Google had created Atom. (Listen to the 2-14-2005 episode, about 5 minutes into it.) They call Atom a new kind of RSS that’s not RSS. Hurm…
LugRadio is the newcomer, with just two eposides under their belt. I’m still listening to the first one, but it’s good so far and they’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. It’s done by 4 blokes in the UK. And I mean blokes! You might think it’s called “Luhg Ray-Dee-Oh” but it’s really “Loog Rah-Dy-Owe” Thick accents for sure! Besides that, it reminds me of the old Geeks in Space show, a bunch of guys sitting around discussing whatever. There really should be more of these shows. (I’d do one if I had the time, and people geographically close to me interested in such a thing.)
Besides the shows, there are also interviews.
Christopher Lydon occasionally has one that will interest me, but I almost always get good stuff from Doug Kaye at ITConversations. Doug does an awesome job of talking to interesting people. Since I can usually count on the quality of material from ITConversations, I wrote a script to parse the RSS feed with enclosures and download the newest stuff. It’s that good.
So concludes our radio notes for this time. Tune in again for more of the same! Did I miss a good show? Let me know…