Congratulations on your new iPod, part three

Last year at this time, I was in your shoes, unpacking my new iPod, burning the other CDs I owned that I didn’t yet have in iTunes (my brother suggesting I do that back at Thanksgiving should have been a hint to me that I was getting an iPod for Christmas, but it somehow wasn’t) and wondering what else I was going to do with this thing.

I started downloading podcasts a few months later, which makes me a relatively early adopter (I did it before iTunes could get podcasts), but not a bleeding edge ubergeek. (And a good thing, too. All that was available early on were podcasts about podcasting or about Linux or Apples. Zzzzzzzz.) My choices have waxed and waned, but the roll-your-own-radio-station notion of podcasting has always clicked with me.

Here’s my current list of podcasts. Whether you use Juice or iTunes, just copy these addresses into your podcasting software and add them to your subscriptions.

• APM’s Marketplace – A weekly highlights show of the great public radio on business, nationally and internationally.
• Bill Handel – Highlights from the Los Angeles talk show host’s KFI morning radio show. This is the one feed I have trouble with, and I seem to miss about half of the podcasts as a result.
• Channel Frederator – A great collection of independent cartoon shorts. If you own a video iPod, you owe it to yourself to get this one.
• Dave Cusick’s Post Modern Rock Show – It’s already become more important to me, musically, than my local radio station (if KROQ in Los Angeles starts podcasting, that might change, but probably not). A great eclectic round-up of new music each week. It’s not always stuff I love, but it’s always stuff that’s interesting.
• Inside the Net – A fairly geeky podcast, this features two professional broadcasters interviewing industry leaders about new Web software, such as Firefox 1.5, Flock and other programs.
• KCRW’s Film Reviews – The first of many shows from LA’s amazingly cool NPR station. It turns out that NPR doesn’t have to be dry and self-satisfied. It can be really hip, fun and self-satisfied. This is a strong set of weekly film reviews by Joe Morgenstern, the Pulitzer-prize winning film reviewer for the Wall Street Journal.
• KCRW’s Martini Shot – Funny weekly reports from television writer Rob Long.
• KCRW’s Minding the Media – Not the best media-on-the-media report, but short and often incisive.
• KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic – Interviews and live performances from the legendary music show. Rights issues prevent the rest of the music from being podcast, but you can hear it streaming at KCRW.org.
• KCRW’s Music Exchange – KCRW and the BBC talk about breaking bands on both sides of the Atlantic.
• KCRW’s The Business – Forget Entertainment Tonight. This is the best show about the entertainment industry. It even has a cool theme song.
• KCRW’s The Treatment – Great one-on-one interviews with entertainment industry figures. Much more interesting than the typical interview circuit subjects.
• KEXP Presents Music That Matters – A music show from a northwest NPR station.
• KFI Tech Guy – The commercial-free version of Leo Laporte’s syndicated tech help call-in show.
• Liz Phair Podcast – She hasn’t done a new episode of Uplands in a while, but it mixes music, interviews with people she meets and her reading her short fiction. Come on, you knew I’d have this, didn’t you?
• NPR: Books – The week’s NPR stories regarding books.
• NPR: Health & Science – A weekly round-up of NPR health and science stories.
• NPR: Most E-Mailed Stories – Ah, the democracy of the “E-Mail this Page” link. This tends to assemble a great 30 minute news podcast each day, although you sometimes end up capturing more of the NPR listeners’ zeitgeist than you might want. And, guys, stop recommending that awful Slate guy’s smarmy movie reviews round-up. Ugh.
• NPR: Movies – You can probably guess. It’s also amusing because the intro’s reader seems amazed that NPR would get interviews with movie industry folks, which suggests that NPR has people working for them who have never listened to their shows.
• NPR: Music – Stories about music, and sometimes some performances.
• NPR: Open Mic Music – Every weekday, a performance by an unsigned artist. Typically very, very good.
• NPR: Technology – A relatively un-nerdy round-up of the week’s tech stories.
• NPR: World Cafe Words & Music – Highlights from the weekly music show.
• Official Disneyland Podcast – Originally created by an obsessive SoCal fan, this is a surprisingly interesting show. (I discovered once I moved to Southern California that I really, really like Disneyland.)
• On the Media – An excellent media-on-the-media show. Great criticism, a great examination of the business and the calling.
• PRI’s Studio360 – Highlights from the weekly interview and performance show.
• PRI’s The World – Geo Quiz – Inexplicably, they’re only giving us one of these a week, but it’s the most fun part of the great daily international news show. Hopefully PRI will put more of The World online as a podcast at some point. It’s not like it’s a commercial broadcast anyway.
• science friday podcast – All of the segments from the great science feature on Talk of the Nation. Interestingly, each of the segments on Science Friday is a separate podcast, allowing you to listen to just what you want to.
• SuicideGirls Radio – The pierced-and-tattooed pin-up girls (I couldn’t make this stuff up) do a surprisingly warm and sweet call-in talk show once a week on an LA rock station.
• this WEEK in TECH – A highly geeky round-table by professional broadcasters and pundits on the latest tech news, but a great show.
• Tiki Bar TV – A very silly sitcom and drink recipe show by a group of folks having way too much fun. Another must-subscribe show for video iPod owners.
• Various and Sundry DVDs – Augie gets snarky about the week’s new DVD releases. He’s one of the first podcasters, and is a great example of how podcasting has opened up radio to the masses like the World Wide Web theoretically opened up the print media to the masses.

Congratulations on your new iPod, part two

Whoops! I really was lazy yesterday. I spent my vacation in an inexpensive way: Battling my way up the underworld ladder and battling the living nightmares of an ancient druid. But as for your new iPod …

It was the word of the year, and if the jury’s still out as to whether podcasting will eventually become a major way radio and television-style content is released (NPR certainly seems to think it will be), there’s still a world full of great free content out there for you to have automagically delivered to your computer and, thus, to synch up with your iPod.

In other words, podcasting is comparable to what your TiVo does for you. Content that you want, including an increasing amount of professional radio content, is automatically pulled onto your hard drive by special podcasting software. You can then listen to it on your computer, or synch it up with your iPod or other MP3 player.

iTunes now includes podcasting capabilities, and it’s probably the easiest way to get podcasts on your computer: Just find a podcast in the iTunes directory, find it on the net and plug in the download address or find the podcast’s Web page and click the appropriate “add to iTunes” button, and you’re done. New podcasts will arrive on your computer as they’re released.

I don’t like the iTunes software myself. It keeps podcasts segregated, both in iTunes and on my iPod, and lets me do fewer things with podcasts than I might want. (I was getting podcasts before iTunes added the capability, and the fact that I couldn’t smoothly integrate the content together seemed silly to me.) Instead, I use Juice, which is an insanely easy to use cross-platform podcasting program. I have it drop the files in my iTunes directory under My Music under the My Documents folder. Once there, it’s integrated with the other iTunes files.

Once Juice downloads a podcast, I manually set the podcast’s genre to “Podcast,” if it’s one of the few that doesn’t automatically set it that way. I then have a “smart playlist” in iTunes that grabs all of the MP3 files genre, that have a play count equal to zero. This lets me use my iTunes/iPod just like a radio: I play it, it vanishes from the playlist, and I don’t have to worry about listening to stuff twice when casually enjoying it. But the files are still there on my iPod (you can find them under Genre, Podcast) if I still want to listen to something again. I have a lot of music shows that I keep indefinitely, for instance.

Next up, my current podcast subscriptions.

2005 Year in Review: Great stories you didn’t read

Columbia Journalism Review Daily has a list of five great stories you didn’t read, celebrating great journalism that either didn’t get national play or was overshadowed by other events.

The coverage includes:

1. An in-depth examination of the chaos caused by Hurricane Rita.
2. The Memphis Waltz sting
3. The truth about global warming.
4. The stories of wounded soldiers.
5. A harrowing follow-up to a traffic accident in Florida.

Definitely worth checking out.

Congratulations on your new iPod, part one

Well, it’s that time of year, where good little boys and girls have gotten their first iPods. The first thing you’ll want to do is immediately order an iSkin — you’d be amazed at how easily the metal finish and screen of an iPod can get scratched.

Next, you’ll want some content for it. Wired has a nice article on free quality content that’s not pornographic. (It turns out there’s lots of free porn on the Internet, including for the iPod. Who knew?)

It’s been a year since I got my iPod from my family (most prescient joke ever: “What’s going on? Do I have cancer or something?”), and I use mine daily.

Tomorrow: What’s a podcast, how do I get them, and what’s good? (Yeah, I’m being lazy. I’m on my first almost-week vacation since I got this job.)

• Even the president loves his iPod, although it seems like he might be borrowing it from one of his girls. (Well, given the playlist, maybe not. But “Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle?”)

The Brothers Grimm

At their best, Terry Gilliam’s films have a magical quality that transports the viewer to another world, one they may not entirely understand, but which has its own crazy through-the-looking-glass sort of logic. Time Bandits, the Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the Fisher King all have a fever-dream quality to them, where the viewer is swept along through strange, even sometimes nonsensical paths.

The Brothers Grimm could have used more of this. There are nods in that direction, but ultimately, the film feels like a Hollywood action adventure. It’s not quite as bloodless as Van Helsing, but it’s cut from the same cloth. To get a film like this from Terry Gilliam is almost shocking.

There’s still plenty of whimsy and strangeness in the film — the Italian torturer who shadows the Brothers Grimm or the involved 19th century special effects equipment used to create many of their tricks — but it all feels very much like the film any other Hollywood creator would make. Maybe that’s what Gilliam had to do for his career, after Don Quixote went off the rails as badly as it did. Even so, this film feels like an opportunity wasted.

The world can use more of Gilliam’s madness and whimsy. The Brothers Grimm, although it can be fun, doesn’t answer much of that need.

A recommended rental for fans of Terry Gilliam’s work or adult fairy tale fans.