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[16:15] What a T.W.A.T.
If you haven't heard of it yet, Today With A Tech aka T.W.A.T. Radio is a community media-cast and is, to quote the website:
...a hardcore tech daily internet radio show that has multiple hosts, guests and topics. There are 1000’s of internet radio shows that talk about what the hosts had for breakfast. This one is going to be HARDCORE TECH...
I really like it because of the sheer variety of topics being discussed. I've listened to some obvious audiophiles talking about setting up a recording studio, an interesting tour of the Boston Telephone System by a phreak (who better to run such a tour), how to design and build a softball launcher, cracking SAM files and more. The quality varies considerably (one guy actually recorded his by yelling into his headphones after plugging them into his MIC jack) but I've picked up a few interesting tidbits none-the-less.
The way it works is that people (I'm looking at you here) do up a show based on whatever they know something about. There's a lower limit of five minutes and an upper limit of "How long can you hold peoples attention for". A lot of people from the tech media-casting scene have pitched in, probably because they are already above the bar in terms of recording equipment and having what it takes to produce a listenable show.
So anyway, T.W.A.T. went dark in February after a successful two month run - ostensibly to produce some backup episodes and update the website. I freaked out a bit because I've seen three promising shows of a tech nature like this die because the guys making them didn't understand just how much work was behind doing a daily show. Droops and co have long history of this kind of thing but I freaked out anyway and as the last show to air was a request for content I offered to put a show together. What I wasn't expecting was the e-mail coming back saying "Cool, you're on in two weeks".
Well, I've been silent for the last couple of weeks because I've been pretty busy at work and in my spare time I've been busy researching for what I'd intended to do - basically a rundown of handy Windows command line tools to keep you safe from the nasty GUIs. This has been a reasonably successful endeavour and I've managed to write a 40 page discussion of tools and their usage with some sexy text-based screenshots.
I suspect the more astute amongst you have spotted the main flaw in my scheme, namely: CLI tools are REALLY hard to talk about with no visual references and I spent two weeks writing a huge article (yeah, with screenshots) that is going to be completely impossible to transform into audio.
I got down to trying to record this Sunday using Audacity and a free Skype microphone I collected from Liverpool Street station as a handout. Once I hit the hour mark at around page 4 I realised that I was in trouble. So, I sat down and re-wrote my treatise to try and mangle it into a 15 minute presentation, retaining all of the commands and just hinting at their functionality. Then I started recording again at about 2300. I was about three-quarters of the way through the content and about 38 minutes into the recording when my Beta version of Audacity politely informed me that some bastard had flogged it's memory. And then it blinked out of existence.
My first thought was "Well, that's Beta software for you", closely followed by "Gee, I really wish I'd saved that at some stage". Yes, that's right. I was on such a roll that I neglected to shut-up and save it at any stage. What a dick.
So, it's the day before I'm meant to hand this thing over and despite overwhelming ineptitude, I've managed to record it. My main problem now is that, compared to what I had intended to produce, I've got some smashed up and highly questionable material (vetted by a man half asleep you'll recall) recorded at high speed with no quality control. Yay. As I type it's busy MP3ifying itself back home and I WILL hand it over because I committed myself to a deadline and I'm going to meet the damn thing. I'll clean up the original article and add that as a link from the show so that if anyone actually listens to all 50 minutes of the audio and manages to pick up anything that I'm talking about they may be able to track it back to the article and find some understandable examples.
I guess that on the bright side, it's been an educational experience for me. My two day crash course on Audacity has been quite interesting (that's a real slick piece of software and I think it would run really well on a machine that had a little more than 300Mb of RAM). I've also learned that people who produce all the media that I glibly download and listen to put in a SHEDLOAD of work to produce interesting and listenable content. I will never hack on a "crappy" show again, I swear. Finally, I've picked up more than a few new tools and tips and found some really great websites whilst trying to provide a quality piece of information.
For better or worse, I'm a real T.W.A.T.
[Posted at 17:22 13-03-2006]
UPDATE: It occured to me on the way home that it might be a better idea to split my one mangled show into multiple short 'n sweet listenable shows. Hopefully this will also give me a break and let me get the quality back up to where I'd like it. I've pieced together a makeshift Episode 82 and if it's not too awful (volume seems to be really bad) then I'll see if I can make a go of it on the next one!
[Posted at 00:15 14-03-2006]
[10:13] I Want To Safely Remove My USB Device
If Windows Explorer happens to "abnormally exit" it generally takes all the other explorer processes with it, including the one controlling the desktop and taskbar. When this happens you lose a certain number of tray icons that hooked in when they started up, one of which is the little "Safely Remove Device" icon that you're meant to use to remove USB devices so that they can flush everything to disk properly and all that kind of jazz. If yours goes missing and you need to get it back, you can do like this:
%windir%\system32\RUNDLL32 shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll