Podcasts at the Speed of Thought

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/podcasts-at-the-speed-of-thought-1be9fc21cbc

Ever since I started my podcast I've been listening to more and more podcasts. Being that most of them are weekly and each episode is an hour to two hours long, it's a big time commitment.

Luckily BeyondPod recently came out with an update that now supports multiple playback speeds. I didn't think much of it until I tried it out and realized just how much of a time saver it is. And the best thing is that even though I couldn't comprehend what people were saying at 2x speed at first, I am slowly making my way up. I started at 1.3x and am now up to 1.45x.

Of course speeding up a podcast works better for some shows. I have found that At the Nexus and Control Structure are quite easy to understand (and I bet my show would be too) because we're not professional podcasters and we don't talk very fast. Same goes for the PC Gamer Podcast. The Besties talk a bit faster, and The Nerdist is extremely fast (although it does depend on the guest.) I was also recently introduced to Welcome to Night Vale and I haven't decided if I want to listen to it at increased speed because a huge part of the humor of that show depends on his monotone delivery and timing.

The weirdest part of listening at 1.4x speed is the theme song that typically happens at the beginning of a podcast. In the case of Control Structure, where they have a musical transition between sections of the show and occassionaly music playing under their voices, it gets even weirder.

Overall I really like the ability to speed up podcasts because it is a more efficient use of my time and it makes me feel more like a pro.

A New Era of Journalism

As anyone who will listen to me for more than five seconds knows, I have a podcast. Inspired by +Ryan Rampersad and +Matthew Petschl's show At The Nexus +Ian Decker and I hatched the idea to start a weekly video game show. And so Eight Bit was born.

We recorded our first episode almost exactly six months ago, and so far we haven't missed a week. We've also managed to have guests on the show for most of the episodes. All of the guests to date have been friends of ours, and we usually brought them on to review games that neither of us had played.

Imagine our surprise when we get this email:

Hi! I was told I should get in touch with you about potentially talking about our new project, Net Gain: Corporate Espionage.
If you'd like to check up on it, you can see our popular Kickstarter here: http://kck.st/ZK6OR3

Thank you!

~John Gosling

 My initial reaction was "There is no way this is real. No way a real developer heard about us. Did one of our listeners tell them about us? No way."
But lo, the Kickstarter looks legitimate, and his email address is in the @levelzerogames.com domain. They even have a few games that they have already made! So I had to come to terms with the fact that a real Indy developer wanted to be on our show. Now how did he hear about us?

I started snooping around the Kickstarter page, and after determining that the game sounds worth it, I backed it. Then I looked at the list of other backers. One profile picture jumped out at me. +Chris Thompson was one of the backers! Chris is one of the hosts of Control Structure, the Computer Science-themed show on the network.

Long story short, Chris had contacted John about being on Control Structure, and John found out about our show. Since ours is the gaming show he wants to be on our show to talk about the game, and he will also be on Control Structure to talk about some other topic.

I am super excited about this opportunity, and I am still a little flabbergasted that it just fell into our lap the way it did. John is scheduled to appear on our show on March 17th, so look for that episode on the website right after St. Patrick's Day.

New Desktop: Sasha!

Note: this blog has been migrated to Medium, with the articles here available to preserve permalinks Please see this post at https://medium.com/@ianrbuck/new-desktop-sasha-4c868bfd3ef8

For the last two years the only computer I had was my laptop, a Sony VAIO VPCF1. I call it Vera. She has served me well, but lately she has started to overheat very quickly while playing games like Max Payne 3 and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood. This is likely a combination of the hot summer air, her aging Geforce 425M, and the fact that she has never had the best cooling system as it was.

So this summer I started keeping my eyes peeled for deals on desktop parts. Last week the final parts came, and I spent a couple of hours with my friend Sean Stockholm building Sasha in my dorm's TV lounge. I also did a live-stream of the whole thing to test out Google+'s streaming system. You can watch the video here, but I understand if you don't want to.

Here is a complete list of the parts and peripherals that I got (in the order that I bought them in) with rounded prices.

• 16GB RAM by G.Skill for $85
• 27" 3D Acer monitor for $550
• Rosewill R5 case for $60
• 650W Corsair power supply for $90
• i5-3570K Intel CPU for $200
• Razer Death Adder 5 button mouse for $50
• 1TB Seagate HDD $68 (x2)
• Cooler Master CPU cooler for $30
• 128GB Samsung SSD for $75
• Logitech webcam for $70
• Razer Lycosa keyboard for $70
• Asus P8Z77-V LK motherboard for $150
• Zotac AMP! Geforce 670 for $450
• Total cost: $1941.08

This sounds expensive until you realize that a large portion of that cost was the monitor alone, and the tower itself was under $1300. So it would be very easy to build something similar for about $1500, but without the 3D monitor (more on 3D gaming in another post).

Being that I name all of my electronics after weapons, I have named her Sasha after the Heavy Weapons Guy's mini gun in Team Fortress. For now I have installed the release preview of Windows 8. I am liking it enough to actually get the final version when it comes out on October 26th, especially since it is only going to be $40. And for all you nay-sayers out there who think that Windows 8 is going to be crap, don't worry about it. It is very easy to use it just like Windows 7. The only major difference is that you have the start screen instead of the start menu, and I hardly ever go there because all of my programs are pinned to the taskbar. And Windows 8 brings quite a few features that are very useful, such as Storage Spaces (lets me put files like my music collection, game files, etc in a virtual space that is duplicated across as many drives as I wish) and the ability to open ISOs in Explorer. You may have noticed that I didn't buy any sort of optical drive because I don't believe in them. Seriously, when was the last time you had to install something from a CD? Even if I ever have to do that, it isn't hard to stick the disc into my laptop, make an ISO file in Google Drive, and then open it in Sasha.

There are a few quirks that I have noticed so far. When I am gaming and I have the fans turned all the way up, I hear this annoying little squeaking coming from somewhere in the tower. I still need to look into that. Also, during last weekend's podcast the computer stopped receiving sound from my headset's mic. It was set as the default device and everything, and I know there is nothing wrong with the headset because it was working with my laptop. Since then it has started working again, and I have no idea what was going on.

To wrap up, I am definitely happy with my new computing device, and I hope that I have future-proofed her enough to not have to spend too much on parts for the next 4-5 years.

My Podcast!

I am really excited to announce that Ian Decker and I have officially started our show about gaming news, reviews, and whatever else we feel like talking about. It is called Eight Bit, and you can find it over at the-nexus.tv.

We had a ton of fun recording it, and we are looking forward to next week. Oh, and we are always looking for guests, so if you would like to be on the show, just let me know.