The New Road

Great night of podcasting

I went into the studio for another round of O'Reilly podcast content with Danny last night. It was awesome. I had a great conversation with the author of Astronomy Hacks and Landon Noll about getting into astronomy.

The segment with Landon and Robert about astronomy may have some more legs. I talked with Landon after and both Danny and I thought he had a great presence and really made astronomy accessible. So we could envision doing something about astronomy hardware, software and what is coming up in the night sky on a regular basis.

Then I talked gadgets with Brian Jepson and we had a lot of fun with that. One thing he brought up was this little $130 PSP style device which is totally open source and has games written for it and can play video. I thought that was really, really cool.

I also had a chat with the author of Retro Gaming Hacks about his book and about playing the older console games. He had some great points about how the advent of 3D games abandoned a lot of poeple who really enjoyed gaming. And how it turned gaming from a family activity into a something more solitary. I remember playing Sonic with Lori and Micheal as a group activity and now those days are gone. Lori, who was an avid gamer, gets physically ill looking at the 3D graphics and is stuck with card games now. I'd love to see some legitamtely fun and new 2D games come out for the PSP and the major consoles.

Yeah, it was a great night. I used to be really scared about recording and interviewing, but now, it's so easy and fun. I was telling the producer at O'Reilly this morning that I can't wait to do the next set.

Speaking of which, it looks like I might get an interview with Brooke Gladstone, the host of NPR's "On The Media", about podcasting and it's effect on the media and our public consciousness. She was very helpful to me early on with research for Podcast Hacks. She is not only a great host and extremely funny, but she is a skilled editor and producer who can make digital editing tools sing. So that will be a fascinating interview.

Anyway, open forum, if you have any ideas for generally techy type topics that you would like to see covered let me know. The O'Reilly name gets me in a lot of doors. On my own list I have these:

• Ruby on rails
• The next steps in computer languages after Java
• Digital audio and video production tricks
• Fighting spam
• Phishing and identity theft
• Smart homes
• Hacking your car, and maybe even import tuning
• The programming behind computer graphics in movies (maybe with somebody from Pixar or Lucas)
• The state of social networking
• Something on both Windows PDAs and PalmOS PDAs
• Composing your own music for podcasts

Anyway, these are just a few ideas. I can't keep my eyes on everything so if you guys have some more ideas let me know.