Back in college, I used to DJ for KSCR, USC’s student run radio station. I’ve got a bunch of old cassette of my “work”. Now, with the PlusDeck, I could actually install a tape deck in a free 5.25″ drive bay of my home computer. But for $150, I think I’d rather just plug my old tape deck from the garage into the sound card.

So I’m playing around with podcasting. The new version of dasBlog supports RSS enclosures for local binaries and I’m thinking of adding support for remote binaries. (I’m not sure my friend who hosts this blog for me would appreciate the bandwidth spike from adding downloads of media files. Of course, that assumes people would listen). So far, I’m just listening. My friend Mike does his Manic Minute and I guess Daily Source Code is the defacto standard podcast. This will be easier when I get my new AUX input installed in my car.

Listening to 30 minute podcasts like DSC on my Nomad have me longing for WMP’s variable speed feature. I listen to podcasts primarily on my Nomad – the combination of WMP 10 AutoSync, Doppler Radio and Sean’s podcast playlists makes syncing down to my player effortless. But listening to Adam Curry ramble on about podcast commercialization for 45 minutes doesn’t fit into my communte. However, listening to Adam Curry sped up 1.4x would make a 45 minute show end in just over 30 minutes. But alas, the Nomad doesn’t have that feature. Does any player support that? Or does it take more proccessing power than these things are carrying around?

Note to MSTV Foundation team – variable speed support would also be a great feature for the DVR. I wouldn’t watch 24 sped up, but I might watch the Daily Show that way.

Update: I neglected to “give props” to my boss Norman for convincing me to look at this whole podcasting thing in the first place. Given how little spare time I have these days, I’m not sure that I needed yet another hobby. On the other hand, not following your boss’s suggestions or giving him props is never good for the career! 😄

I just got my hands on a Nomad Zen Micro. That makes four Nomad’s so far – I also have a IIc, Zen Xtra, and a MuVo NX. While I like my other Nomads, the Micro blows them all away.

First off, it’s tiny. It may only be 5GB compared to the Zen Xtra’s 40GB, but it’s also around a third the size. The touch pad is a little funky to get used to, but it sure looks nice. And unlike the Xtra, it pulls power from the USB connector. It doesn’t even have a separate power connector – the AC adapter that it comes with actually plugs into the mini USB slot. Cool

Haven’t had it long enough to talk about battery life or the interface, though the interface at first blush seems much better than the Zen Xtra. For example, if you’re listening to a song you can jump to that artist in the library. I’ve wished for that feature many times with the Zen Xtra.

Of course, the first thing I did was flash the device to the new 2.1 firmware. The 2.x firmware adds support for Plays for Sure subscription services like Napster To Go. And I signed up for my 14 day trial on Napster about 10 seconds after I updated the firmware. I’ve downloaded about 1GB of music from Napster – I figure that’s a good start.

(Note to Creative – the fact that I got a Zen Micro does not let you off the hook for updating the firmware of the Zen Xtra. I expect to be able to use that with Napster To Go as soon as possible.)

I recently had to repave my main machine. Among other things I installed MSN Premium which I use to manage my hotmail and DevHawk emails. However, this time I installed the Outlook Connector for MSN, which enables you to use Outlook 2002 or later to manage your hotmail account. Calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, everything. Very very cool. Now, there’s no need to install the MSN Premium client at all…or is there?

The coolest feature of the Outlook Connector is that it delivers all of my personal hotmail to a totally different top level folder inside Outlook. Does anyone know how to do that for POP3 mailboxes? I tried using Outlook to manage my DevHawk email, but then all that mail gets mingled together with my work email. I want the exact same experience for my DevHawk email inside Outlook as I get for my hotmail. However, it appears that while you can have multiple PSTs, you have to designate one as the new mail delivery location default for all accounts. I.e. it doesn’t appear that you can configure this on a per-account basis. I’m guessing the Outlook Connector is overriding this for my hotmail.

Anyone have any ideas on how to deliver email from two different accounts to two different locations? (Other than the obvious “use rules” – I had issues with that approach.)

If you’re using the MSN Deskbar, you might want to pick up Gibson Research’s Wizmo. Wizmo is a command line tool that provides a grab-bag of tools. Personally, I use it for the shutdown commands. I’ve mapped several of them to Deskbar shortcut, particularly “shutdown” and “shutdown!”. The exclamation point invokes the “damit” variation that overrides applications and/or device drivers that refuse to shutdown. I know a repave is in the near future when I’m find myself using shutdown! on a regular basis.

I’m surprised Wizmo didn’t make Scott’s Ultimate Power Tools list.