The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
I've always enjoyed listening to the radio. Mindless entertainment that you don't really need to listen to, but which sits in the back of your brain, bubbling up to the surface every now and again when something becomes interesting. I listen to anything; music, talk radio, information, or news. This is why it has always left me frustrated to live in the North. Limited by geography and population, radio stations always have been few and far between. This is why I grew to love Internet radio. I can use anything from internetradio.com through Quick Time, to Windows Media Player to find stations, and there are literally thousands of them. But one big problem with Internet radio has been time zone differences. If I pull in a live radio feed from England over the Internet it's great, but the problem is they are six or seven hours ahead of us. This means if I login after supper, it is already midnight in the UK and the best music of the day is over. If I want the top music I need to get to the net early; and things like having to work usually end up getting in the way. That is why I have quickly grown to love my latest obsession, podcasting. Podcasting has in a few short weeks become hot. Podcasting is basically like a VCR or TiVo for radio enabling you to time shift when you listen to radio programs. Similar to the RSS feeds which I wrote about several weeks ago, podcasts are MP3 files which your software automatically downloads, allowing you to listen to them on a portable player such as an iPod (hence the name, podcasting), or straight from your computer. Podcasts are basically radio broadcasts covering any topic you could want, most of them ranging in length from 15 minutes to about an hour. Most of the files are compressed into reasonable file sizes (if you have high speed net access) of approximately 12 ? 15 megabytes. Currently the market is cornered by geeks, most sites showcasing programs about technology, computers, and music; but this is rapidly changing. A website I looked at tells of Googling for podcasting several weeks ago and coming up with 5,200 hits, and trying again two days later and coming up with over 8,000! I love them. I find myself listening to podcasts while I'm getting ready for work in the morning, at lunch hour and even while I'm cooking supper, my laptop sits playing on the counter. When the programs are downloaded to my machine, I have the option of listening to them immediately, or storing them away for days if needed. I love the convenience, the fact that I can find podcasts on almost any topic I might want, get them delivered to my machine automatically, and trash them or keep them when I'm finished with them. They are very simple to use. The first thing to do is find software which will automatically download your podcasts and set them up for you to listen to. IpodderX is the most popular on the net currently, but I recommend doing a Google search first as podcasting is so new that software is hitting the web daily. Once you have downloaded the software, you just need to search for podcast feeds. These are the actual websites you will get your audio content from. Simply set up the software to download from whatever site you want and you will soon have content streaming into your machine for you to use as you want. It's worth checking out. ([email protected])
