Audio books: Spoken word entertainment

I have been a fan of podcasts for a little over 3 years now and follow roughly a dozen with some form of regularity. What I have discovered through listening to podcasts is that I am a fan of spoken word entertainment. The biggest advantage of entertainment you can listen to is that you can do something else while listening. Typically, I listen to my podcasts while commuting or while cleaning up at home.

Over time, a thirst for a greater variety of this type of entertainment began to grow. Eventually, I signed up for Audible, a subscription-based service that has over 40,000 titles of spoken word entertainment, including audio books.

Now, I love the Audible service and still maintain an account, but I found that the monthly subscriptions were adding up. Due to this fact, I began to seek a free alternative to the monthly subscription option.

The first service I discovered was Podiobooks, a free service that serves up audio books in podcast form. Podiobooks features a collection of books from both new, as well as published authors. What makes this service especially nice is that you can configure how often a book chapter is "sent" to your podcast client, anywhere from daily to monthly.

Then I discovered Project Gutenberg for audio books. According to Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg "is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works." LibriVox, AudioBooksForFree, and LiteralSystems have contributed to Project Gutenberg and also have their own collection of audio books.

On Audible you can find audio books, many of which can be found in print form at your local bookstores, and a great variety of other spoken word entertainment including radio dramas. Over at Podiobooks, you can find audio books from new and upcoming authors. At Project Gutenberg you will find books from the public domain.

My hopes for the iPhone SDK: Nine things they didn't address

In an earlier post, Ten things I hope the new iPhone SDK will help my iPhone do, I identified several items I was hoping that the iPhone SDK would either resolve or address. I can say with confidence, that Apple will address one of the items from my list.

The one item that Apple positively addressed was the Typeahead Search for Dialing option. Now, a user will be able to type to search through a list of contacts instead being required to "flick" through the list.

The other items on my list may be a bit more specialized and, therefore, not addressed. But the two which stand out most in my mind as items which might be slipped into the next release of the iPhone OS are Copy and Paste and Lock.

It is possible that the Copy and Paste functionality will be included in the new software for the iPhone and just not be publicized. To announce it would be an admission that the phone was lacking a vital component.

We have seen Steve Jobs gloss over new/missing features in a product before, specifically with the Apple mouse. A computer only needs one mouse, right? Well, when the Apple Mighty Mouse was introduced, there was still only one button. However, you could change a preference setting and take advantage of several conveniently placed sensors to make your Mighty Mouse mimic two-button mouse behavior from -- get this -- a mouse with only one button.

Until the iPhone update comes out July 11th, I will hold out hope that I will be able to copy and paste. And, who knows, maybe a few of the other things I hoped for will show up too.

What is this RSS stuff anyway?

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication." You can think of it as a way of making the content on a web page accessible to people via other means.

If you visit a site that uses RSS, you could use a special program (an "RSS Reader") on your computer that goes out to the web automatically and periodically to check for anything new on that site. If anything new is found, then it shows up in the RSS reader in much the same way as an email message arrives in your inbox. Through the RSS reader, you can read the website's content and, in many cases, you can click on the title of the article you are reading to go directly to that page on the site.

For a better explanation, check out this Common Craft video that explains RSS in "plain English."

Ten things I hope the new iPhone SDK will help my iPhone do

I love my iPhone, but there are a few things it doesn't do. Some of the things it doesn't do seem a bit odd, especially when you compare them to how powerful the phone is.

With the upcoming release of the Software Development Kit (SDK), it stands to reason that Apple will soon add some functionality to the much vaunted iPhone. And, if everything works out just right, my list will become totally obsolete when the SDK is released later this month.

I would like my iPhone to either have or be able to each of the following:

1. Copy and Paste. If you want an easy way to grab information from the web and email it to someone, there just isn't a way to do that on the iPhone without cracking it.
2. Lock Screen Status Icons. I will caveat this item by saying that when the iPhone is locked there are some status icons, but there isn't a status icon for each application that can notify you. For example, if you receive email messages, there isn't an unread message count on the lock screen. Likewise, there isn't an icon indicator for new voicemail messages.
3. Typeahead Search for Dialing. It has always struck me as odd that you can draft a new email message and type to find a name in your contacts, but you cannot do the same when dialing a phone number. To dial a contact, you are limited to flicking through a long list. This is not an easy task when you have over 800 contacts.
4. Customizable AutoCorrect Dictionary. I would love to have the ability to edit the list of AutoCorrect words that my iPhone suggests to me.
5. Suppress the display of remote images. With standard email clients, you can control whether images which reside on remote servers are displayed. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail all allow you to block external images. Even Apple's Mail.app allows you to enable a similar setting.
6. Support Alternate Keyboard Layouts. I will start out by saying that the iPhone does support keyboard layouts for other languages, like Azerty for French, or Qwertz for German. However, I would love to be able to substitute the Dvorak keyboard layout for Qwerty, which is default on the US iPhone.
7. Better Support for Smart Playlists. Because my iPhone only has 8GB of space, I use Smart Playlists extensively to automatically manage the content (mainly podcasts) on my iPhone. Each of my Smart Playlists is set for "live updating" has the line "Playcount is 0" in it to ensure that I only have not-yet-listened-to podcasts cued up. Many times, however, the playlists don't update until a subsequent sync.
8. Better Support for iMap Email Syncing. My iPhone handles pop mail OK, but it fails to update my iMap accounts even though my option is set to update every 15 minutes. In fact, unless I specifically click the mail icon, it doesn't update at all.
9. Lock icon. An icon that, when clicked, locks and password protects the iPhone immediately.
10. Bluetooth Internet Connection Sharing. The iPhone runs OS X, right? So, an available option is OS X is the ability to share an internet connection to another device. I would love for this option to be made available on the iPhone. I mean, it's OS X, right?

There are many other things I want my iPhone to have, such as a chat client and an ebook reader. Of course, with the SDK right around the corner it shouldn't take long for these two items to get created. In fact, I'd be very surprised if they weren't already in development.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on all this.

Apple iTalk

I was talking with a friend about all the current postulations surrounding the upcoming "next-gen" iPhone and I was reminded that just a little over 18 months ago, all the popular media outlets were abuzz with rumors of Apple announcing a phone and a wide-screen iPod.

So here we are again waiting, this time for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference where rumors range from a 3G iPhone to mysterious new "electric computers."

Do you remember the iTalk, which landed on YouTube in 2006? I remember watching this and thinking, "Yeah, I'd buy one of those."

You know, if Apple releases one of these on Monday, I still think I'd buy one.

Whether you subscribe to all the Apple product hype or not, there's no denying that the iPhone has totally changed what people expect from their cell phones.

What do you think?

UPDATE: CrunchGear has photos of the "new" iPhone. Or do they??

Politics meets the WWE: Can you smell what Barack is cookin'?

I am interested in what our US presidential candidates have to say when it comes to their campaign. I am very interested to see not only their plan, but also how well they are able to explain it to the people who they will be serving should they manage to obtain the office.

However, when they employ cheap gimmicks to try and appear "cool," well that just leaves me wondering who is advising them. What I mean is these people are supposed to be convincing us that they are well-suited leaders who will be able to stand up to the pressures that come with the office, but, as you can see in the video below, it seems they have allowed someone to talk them into donning "wrestling" personas to promote their message. Cheesy? I think so.

Which of these three seems the best prepared to handle new and unexpected situations based on their performance in the video? What do you think?

Free Internet access; Ethernet cable required

Right now, I'm at the car service center getting some work done on my car. When I spoke with the service department associate, he mentioned I would be able to get free access to the Internet in the waiting room.

As I walked back to the waiting room, I was thinking about all the things I would be able to catch up on things like email, blogs, news, and other stuff.

I powered up my laptop and began looking for a hotspot, but the only one I saw was a password protected one. When I asked the business center associate about access to the web, she said, "Yes, we provide free Internet access. All you need is an Ethernet cable." I asked if they had any I could borrow and was told no.

As I think back on my previous travels, I realize that I've come to expect wireless Internet access where any Internet access is provided. I stopped carrying an Ethernet cable in my laptop bag because I've come to expect that if Ethernet is the only means of connecting, then a cable would be provided.

Of course, I'm not complaining, because I've also come to expect that I can access the Internet wherever I happen to be. As a matter of fact, I'm composing this blog post on my mobile phone. The only difference is that it takes a bit longer to type because I'm reduced to about 20% of my typing capacity (2 fingers instead of 10).

What do you think about Internet access? Do you expect to have it wherever you go?

Struggles with the "Attention Economy"

As the number of available inputs continues to increase, it has become more and more difficult for me to get everything done that I want done and to decide what to do with the limited amount of time left to me each day.

I'm talking about all tasks across my life, including work items as well as personal tasks. For now, I'll focus on the personal things.

I have a lot of content waiting to be consumed. I am currently subscribed to 29 podcasts. Across these podcasts, I have 80 items to either listen to or watch. In addition to that, I have a DVR with about 10 different series stored. These series total roughly 19 hours of video to watch. I am also subscribed to Netflix.com, with 381 items in my queue. I have an Audible.com account with about 7 hours of audio I haven't yet listened to. And, this list doesn't include about a dozen books that are on my list of "things to read once there's a bit more time."

I believe the problem I'm faced with isn't something unique to me. It is the problem of the attention economy. There simply isn't enough time to do all of the things we need to do. How do you find the balance? I'm still working on it.

According to the Wikipedia article linked to above, the answer lies in becoming good at "filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information."

And, to that end, I have been reading (and listening to) Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. The central premise of the book is to prioritize all things to be done into a list, and then prioritize that list by importance and impact. Finally, attack the most important and biggest items on the list first.

The author, Brian Tracy, basically says to give up on the idea of completing everything; there simply isn't enough time to do it all. I'm not sure whether I can commit to doing something like that. The least important items, according to Mr. Tracy, should either get delegated to others or simply cut from the list entirely.

Of course, I'm not getting everything done now, as it is. So, it just might be a good idea to explicitly choose the items that don't get done, rather than to try and do everything and be surprised and what gets left unfinished.

For now, I can commit to finish reading the book. Onces that's complete, we can take it from there.

I'm a victim of the Twitter Effect

It seems that I am among the latest to succumb to the Twitter effect. I tried to avoid it, but it has claimed me at last.

On the face of it, the concept of Twittering didn't really make too much sense to me. I mean, only 140 characters per post didn't seem like anything worthwhile. However, after hearing about how awesome Twitter was from all of the various podcasts I follow, I decided to sign up and take a look to see what all the hype was about.

We can sum it up by saying that constraint drives creativity or some such. But the coolest thing, at least for me, is that Twitter offers fairly simple integration with so many other web-based services that it makes it super simple to keep all of the places where you web up-to-date.

Of course, maybe it's just popular because it allows people who crave attention to mingle with other people who crave attention. A perfect platform for mutual ego stroking. But, upon second thought, I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.

If you don't know what Twitter is, check out this great video created over at Common Craft.