ScutterCast

Apologies for no posts for a while, however I’ve been mad busy on one of my other projects.

About a month ago, myself and a couple of my resident posters over at Red Dwarf Forum decided it was time to do a Red Dwarf based podcast. We’ve been discussing who will do it, what we’ll talk about for a while, and last Monday we recorded the first episode.

The podcast itself took about 5/6 hours to edit together, which for me was quite good, as I’m still quite new to all this podcasting stuff.

Below is the software I’ve used to put the whole thing together, there are probably a lot quicker and smarter ways, but open to suggestions

Initial recording was done using skype, and a piece of software on the mac called “Skype Call Recorder“, which does the job well, however recorders all inputs as 1 file with no channel separation. This although good for the job, makes editing a bit of a pain, as we found Antirealism was too quiet, and Ori-Studfarm was too loud. I’m pretty sure this can be fixed quite easily by using hardware, and probably something I will look at as the episodes come along.

Once I had the audio file, it was editing time. I ran the file through Adobe Soundbooth, to hopefully clean up the background hum of a 4 man skype conference call, and attempt to increase Antirealism’s voice, and lower Ori-Studfarm’s. I then went to town on the editing, we recorded around 90 minutes worth of audio, however in the end, there was only around 35 mins used.

Once I had the cleaned audio, it was then time for GarageBand to work it’s magic. Dropped it into Garageband, chopped the audio into sections, then added stab music in between the little breaks. It was time then for the intro music, the intro message from Kyten (thanks to Tony Lunn), the outro music and the background track. I was planning on having just the clean vocals without a backing track, however there was still quite a lot of background humm, and thought the best was of applying a “sticky plaster” was to attempt to mask it out with an audio track.

The final work that needed to be done, was to add the images, I’ve always wanted to do an enhanced podcast, and was the main reason I bought the mac in the first place. This then meant listening to the podcast, listening for key points in the episode review and getting screen shots from this point. This was done with a peice of software on the mac called Snapz Pro X, which allows you to take a screen capture of anything on the screen, as the Cmd+Shift+F3 doesn’t allow you to take screen captures when you are running a DVD.

The final peice of the jigsaw was hosting. As we plan to do all 55 episodes of Red Dwarf (currently 52 + the 3 Easter specials), I made the assumption that these would be around 50Mb each x 55 which would be nearly 3Gb of space, and if only 10 people downloaded, we would need 30Gb of bandwidth.  I took the advice of a fellow podcaster (CarBozman), and went with podbean, as this is a dedicated pocast hosting site, and I can’t describe just how happy I am with this. It gives more stats then I know what to do with, and after a discussion with Tony, we will probably be moving all the other projects to podbean.

That’s it, episode 1 in the bag, and everything set up for episode 2 and the other 53 episodes.

If you wish to have a listen yourself, you can find them either on Itunes by searching for scuttercast, or by going to the podcast site for the Enhanced version or the MP3 only version

Also please check out the newly WordPressed version of www.reddwarfforum.com, many updates on the new Red Dwarf episode.

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Consolodating email

I like most of you have been using email since it first came out, way back in the days of a 14k modem was FAST !!

As you can imagine, I have switched between many mail programs as they have advanced over the years, and have disks and disk full of archives.

Last week, I came to the conclusion that I needed to get all of these onto Gmail, as I really like the idea of cloud computing, and it really helps when you can get to your email from anywhere.

I’ve tried a number of ways to upload to GMail, eg setting up IMAP and dragging and dropping, Google Email Uploader (which only works if you have a google apps account, and also attempting a few tutorials I’ve found on the web, which seem to be out of date.

I have however managed it, and below is how.

Firstly, you need a “throwaway domain”, I’ve got a couple of domain names that I’ve registered but never done anything with. You will need to have access to change the MX records (normally found at your domain hosting site)

Log into your domain hosting, got the DNS management section and change your MX records to these

Next you need to setup a google apps account, the signup page is here, please note, it was assume you are a business, and suggest the paid version, however just sign up for the standard, as this is free, and will do everything you need.

Right, now that’s in place, you will need to add this account to your main GMail account. Gmail will allow you to download email from 5 external emails. Log into your Gmail, go to Settings, then Accounts. The section that says “Get mail from other accounts:” Add your new account.

The setting for the new account are

Username = full email address
password = your password
pop server = smtp.gmail.com
port = 995
Click the Always use a secure connection……
Click the Label incoming message….I created a Label called “Old Archive”, as google uses Archive
Click the Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)….learn from my mistakes, not clicking this, meant for the last 24 hours, my phone, my mac book, my PC, my Ipod touch have been going mental with new email alerts !!

Assuming you’ve now done the above, your ready with your email.

Ok now to tidy up the email, as I’ve got so many email archives, I had quite a lot of overlap, I found the best way to fix this was to get them all into Thunderbird. If your not familiar with Thunderbird, it’s Mozilla’s email client. The reason I’ve used this, it because, as with Firefox, there are loads of addons.

First thing I did, was (and there is probably a lot easier way of doing this) was to load up outlook, and outlook express, and drop in all the related email archives into each. Once this was done, I opened up Thunderbird, and used the Import function to import all mail from these 2 programs and get them all into Thunderbird. Now all my email was in 1 place, I was time to do some tiding.

I dragged all the email from all the folders (Inbox, Sent, etc) into 1 big folder, I know to some of you, your thinking WTF !!!, but wait, hear me out. As Gmail works differently to other email systems, it stores all it’s email in one please, and separates by label name, and not folders, Also the end result will be all imported with a label of “Old Archive” anyway.

Once you have all the email in one place, I downloaded an addon for Thunderbird to remove duplicate emails (as I type this, there were 2 available, and the Alternative one worked best for me. Once downloaded and installed, right click on your big email folder, and remove duplicate emails. Once done, we’re ready to upload.

Download Google’s Email Uploader program found here and close down Thunderbird.

Enter your throwaway email address (the one set up for google apps), and you password.

On the next screen, select your Thunderbird email mail box, and there should be a count of all your cleaned up emails, select this and hit go. I think mine took about 6/7 hours to upload, so I suggest you do this overnight, or at a time when you’re not planning on using the internet for a while.

What will happen next is this.

The Google Email Uploader will upload all you archived email into your google apps email, your usual GMail account will check for new emails every hour and download these, and apply the label “Old Archive”, job done, all your email is now on googles servers

Just a note, I’m not sure how long this process will take, I set the emails uploading on Friday evening when I went to bed, and I’m still getting email added to the “Old Archive” label, from my understanding, the “get from external email address” has a limit of 200 emails every poll, (meaning 200 emails an hour), however if you did click the Click the “Archive incoming messages” this won’t be a problem, just let them come

1 more note to add, I have noticed that my “Old Archive” label has a vast amount of Unread email, (which would be try, as to my main Gmail account, these will be new emails), if this doesn’t bother you, then feel free to ignore, however if your like me and a little anal when it comes to email folders, I did the following.

Went into settings, changed to maximum page size to 100 conversations, then clicked on the “Old Archive” label, clicked, “Unread”, More Actions >> “Mark As Read”, granted there is probably a lot quicker way of doing this, but I thought, I could do this about a 100 times, in the time it took to google an answer.

I did however find a cool way of finding unread email in the future, as you are unable to create a label for “Unread”, I assumed that google uses this as a function, so in the top search box, if you type label:unread this will display only the unread email, I wish I’d have known this weeks ago, as somebody sent me an email, with the wrong date on, which meant I had to click through pages of emails until I found it.

Well I hope this is on use to somebody, and if I haven’t explained any of the parts enough, drop me a comment or email and I’ll try to help you out.

Cheers

Darren

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Green light for faster broadband

The fibre rollout can begin in earnest says Ofcom

BT has received the green light to begin its rollout of super-fast broadband.

Ofcom has delivered its long-awaited ruling which offers BT more flexibility in the way it delivers fibre networks.

BT made clear it only wanted to make the move if regulator Ofcom allowed a fair return on that investment.

The regulator said that its ruling was a “pivotal” one for the development of broadband which it said would “be crucial” to the economy.

Three phases

“Our message today is clear: there are no regulatory barriers in the way of investment in super-fast broadband,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards.

“We want to promote investment to support the widespread adoption of superfast broadband but we want to balance that with the need for competition,” said Mr Richards.

He said that the plans outlined in this “first phase” would provide the current conditions for investment in fibre.

Phase Two would look at how to reach the areas not covered by this market-led approach, and phase three would consider the evolution to even faster technologies.

Moves have already begun to upgrade the UK’s existing broadband networks to fibre.

Virgin Media has committed to upgrading its cable network to 50Mbps (megabits per second) – which will cover around half the population of the UK – by the middle of this year.

BT has pledged to complete the installation of fibre-optic cables to some of its street-side cabinets, offering speeds of between 40 and 60Mbps, by 2012.

This will offer higher speeds to around 40% of the country.

However, the regulator has “a central role to play in enabling both investment and competition”, it said.

That includes allowing BT to set its own prices on how to sell access to its network to secure a fair return on their investment.

It may lead to consumers paying a premium for super-fast broadband.

Ofcom also said it would also “minimise unnecessary inefficiencies” in the design and build of new networks, which will mean, for example, that BT will be able to reduce the amount of engineers needed to manage an upgrade to fibre.

To date it has had to send separate engineers from its wholesale and Openreach divisions to manage the electronics and ducting respectively in its exchanges. Now it will be allowed to use one.

Mr Richards said that the wholesale pricing would be considerably more flexible than current wholesale products and that its hands-off approach reflected that it was dealing with a new BT.

“This is not the BT of old milking a copper network put in years ago. This is a risky investment for it,” he said.

BT chief executive Ian Livingston welcomed the move, saying it “set expectations for the whole UK industry as the market evolves into a fibre-based world”.

“Today’s announcement gives us the green light to push ahead with our £1.5bn superfast broadband investment plans to reach at least 40 percent of UK households by 2012,” Mr Livingston said in a statement.

It has been estimated that to offer fibre to the whole country would cost £5bn. If the technology used is fibre to the home that cost rises to £29bn.

Wholesale focus

What will deliver next-generation broadband? Read Rory’s blog on Ofcom’s report

The focus of Ofcom’s announcement is on making for a flexible wholesale model rather than opting, as some had predicted, for an environment where other operators laid their own fibre alongside BT’s.

There was, said Mr Richards, “a lack of appetite” among the companies it consulted with for a fibre version of local loop unbundling.

This is largely due to the economic climate, he said.

Local loop unbundling, in which operators are able to install their own equipment in BT’s telephone exchanges, is largely credited with kickstarting the current broadband market and for making it as competitive as it is.

‘Limited options’

The fibre landscape will be different, thinks Ian Fogg, an analyst with research firm Forrester.

“What we have seen is a game, unlike football, of three halves. Dial-up was the first half, broadband was the second and this is the third. Ironically, in terms of competition, it will have more in common with what was happening in 2000 than what we see now,” he said.

He is concerned that the type of superfast broadband on offer from BT – fibre to the street cabinet rather than fibre to the home – is being overhyped.

“It has a theoretical maximum of around 50Mbps (megabits per second) but speed will vary based on how far people live from a street cabinet and how many ADSL lines are in a street as the two can interfere with each other,” said Mr Fogg.

“Even in urban areas there will be areas where speeds are no better than ADSL speeds,” he added.

BT has pledged to offer Fibre to the Home technology on new-build sites. So far one estate, at Ebbsfleet in Kent, has a handful of houses using the technology.

Andrew Ferguson, editor of ThinkBroadband.com, thinks Ofcom’s report was necessary: “The options for Ofcom were limited since if it refused BT, then the only next generation like network approaching national coverage would be Virgin Media who currently offer no form of wholesale access.”

Mr Richards did not rule out the possibility of regulating Virgin Media if it became the dominant super-fast broadband player.

Graphic showing speeds for applications

Original Source

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