Are You of the Body?

I am now. I have finally joined the ranks of those who listen to podcasts. I figured with all the driving I'm going to have to do for the new job, I might as well keep current on tech news or at least get some entertainment out of it.

I downloaded a free podcast aggregator called Juice. There are a couple of features I wish it had but overall it's not too difficult to work with. One feature I'd like to see (and I don't know if any aggregators do this) is to create a rolling set of files for a podcast. For instance, I could tell it to keep three episodes of Distorted View Daily and it would delete the oldest file as it downloaded the newest file. My DVR does this and it would make it easier to manage the files on my MP3 player (a Lyra 2780).

I've already found some pretty decent Tech podcasts such as the Mike Tech Show, This Week in Tech (TWIT) and Geek News Central.

It's amazing what you hear when the companie's propaganda is filtered out. For instance, I learned that the virus scanner in Windows Live OneCare (a subscription service) has been recently found to be deleting Outlook .pst files (email archive files). The fix is to turn off the virus scanner until the patch can be released (it may already be out). You know, when you pay someone to provide a service like that, you don't expect that their service will delete one of their own critical files. Trustworthy computing.

I also learned of a handy little program. It's called Evernote. Evernote is very similar to OneNote by Microsoft. They have a free version which is pretty feature-rich already and a paid version (that's about 60% cheaper than OneNote) that includes Synchronization, Handwriting Recognition, Shape Correction, Advanced Note Recognition (ANR) and Ink-Note Search.

First it was blogging, now I'm listening to Podcasts. Next thing you know, I'll be producing a podcasts.

p.s. If you recognize where the title came from, you are a true Trekkie/er