In a two-part segment on electronic books I weigh the pros and cons of “real” vs electronic books, and then walk you through how to get eBooks on your Kindle using overdrive.com. Two interviews from CES: Wonder Workshop has toys to get your kids started programming, and the Osterhout Group’s Augmented Reality Glasses. In Chit Chat Across the Pond, Donald Burr of Otaku no Podcast tells us how to become a Maker and about the cool things you can make with single board computers like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Read all about it at donaldburr.com.
Hi this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Mac Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. Today is Sunday March 1, 2015 and this is show number 512. Since that’s a nice round power of 2, we have Donald Burr of Otaku no Podcast on this week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond to tell us about the Maker movement and fun things you can do with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis and more.
Before we kick in, I wanted to remind you that this is the last show I’ll be doing before Steve and I head off to Dubai, India and Nepal for three and a half weeks. I’m excited and terrified and excited about the trip and very thankful to Bart, Allister and Guy for taking over in my absence. I have every confidence in them that they will entertain and educate in my absence. Remember if you have audio reviews you’d like to record, send them in to Bart at [email protected] and he’ll distribute them out. I know that Steven Goetz got his in early so get them going to be sure yours gets played!
Also remember that there will be no live show for the next three weeks. We’ll be back live on the 29th of March. Ok, enough about that, let’s get into the show.
This week I had the great pleasure to be on Bart’s podcast Let’s Talk Photography where Antonio Rosario, Mark Pouley, Bart and I talked more about understanding the different focus modes on our cameras. Check it out.
Blog Posts
Reading Part 1: Paper vs Electronic Books
Reading Part 2: Borrowing eBooks from the Library
Wonder Workshop Dash and Dot Robots Teach Kids to Code
ODG’s 3D Smart Glasses Could Assist in Industrial Applications
Clarify
I’m so glad I started making blog posts mid-week so that some folks can get a chance to respond to them, making the information richer for the rest of you. This week I posted both of the book reading stories I told you about here and Hai Vu posted on the one about finally figuring out how to borrow library books on my Kindle.
The cool thing is what he posted was a Clarify tutorial he had made on how to use Overdrive to put library books on your Kindle. I’m pretty sure he must have already done this one earlier for folks who live near him as the example he uses is for his Seattle-based library called Sno-Isle. I can see from his tutorial that HIS library has a nice button that clearly says “eBooks and more”, unlike mine and if you click on that, he shows in his tutorial that there’s a giant OverDrive logo! Gosh, I bet I could have found it there!
Once he takes you through to OverDrive he gives you a great view of how to filter for books using sequence numbers on the screenshots and how to look at your Bookshelf personalized in OverDrive.
I love that Hai did this for his own friends and even better that he got dual use out of the tutorial for sharing it to us. Of course I put a link in the shownotes to Hai Vu’s great tutorial on Clarify-it.com.
if you know a lot of stuff like Hai and enjoy helping other people, and more importantly enjoy helping them ONCE and not having to answer the same question over and over again, consider trying out Clarify from clarify-it.com and tell them Allison sent you! Maybe your tutorials will get featured here too.
Chit Chat Across the Pond
Donald Burr’s notes for Chit Chat Across the Pond on How to Become a Maker are at donaldburr.com.
That’s going to wind this up for this week, many thanks to our sponsor for helping to pay the bills, the makers of Clarify over at clarify-it.com. Don’t forget to send in your audio recordings to Bart at [email protected], and hopefully I’ll be tweeting over the next 3 weeks so you can follow me on twitter @podfeet. Check out the NosillaCast Google Plus Community too – lots of fun over there! Remember, NO live show for the next three Sunday nights so you can’t join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Who knows though, sometimes they just go hang out in the chatroom without me. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.
[…] micro controllers such as the Arduino, as well as single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi. Listen to it here (starts in around 33:25) and read the show notes […]
Did your episode production workflow change recently? I listen using Pocket Casts at 3x speed. With this episode, listening at other than 1x speed is *extremely* distorted. The extra weird thing is that if I hit a particularly bad spot, I can usually hit the back-10-seconds button and hear it without any (or as much) distortion. So, maybe a change in encoding scheme that might be confusing Pocket Casts at high speed? Thanks.
How interesting, Ron. I use a script to produce the show that includes encoding so I have no ability to screw it up or just intentionally change it. I thought maybe it got messed up in being sent to my hosting provider but I just tested on PocketCasts myself and it sounds good. I tested at 1.5 and 2x but don’t actually see an option for 3x. It wasn’t distorted at 2X. Maybe try unsubscribing and (VERY QUICKLY) resubscribing?
Further investigation, a couple other podcasts have the same problem, but I have a fix that I don’t think that I can talk about, other than that it will probably be generally available before the things that cause the problem. Sorry for the false alarm.
No worries, Ron, glad it got sorted. I’d be interested in what caused it if that’s ever possible.