Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Apple Podcast, hosted at Podfeet.com, a technology geek podcast with an EVER so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, July 19, 2020, and this is show number 793.
Chit Chat Across the Pond
I am super excited about this week’s Chit Chat Across the Pond. My guest was Doug Kaye of The Conversations Network. It’s quite likely that you’ve never heard of The Conversations Network, but this service that Doug and others built created the second podcast ever produced! In our interview, Doug talks about how that happened, and what the network’s goals were and how they were achieved. His vision of a medium that allowed open access to information I think was foundational to the attitude amongst independent podcasters today.
The Conversations Network managed a worldwide distributed team of part-time and essentially volunteer people, which was awesome, but which caused audio levels to be all over the map. Doug talks about how annoying it was to be listening to a podcast in your car and have to be constantly turning the volume up and down as the speaker changed. He and his team decided this needed to be fixed.
He’ll tell the story of how Bruce Sharp, a mathematician and his son Malcolm, a developer, wrote the application entitled The Levelator for the Mac, Windows, and Linux. This tool has been a mainstay of podcasters for close to 15 years now, and like everything else Doug creates, it’s always been free. I got Doug to give us more detail than I’ve known before on how it does its magic.
The Levelator is a fascinating story unto itself since twice now it has been rendered unusable by Mac users because of changes to fundamental changes in macOS, and yet rose like a phoenix from the ashes to live again, not once but twice.
Doug is fascinating and I enjoyed every minute of it. You can find the episode in your podcatcher of choice under Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite, or you can listen right over at podfeet.com/….
But that’s not all. At the end of our conversation, Doug explained that his love now is photography and that he runs a local photo club. I took a look at Doug’s portfolio at dougkaye.com/… and I was blown away by his work. You know how a lot of photographers have a theme or a look to their work so after a while it all starts to look the same? Like they do all black and white, or all street photography, or all pictures of food? There are not two photos in Doug’s entire portfolio that are anything like the others. Every photo made me say wow.
I suggested to Bart that Doug would be a great guest for his Let’s Talk Photography podcast. Bart’s been doing a series within a series where he gets photographers to come on and evangelize a photographer they admire. Doug was on this week’s Let’s Talk Photography and it was fantastic. Doug talked about David Burnett and I won’t even begin to try to tell you about how crazy cool Mr. Burnett’s photography is. Doug did talk about his own crazy cameras and printing experiments.
If you don’t get enough Doug Kaye listening to him talk about the early days of podcasting on Chit Chat Across the Pond, definitely give a listen to Let’s Talk Photography episode 82 at lets-talk.ie/…
“DopeyOne” Says Thank You
Like many people, Ryan (aka DopeyOne in the chat room) has gotten behind in his podcast listening because he’s at home now. He just heard the 15-year anniversary show that happened back in May but luckily decided that it was better late than never to send in a recording of his thoughts about the show. This absolutely made my day:
Hey, Allison, this is Ryan DopeyOne in the chat sometimes. I am a few weeks behind in my listening. So I’m sorry that I am late. But I wanted to say a big thank you to you and Bart and Steve for making the show. It’s been a learning and fun experience for me. You and Bart have inspired me to make some better decisions about security and have inspired me to build my own router so that I can support VLANs and make my IoT devices run on their own VLAN make a VLAN for my visitors so they’re on their own VLAN and then provide a VLAN for my family.
Other inspirations have come through some of your software recommendations. Anyway, mainly, I just wanted to say thank you. I haven’t been as long a listener as some, but I still feel like I’ve been listening for quite some time. And even though I have removed my subscription from many other podcasts that I’ve started and stopped listening to, NosillaCast has stayed. I’ve stayed subscribed to the NosillaCast. Anyway, thank you. Thank you, Steve. And thank you Bart. And I wish you all the best.
Ryan – you brought tears to my eyes when I heard this – thank you thank you thank you.
Blog Posts
Macstock Expo is Going Virtual AND Free This Year on 25 July 2020
Support the Show
This week’s hero is John Murray III. Why is he our hero? Because he became a Patron of the Podfeet Podcasts. He went to podfeet.com/patreon and created an account. From there he got to decide exactly how much money he wanted to pledge. I have chosen to have pledges be per episode of only the NosillaCast. So if you put in $2, you’ll be charged around $8/month depending on how many Sundays there are in that month.
But what if John had wanted to limit his costs to $5/month? There are two radio buttons – one to support every creation as I explained, but he could also have chosen to set a monthly limit. With a show as consistent as the NosillaCast, he can be pretty confident that it will be once a week, but some shows are more intermittent so setting a limit can be a great way to go.
The other cool thing is that if John decides at some point that he can’t afford to continue his pledges, he is in complete control and can stop contributing. It’s all about John and what he wants to and can afford to contribute.
I hope you’ll consider being like John and becoming a Patron too!
Shure Digital Recording Kit – Everything You Need for Good Audio
Why I Use 5 Different Apps to Take Notes
That’s going to wind this up for this week. Don’t forget to send in your Dumb Questions, comments and suggestions by emailing me at [email protected], follow me on twitter @podfeet. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com/. podfeet.com/patreon, podfeet.com/paypal, podfeet.com/facebook, podfeet.com/slack! And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com/live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific Time and join the friendly and enthusiastic NosillaCastaways. Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.