Podcasts

My Favorite Podcasts

Science Fiction Podcasts

Clarkesworld
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/

About:
“Clarkesworld is a monthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in October 2006. Each issue contains interviews, thought-provoking articles and at least three pieces of original fiction. Our fiction is also available in ebook editions/subscriptions, audio podcasts and in our annual print anthologies. We are a two-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine and our fiction has been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press and Stoker Awards.”

Drabblecast
http://www.drabblecast.org/

About:
The Drabblecast is a weekly podcast featuring flash fictions from a variety of genres. Its singular message is that of off beat, funny, eclecticism. It is a paying fiction market, accepting submissions (see the submissions page for more information). The Drabblecast is the winner of the 2010 and 2011 Parsec Awards for Best Speculative Fiction Audio Magazine.

Escape Pod
http://escapepod.org/

About:
“Escape Pod is the premier science fiction podcast magazine. Every week we bring you short stories from some of today’s best science fiction stories, in convenient audio format for your computer or MP3 player.”

Flash Pulp
http://flashpulp.com/

About:
Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Lightspeed Magazine
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/podcasting/

About:
Lightspeed is an online science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF—and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales. No subject is off-limits, and we encourage our writers to take chances with their fiction and push the envelope.

Linux Centric Podcasts

Tuxradar
http://tuxradar.com/podcast

About:
News, reviews, rants, raves, chit-chat, geekspeak and more – a new TuxRadar podcast all about Linux and free software will be posted here every two weeks for free download. All TuxRadar podcasts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence. Music by Brad Sucks.

ubuntu uk podcast
http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/

About:
The Ubuntu Podcast covers all the latest news and issues facing Ubuntu Linux users and Free Software fans in general. The show appeals to the newest user and the oldest coder. Our discussions cover the development of Ubuntu but aren’t overly technical. We are lucky enough to have some great guests on the show, telling us first hand about the latest exciting developments they are working on, in a way that we can all understand! We also talk about the Ubuntu community and what it gets up to.

The show is presented by members of the UK’s Ubuntu Linux community. Because it is covered by the Ubuntu Code of Conduct it is suitable for all.

The show is broadcast live every fortnight on a Tuesday evening (British time) and is available for download the following day.

Some Rights Reserved

All contents of this site (including audio) are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Full Circle Magazine
http://fullcirclemagazine.org/category/podcast/

About:
The independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community.

The About sections are direct quotes from the Podcast sites.

Media Server for the Sony Bravia

I wanted a DLNA/UPnP server to allow me to view photos, listen to music and watch videos and PC recorded TV on my TV. The media is currently stored on my Linux server. I tried various options before finding miniDLNA here http://minidlna.sourceforge.net/ . The MiniDLNA server was extremely easy to set-up and worked out of the box and coped with my Sony Bravia KDL-40W5500 40in LCD which other servers software did not. The TV is connected to my local network via a network cable to a Home Plug.

The Home Plug is a DEVOLO dLAN 200 AVmini Starter Kit 2x Home Plug AV Adapters £79.99 from PC World in the UK

This TV supports images as .jpg, music as .mp3 and video as .mpg or .m2t/m2ts, I’ll blog post how to get the correct settings for the video files later. [ Edit see here tsmuxer-video-conversion-for-sony-bravia/ ]

First I downloaded both the static and src tar files from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/files/minidlna/ [go for the latest currently 1.0.22] I wanted the pre-build version as there are a lot of unmet dependencies when I tried building it on Debian Squeeze and a frankly gave up. Download the 2 files [currently minidlna_1.0.22_src.tar.gz and minidlna_1.0.22_static.tar.gz]. Open the static version in your favourite archiver and extract the file minidlna located in /usr/sbin directory within the archive and minidnla.conf located in etc/ directory within the archive to your home directory. Now using your archiver program again to open the src version and extract the minidlna.init.d.script from the /linux/ directory within the archive to your home folder.

you should now have 3 files;

minidnla
minidnla.conf
minidlna.init.d.script

in your home directory

now open the minidlna.conf in your favourite text editor and change the following highlighted text to match the paths to your media, server name and paths to store the database & log files.

***** file extract *****

# set this to the directory you want scanned.
# * if have multiple directories, you can have multiple media_dir= lines
# * if you want to restrict a media_dir to a specific content type, you
# can prepend the type, followed by a comma, to the directory:
# + “A” for audio (eg. media_dir=A,/home/jmaggard/Music)
# + “V” for video (eg. media_dir=V,/home/jmaggard/Videos)
# + “P” for images (eg. media_dir=P,/home/jmaggard/Pictures)
media_dir=A,/home/martin/Musics
media_dir=V,/home/martin/Videos
media_dir=P,/home/martin/Photos

# set this if you want to customize the name that shows up on your clients
friendly_name=Angel

# set this if you would like to specify the directory where you want MiniDLNA to store its database and album art cache
db_dir=/home/martin/.minidlna

# set this if you would like to specify the directory where you want MiniDLNA to store its log file
log_dir=/home/martin/Logs

***** End file extract *****

I left the rest of the config as it was.

Now we need to sore the config and program file and test they work so in a Terminal;

$ mv ~/minidnla.conf ~./minidnla.conf

this moves the file into your home directory as a hidden file by adding the dot at the from of it. I have a seperate partition for the system directory /opt so that I can store user added programs which I don’t want to get removed when I do an upgrade so I’m going to store the minidnla program there in it’s own directory

$ sudo mkdir /opt/minidnla

create the directory

$ sudo mv ~/minidnla /opt/minidnla/minidnla

move the program file into it.

$ sudo chmod +x /opt/minidnla/minidlna

make it executable

You could leave the program in your own home directory or move it into /usr/bin in which case amend the paths in the commands above.

Now we can run the program to see if it works with in my case;

$ /opt/minidlna/minidlna -f /home/martin/.minidlna.conf

so this is the path to the program, followed by -f telling it to look for a file then the path to your config file.

This should now start minidnla building it’s database and then serving up the results, depending on the number of files this may take a while but you can check out the log file for errors on progress.

The only problem I had was that one of the music directories had root permissions on it not my own so if you get error that’s the first thing to check. If all has gone well you should be able to see the results on the TV. If your TV does not see the server which on mine shows up under the name of the server I added in the minidnla.cof and has a Tux penguin icon then check out your Firewall on the PC server.

Next we want to be able to autostart the server if we ever restart our server and be able to start, stop or restart it with easy options. So now open the minidlna.init.d.script in your favorite text editor and amend the highlighted text shown below. Just 2 lines to amend the path to your minidnla program and the path to the monidnla.conf file.

***** file extract *****

# Short-Description: DLNA/UPnP-AV media server
### END INIT INFO

MINIDLNA=/opt/minidlna/minidlna
ARGS=’-f /home/martin/.minidlna.conf’

test -f $MINIDLNA || exit 0

. /lib/lsb/init-functions

case “$1” in

***** End file extract *****

now move it to /etc/init.d/ with

$ sudo cp /home/martin/minidlna.init.d.script /etc/init.d/minidlna

this changes it’s name to just minidnla and

$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/minidlna

make it executable, now reboot the PC and the server should auto start.

$ sudo update-rc.d minidlna defaults

And update, now you can the use the following commands from a Terminal to control the server.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna stop

$ sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna start

$ sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna restart

HAUPPAUGE WinTV Nova-T Digital Terrestrial TV Stick

I wanted to record some Digital TV [freeview] using my PC running [Linux Mint Debian XFCE] so that I could watch it later on my Sony Bravia TV which is hooked up to my homegrown server running [Xubuntu]. After a little Google search I found the HAUPPAUGE WinTV Nova-T Digital Terrestrial TV Stick recommended on a few posts which needed no extra drivers adding. I bought the above from PC World [UK] http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hauppauge-wintv-nova-t-digital-terrestrial-tv-stick-00776361-pdt.html for £49.99 and located a spare USB slot, plugged it in and connected it to the House Digital aerial. I then re booted the system and added the programs ME TV and Kaffeine to the system and then ran update before rebooting. Both programs found the Nova-T out of the box and scanned the channels with no problem. Kaffeine’s default output file format is .m2t which can be served on the miniDNLA server  [ see here and is picked up by the Sony Bravia.

[ Edit ]

Having now installed Debian Squeeze with an XFCE Desktop I found the above no longer worked out of the box, typing $ dmesg | grep dvb in a Terminal after plugging in the WinTV stick I got;

$ dmesg | grep dvb
[ 668.441506] dvb-usb: found a ‘Hauppauge Nova-T Stick’ in cold state, will try to load a firmware
[ 668.441514] usb 1-5.2: firmware: requesting dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw
[ 668.450267] dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)
[ 668.450336] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_dib0700

shows it is missing the firmware, after a little Google searching I found the Debian package called firmware-linux-nonfree has this firmware in it so as long as you have the deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free enabled you can install it with;

$ sudo apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree

Then either reboot or just remove the WinTV stick and plug in again and running

$ dmesg | grep dvb
[ 5.083029] dvb-usb: found a ‘Hauppauge Nova-T Stick’ in cold state, will try to load a firmware
[ 5.083031] usb 1-5: firmware: requesting dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw
[ 5.121021] dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file ‘dvb-usb-dib0700-1.20.fw’
[ 5.824025] dvb-usb: found a ‘Hauppauge Nova-T Stick’ in warm state.
[ 5.824053] dvb-usb: will pass the complete MPEG2 transport stream to the software demuxer.
[ 5.824342] DVB: registering new adapter (Hauppauge Nova-T Stick)
[ 6.026890] DVB: registering adapter 0 frontend 0 (DiBcom 7000PC)…
[ 6.239918] input: IR-receiver inside an USB DVB receiver as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.2/usb1/1-5/input/input8
[ 6.239946] dvb-usb: schedule remote query interval to 50 msecs.
[ 6.239949] dvb-usb: Hauppauge Nova-T Stick successfully initialized and connected.
[ 6.240113] usbcore: registered new interface driver dvb_usb_dib0700

now all is well.