Google has been in the process dropping Google Podcasts. It has tried to enrolling users of Google Podcasts in YouTube Music. I did not want to use the YouTube service for anything except streaming video. I started to deal with this before Google Podcastsdisappeared. I deleted Google Podcasts and the BBC App.
Google Podcasts was adequate, although it sent many notifications, some pointless, and did not carry all the podcasts I wanted.
I tried Podcast Addict. The App developer complained about changes to Google Android software on my phone and began to suggest that I grant more permissions for more apps and Android services on my phone.
In February 2024, I installed the open source podcatcher AntennaPod, which seems to working smoothly. Podcast Addict and AntennaPod are each different from Google Podcasts. I had to learn interfaces and methods. I paid to remove ads from Podcast Addict, but decided not to pay for a subscription. Neither app can block ads that are inserted by podcasts’ producers, in the podcasts’ production processes.
The design of apps and services makes it easier for different interests to sell advertising and to prevent users from avoiding listening to watching ads. A podcast app works when the app can connect users to sites where a user can download or stream a podcast. A developer may try to give uses reasons to pay for a full featured “pro” app, or sell advertising. Some developers plan to make money by building a user base and selling the app as a machine to make money by selling ads. A developer may make its app collect data and sell user data to a broker or ad service.
The reviews of podcatcher apps or any Android apps in internet publications are limited. The Alphabet/Google Android Play Store mainly says how many time an app has been downloaded. A developer shares revenue with Alphabet, to get in the Google Play store but works on spec (i.e. hope). The user reviews in the Play store may note problems in whether an app seems to perform like a user may have expected. Play store reviews can be gamed.
Most of his SF writing is YA. His characters explain things or do things that he explains. SF writers notoriously tended, and some still tend to explain scientific premises of the setting or plot. He tends to the explantory on coding, the internet, commerce, protests, and activism. He favours free speech too much to be “Woke“. He appears to not discuss gender identity or some Woke issues. He is progressive or Left on privacy, and opposes corporate or government surveillance and the application of behavioural economics and other “sciences” to influence people follow and be controlled to buy things or be “governed”.
He is a GenX journalist/publisher/entrepreneur/activist, born in Toronto, who has lived in London (UK) and Los Angeles. I read some of what he wrote when he was writing for Boing, Boing. He has written on information tech issues. He has published policy advocacy, technical information and opinions, and some fiction on the Internet. He now (as of early 2022) publishes “an old fashioned link-blog” – an almost daily summary of links with an RSS feed at Pluralistic, cross published as a mailing list newsletter. It include sections:
Name
Content
Daily Links
On some days, links to his podcast Craphound’s news/latest blog. Some times his podcast is a reading of an essay or article published on his partially gated Medium1Medium is a publishing platform site/platform. It has a partial or soft paywall – the site tracks something and puts up a “you have x free articles left” banner. The differences between Medium and Substack affect writers. blog site. On most days, links to sections of a daily published short essay at plurastic.net on issues and ideas, tech and the news.
Hey look at this
Link to third party material, usually with interesting images
Wayback machine
List of links to material published on web on this day, in history, mainly about tech and information
Colophon
Lists with links if any currently writing, currently reading, latest podcast, upcoming appearances, recent appearances, latest book, upcoming books.
On March 8, 2022 he linked to his review of David Graebber and David Wenngrow’s The Dawn of Everything. I had been struggling with this book and had not finished it – it was high demand it with many holds in the library system. He refers to sections that I read, in the first half of the book. It is an interesting book that straddles the division between ideas of human evolution and culture that assume that whatever human beings do is natural and morally good, and whatever human beings do tends to greed backed by power, and morally bad things. David Graebber thought many social, economic and political institutions that have bad consequences for people are not the automatic or natural way of doing things.
On March 17, 2022, Doctorow’s article “Late stage capitalism is weird capitalism” discusses Benjamin Braun’s paper “Asset Manager Capitalism as a Corporate Governance Regime” with asides on a current attempts to reform US legislation on corporate concentration (anti-trust) and US federal central bank policy on wages and inflation.
On March 20, 2022 he reviewed Dark Factory, a YA dieselpunk novel.
On March 22, 2022 he discussed the Electronic Frontier Foundation paper “Ban online Behavioural Advertising” on privacy, data gathering, targetted advertising and surveillance capitalism.
On April 28, 2022 he discussed the dark pattern web ads that deposit cookies, build tracking of users and subsidize the sale of information that identifies web users. He mentioned a hardware ad block device. (Dark Patterns see:
On April 29, 2022 he discussed contextual ads, which trick Web user into opening pages that the large tech companies unilaterally interpret (use) as consent to place cookies, harvest data and receive ads.
On April 30, 2022 he discussed Disney’s excuse to break a contract to pay royalties to Alan Dean Foster for his popular Star Wars novel(s).
Cory Doctorow works hard and almost always says something new and interesting.
As the reviews promised, the book has anecdotes about British writers, including the historian MacAulay, the 18th century novelist Samuel Richardson, the mathematician/logician/novelist Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and the 20th century novelist Virginia Woolf. It has stories about unsuccessful efforts to index works of fiction in English, fictional indices in fiction and the uses of hostile indices as polemical attacks on adversaries in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is, as the reviewers said, literate and witty. It is short, informative and funny in places.
The book tells stories about the history of books and the efforts of classical, medieval and Renaissance scholars to create indices of religious, scientific and philosophical works. The book touches on
the innovations in the technologies of making records of information – papyrus, scrolls, the codex (bound book), paper, the printing press, the invention of page numbering, and
The book explains the labour necessary to create works like Index of Periodical Literature started by William Frederick Poole in the 19th century, and efforts of Josephine Miles, in the 1950s, to convert the notes of the deceased scholar Guy Montgomery to punchcards to create a database to complete and publish Montgomery’s Concordance of the works of the 18th century poet John Dryden. The book touches on creation in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer software used by modern index professionals to create indices for and in (inline) modern works, such as MACREX, CINDEX and SKY Index, and explains the development of tags and markup to generate indexes in flowing text in ebooks. The discussion of tags leads to a discussion of the use of hash (#)tags in Twitter, which leads to the evocative hashtag created by publicists for the release of a 2012 album by the singer Susan Boyle [#susananalbumparty].
The book lacks a bibliography, but has enough endnotes to credit sources of information.
I have listened to Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review podcast on an iPod and more recently on podcatcher apps on my phones, since 2011. The podcast was a recording of a radio program broadcast on the BBC Radio 5 channel in the UK, with added audio.
In the podcast on April 1, 2022, Simon Mayo mentioned that his pass to a BBC building had been cancelled before he had tried to enter the building for the Friday afternoon radio broadcast and podcast recording. The hosts also recorded a call to the versatile British actor Jason Isaacs. (His performance as Marshall Zhukov in the black comedy The Death of Stalin was brilliant). While the hosts had made “Say Hello to Jason Isaacs” a meme, they only had had Jason Isaacs on the show when he was interviewed about a movie.
The broadcast on April 1, 2022 was the final episode. The end of the show had been mentioned in the show and podcast March 11, 2022. I had missed or misunderstood the announcement. On March 11, 2022, the hosts had announced that the show was ending in tweets, which I had not seen.
My podcatcher did not save the episode, which I expected on April 8. I searched. The seach engines took me to the BBC program and podcast pages – which had become archives of the BBC programs. The BBC did not say, on this pages, that the podcast and the program had stopped. The BBC had posted a news item on March 11, 2022. The Guardian published an informative article which suggested that the hosts would be starting a new program with another publisher, but did not provide a way of finding the new broadcast or podcast. Information about the new show was published in an article in the Independent on April 1, 2022. There will be a public podcast called Kermode and Mayo’s Take starting May 5, 2022, indexed by the podcast sources and available free by subscription in most or all podcatching platforms. There is to be another podcast to be called Take 2 available on a paid subscription basis in the Apple store.
The articles and stories do not explain why and how Kermode and Mayo left the BBC. They had a successful show with a loyal following. They were also boomers, with an older audience interested in modern cinema, perhaps an elite niche in coverage of popular culture. Simon Mayo had been popular as host of popular music programs, and had shifted his emphasis to literature and other cultural interests. The BBC is a complicated organization. I recently read Beebology, a review of two histories of the BBC, published at the London Review of Books. The BBC could have resisted paying as much as the hosts wanted, or usedthe end of the show as an excuse to promote younger talents, more amenable to the ideas of young managers and to working in a gig economy model of public broadcasting.
In Febuary and March 2021 Player FM (an Android podcatcher) failed to perform the functions it had performed over the preceding years that I had been using it. Google is blocked in Britain from serving BBC podcasts. An issue of broadcast rights in British law. Google scrapes content and uses it to fill Google apps. Google struggles with the EU and national governments. For some reason, Google Podcasts does not carry some of the content I listened to, and I did not install or try it.
Pocket Casts appeared to be working again; it regained its reputation for stablility and functionality with 11 stable upgrades to the buggy 2019 Pocket Casts version 7 that had led me to drop it in 2019. (Shifty Jelly had shut down its remaining app Pocket Weather in 2018). Pocket Media, the NPR consortium that owns Pocket Casts, is selling the app. But I started using it again and found it to function.
Podcasting is attracting large investors who want listeners and revenue. See:
Publishers view subscribers as a cash flow, and change the apps and the terms of service.
Podcasts, like radio and television, rely on engaging or relatable narrators to interpret scripts. I have enjoyed Stephen Fry’s work, some of which he wrote. He produced his work through his own firm, SamFry. In 2018, he released Great Leap Years, which is still available to stream or download on Acast and other podcatchers, sometimes as part of his other series 7 Deadly Sins (both were produced for television). The more recent series that he narratives, Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Secrets, are only available on Audible. He does not describe himself as a writer of Victorian Secrets and Edwardian Secrets on his own website. Amazon, the owner of Audible, bundles content – this content is only available to users who subscribe.
The VC financed entity Maple Media bought the Player FM IP in May 2020. Initial coverage treated this a change that might be beneficial for someone. TechCrunch May 12, 2020. The Android Police put Maple Media on a sort of watch list October 29, 2020. Maple Media broke Player FM for some users for some financial advantage.
Original or classic cyclometers measure and display distance, time and speed. The devices could be powered by button cell batteries. These units had (or if in use, have) a magnet that clips onto a spoke which rotates the magnet past a sensor. They count rotations and process data to display speed, distance and time. The original models had a wired sensor; more modern models have wireless sensors. These devices need to be programmed with the circumference of the wheel to calculate how far the bike moves forward each time the wheel goes through a full revolution. The tire will flex under load; the distance travelled is a little less than the circumference of the inflated tire measured unloaded. Cateye had a chart in its manuals, listing the circumferences for dozens of tires, including several 700c tires from 700c x 18 to 700c x 40. Similar charts are online in support articles by Sheldon Brown and by volunteers in the public knowledge base at newwheel.net. I had a Bontrager (Trek) computer on my Trek hybrid – it gave the user choices of tire size in a menu rather picking a circumference in the menu. These systems assume uniform tire sizes, inflated to the rated/marked maximum. The circumference of a tire on a wheel is affected by the tire pressure. It is small inaccuracy, only a centimer in 200 (½ of one percent).
Most units could be calibrated to one bike; a few could be programmed to two bikes. They may pause and appear to “sleep” if the rider stops for longer than a couple of minutes. It depend on the device, default settings and user choices. Setting them up is time consuming and balky.
The monochrome displays were visible even in bright sunlight and under low light conditions.
GPS
GPS was not available to cyclists until the US goverment allowed non military users, after the year 2000, to receive satellite signals from Global Positioning Satellites and calculate position on the ground to within 5 meters. This provided enough accuracy for navigation and tracking distance and speed. A cycling GPS head unit will measure distance accurately and “save” the ride in memory. It may lose a few meters as the device may need a few seconds to recognize when the rider has started to move after halting. The device may lose satellites in tree cover, and falter in calculating velocity or elevation changes. The rider usually has to power the device on, and the device then usually starts to record the session as a new ride or a lap. There are some nuances to setting up a device. Setting up and learning the unit requires time and attention, as changing anything during a ride takes time and reference to manuals and resources that may not be available.
Garmin, having produced watch sized GPS units for runners in 2003, began to produce and sell the Edge GPS receiver for cycling in 2005. Garmin added functions including rear radar, lights, power meters, electronic shifter controls, touch screens, colour screens, maps, navigation and voice prompts in more evolved and expensive head units combined with peripherals. The units for sale bundle primary functions with functions used occassionally by some users, and with some specialized functions and features. Garmin has added GPS functions using the alternative satellites of the Russian Glonass system and the EU Galileo system. Competitors including Wahoo have entered the market.
Basic models do not display a map or provide navigational prompts. Some can be paired with smartphones which may, if they are using wireless data, be able to display maps. A large screen displaying a map is useful if the rider can stop and check, but can be a distraction. The marriage of the GPS cyclometer to cloud computing, big data and social apps means cyclists are sharing their location data with the device manufacturer network and its partners. If the device network servers are hacked, as Garmin was in July 2020, users can lose access to functions that depend on the servers in the cloud. It may not matter much if the cyclist is only using the head unit to display and record distance and speed.
Smart Phones
It seems to be efficient to use a smart phone app on a phone that you already own, and to not acquire a head unit but there are trade-offs.
Smart phone mapping apps will tell a user where the user is on a map but do not necessarily calculate distance and speed in real time. These apps use the GPS receiver and sensors in the phone, and the location services of the OS ecosystem. The GPS receiver is not as good as a dedicated GPS head set; these apps do not appear to record distance as accurately as GPS headunit or a classic cyclometer. Google had MyTracks, an app that ran in Google Maps, but killed it in 2016. The cycling, running, walking and hiking apps push ads, harvest data and self-promote paid apps with better “features”. I am not happy mounting a phone to handlebars or using battery power and cellular data.
I used Pocket Casts as a podcatcher on my Android smartphones for a few years. A podcatcher searches for podcasts, downloads selectected podcasts, and plays podcasts. A podcast publisher stores podcasts. A podcast directory provides a list of podcasts and information about where the podcasts can be found for streaming and download. Who controls the broadcast and inserts advertising or skims and sells the data? A podcatcher finds feeds for users but does not create or control content,
Pocket Casts was developed and marketed by the Australian firm, Shifty Jelly, which had developed some useful and successful apps. I bought the paid version in August 2013 when Shifty Jelly moved to paid app model. The app began to disappoint me in 2019: the phone got hot and showed high battery use (this was noted in a Reddit thread); playback froze when I used the cast function to play it over my home audio. Others complained that some features disappeared.
In 2018, Pocket Casts was transformed from a podcatcher program to an app. An app can be convenient for a user or listener. An app works well for a middle peson who wants to collect data or sell ads. The best way to get this data without breaking privacy laws is to get the user to consent when the user signs up for a service. This is essential data to make surveillance economics work. An app requires a user to identify and consent to the use of data. A user id is a data key based on personally identifiable information. Ads served by an app will not be blocked by an ad blocker.
The journalists at the Android Police cover the sale of Pocket Casts May 8, 2018, starting a year of coverage of what was happening to Pocket Casts. The principals of Shifty Jelly announced a partnership with “a combined group comprised of WNYC, NPR, WBEZ and This American Life” in a blog post May 4, 2018 after NPR announced that NPR and some of its member or affiliate organizations had acquired Pocket Casts and were going to improve it. Rumours and beta releases of a new version to implement Android “material design; changes to the functionality of the paid app. Searching “Pocket Casts” in outlets like Android Authority in 2018 and 2019 will bring up a score of stories. The release of the “upgraded” version 7 in March 2019 broke Pocket Casts. Version 7 of Pocket Casts may have been rushed to let the new owner start data mining. After the installation, Pocket Casts began to nag to create an account and log in to a Web service.
I found Player FM as a replacement for PocketCasts. It would not start without creating an account and logging in with a third party service but, it did not have bugs that Pocket Casts did. Many apps require a login with Google or Facebook.
If Android apps are not upgraded and maintained, they will cease to function, or lack the features of other apps providing a similiar service. The Google Play store makes an effort to prevent apps becoming sources of malware but does not assure users that apps are durable. A developer’s obligations are limited. The person acquiring an app in the Play Store can assume an app is functional when installed but has to trust the developer to upgrade the app. A developer may not have the resources. A developer with a good reputation may fail, or sell its IP to financial capitalists who have ideas on how to make more money for the service they offer. An Android app will generate revenue when the app will stream ads or generate marketable data.
I have an Android streaming box. The home page is an Android TV App launcher skin. It came preloaded with “home screen channels” presenting rows of “Play Next” links – suggestions – from Netflix, Amazon Prime and Google Play. These channels can be turned off. These channels extend the services onto the device home page, even when the Apps themselves are not otherwise active. For about 3-4 weeks, a Google App Store “App Spotlight” channel would show up every time I turned the box on, even after I switched it off on the previous session. There was a Reddit – people suggested turning off Google Play services updates to kill the zombie channel. Others thought that Google would patch it.
The services want my attention, even when I have other ideas of how to spend my time and what to watch. I used to think when I bought a device I owned it and could control it. But the companies think I owe a company my time to take pitches for new content and services.
I used Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 as my desktop email client because they were nearly free. Employees of my employer got the Office Suites for a nominal charge. (my employer rolled back to Word 2010, and Outlook 2010 connected to its MS Exchange server for a time). The programs did what I needed. I had a server account at my ISP. Outlook connected with the server using POP3, a version of Post Office Protocol. I began to consider letting go of my ISP after giving up the cable box and cable TV. This may mean I give up email account and address when I give up the Cable ISP service, and go with a new service. This meant thinking about a new email address on a webmail service, and a new email client.
Outlook was and it a message user agent (client) for Microsoft Exchange Server using proprietary MAPI protocols. In the enterprize enviroment a client connects to the enterprize email server which stores messages and connects to the Internet. Outlook has the capability to manage local copies of messages in a PST file (a dedicated database), which lets it function as a standalone internet email client. Contrary to MS Outlook 2013 Support articles and publicity about Hotmail Connector and Exchange Active Sync,Outlook 2013 did not easily support connecting to an Outlook.com account. After MS “improved” Outlook, creating a lock-in effect for its Hotmail/Outlook.com services and more of a walled garden or closed platform approach to services.
Outlook 2013 does not easily support IMAP. The capability may be there. For instance, there are resources that explain making an IMAP connection in Outlook, which may work or may have been outdated by changes in Windows and the Office Suite. Searching for ways to adapt Outlook 2013 is frustrating and time consuming. This makes using Outlook with webmail platforms other than Hotmail/Outlook difficult. Outlook 2013 has already started its spiral into obsolesence. Newer versions have been web/cloud based (software as a service), which leaves MS with a stream of income as long as consumers will stay with MS as rentier. Staying with Outlook as client means subscribing, which will not be cheap, and being locked in.
There are desktop email clients that support IMAP, and downloading and local storage of messages. IMAP is a robust standard, even if Microsoft deprecates it. It works with webmail, although it is a conceptual leap from POP, and requires some management. Time to move on.
I made some IT changes in the past few years. I bought a used HP desktop in 2011 – a 64 bit machine- and put Windows 8 Developer edition (free at the time) on it. I have stayed with Windows 8 – using the desktop interface. I have an iPad – a gift when I was sick. But I tried to I stay out of the Apple universe except for iTunes and an iPod to play podcasts and music.
I tried out different browsers and by last year had gone back to Firefox – I was on the Nightly releases for 64 bit machines – which seemed to work fine. I never liked MS Internet Explorer. I started to use Chrome when I moved to an Android phone last summer. I chose to submit to Google rather than Apple or MS. Privacy is hard.
At work, we have had an IT “refresh” last week (finally) and moved to Windows 7 Enterprise for workstation OS and MS Office 2010 for tools. Goodbye to Vista. MS had a good idea – an OS with security, but a slow and difficult program. MS is still selling desktop Office to enterprise buyers, but it is pushing the cloud-based licensing model for the “365” product for consumer buyers. Eventually we will all be tenant-serfs in someone’s better IT world.
I had kept up with Movable Type updates, but MT stopped providing updates to old purchasers (and a shrinking user and support community) so I made the switch to WordPress.
The Movable Type editor has 2 screens to compose entries as a body and an extended entry. The MT export and the WP import put the 2 part entries into single entries. “Pages” and tags did not convert. Links to photos and other “assets” in entries may point to addresses in my old MT static directory, but they work. Good enough.
Over the last 6 weeks I spent more time than I want to think about trying to get a new Satellite (Model A200, or A200-03V, specifically PSAE3C-03V08C) to run an alternative OS to its pre-installed Windows Vista. The laptop was attractively priced, perhaps because it was pre-loaded with Vista, as much as the fact that it was being cleared out for newer models. I think these models were engineered for XP and thrown on to the market with Vista drivers when Microsoft terminated its OEM licencing for XP installations, forcing computer manufactures to pre-install Vista.
Given the resources of the system – processor and memory – it falls short of what it seems to take to run Vista, and running Vista has other drawbacks.I wasn’t sure about changing to XP although that is the route I took in the end. One problem, for me and many users is having to buy XP off the shelf. There is a cost factor, and even if I had owned a valid working copy of XP, I needed to get working drivers for the hardware in the Satellite to complement the install set and complete the installation. Another potential problem is losing the recovery functions that Toshiba builds in with its HDD Recovery Utility.
