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32 Great Podcasts from my Podroll

kdmurray — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:09:06 +0000

Inspired by this post from Bill Wagner’s blog, here’s a quick look at what’s on my Podroll these days. I’ve listed each show below with its affiliated network or originating broadcaster in parentheses. Please have a look through the list and post any other great shows in the comments. I’d also love to know what you think about the recommendations!

Science & Technology Shows

Aussie Geek Podcast – Bloody Awesome Tech. Two Aussies (Dave and Cait) and a Canadian (that’s me!) put their unique slants on the technology news, applications sites and services each week (or so).

CommandN – Amber Macarthur and friends bring you a weekly dose of tech news.

Digital Planet (BBC) – The BBC’s weekly technology show looking at trends in tech and how they affect your daily life, hosted by Gareth Mitchell.

Discovery (BBC) – A weekly science documentary examining hot trends and profound topics in the world of science.

Knightcast – Tuning tech into your way of life, Knightwise offers a look at ways to make technology work for you, instead of the other way around.

Mac OS Ken – A daily dose of Mac (and iPhone) news delivered by the sarcastic, funny and insightful Ken Ray.

One Minute Tip (TP) – Byte-sized pieces of knowledge to help you be just a bit more productive with your everyday tech.

Podcasters’ Emporium (LPN) – James Williams and Dave Gray cover all the topics you need to know to become a better podcaster.

Quirks and Quarks (CBC) – Bob MacDonald’s weekly look at science and technology from the CBC mothership. The show looks at new and emerging sciences and technologies, often with an eye towards how they affect our environment.

Run As Radio (PWOP) – Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes provide a weekly batch of insightful trends and topics for the IT pro.

Security Now (TWiT) – Steve Gibson’s weekly dose of security news and security-related topics is very insigtful (even better if you skip over Leo Laporte’s TWiT ads).

Search Engine (TVO) – Jesse Brown’s brutally honest opinions and reviews of life in the Internet age.

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe – Members of the New England Skeptical Society debunk the myths and frauds of the scientific age.

The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5 – A shorter companion podcast for the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.

Spark (CBC) – Focusing on the softer side of tech, trends and how these things work their way into our day-to-day lives.

Software Development Shows

Hanselminutes (PWOP) – Scott Hanselman’s weekly look at software and technology topics with his inside the MS machine take on things.

Herding Code – A group of “real-world” developers discussing topics and technology that affect code-slingers everywhere.

.NET Rocks! (PWOP) – .NET Rocks brings together the incomparable Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell who interview cool and interesting people in the Microsoft developer space.

Polymorphic Podcast – Craig Shoemaker’s periodic exploration of software and best practices for .NET developers was one of the first software podcasts I started listening to.

Stack Overflow – Jeff atwood and Joel Spolsky’s companion podcast to the Stack Overflow Q&A site project. A weekly chat about the project, interesting Stack Overflow questions and other software topics.

Humour & Entertainment Shows

Mondays (PWOP) – Mondays is a comedy show from the crew at PWOP that’s released on a somewhat sporadic basis. This one’s definitely NSFW — unless you have headphones. =)

Star Trek: Defiant – A fan-fiction podcast set a number of years after the events in Star Trek: Nemesis. Produced by the crew at Pendant Audio with a fairly talented voice crew. It’s a good listen.

Two Schooners (LPN) – Dave Gray and James Williams get together again for a somewhat less serious show covering the weird and hilarious stories of the week over a schooner of their favourite brew.

Business / News Shows

Campbell’s Comment (CKNW) – Michael Campbell’s daily business comment.

Get It Done Guy (QD Tips) – Sever Robins provides great productivity tips, business tips and general “how-to-cope-with-life-after-college” tips.

Modern Manners Guy (QD Tips) – The Modern Manners Guy’s advice on how not to inconvenience those around you.

Nutrition Diva (QD Tips) – Eat better, and learn about food myths that’ll keep you on the healthy track.

Reality Check (CKNW) – Bruce Allen’s pull-no-punches daily comment about social issues and pop culture.

Sports Comment (CKNW) – Neil McRae and others provide a comment on the sports world from a Vancouver perspective.

Grammar / Language Shows

Grammar Girl (QD Tips) – Mignon Fogarty’s weekly language show will help you tackle the tricky issues of trying to write successfully in the English language.

Kalye Speak – Learn tagalog as filipino’s actually speak it. By far the most successful podcast of its kind.

Podictionary – Charles Hodgeson gives great background on the etymology of words that we use every day. The show is insightful, fun and concise.

It’s been fun putting this list together. I’d love to hear your comments on these shows, or others that you listen to regularly.

Hide the Undock Button in Windows XP in Five Steps

kdmurray — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:38:49 +0000

If you have a Windows XP notebook, and love to use the Run menu item, chances are you’ve occasionally hit “E” instead of “R” when you bring up your start menu. The result? Windows ejects the PC from it’s dock and forces you to re-dock it before you can carry on with your work. It’s only about a 90-second process, but it’s annoying as hell and will completely take you ‘out of the zone’ when you’re in the middle of your project.

Open the registry editor (Start -> Run -> regedit)
Open one of the applicable keys:
- Current User: [HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer]
- All Users: [HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesExplorer]
Right-click the Explorer folder -> New -> DWORD Value and call it NoStartMenuEjectPC (case-sensitive!)
Right-click NoStartMenuEjectPC -> Modify
Choose one of the following values to set the behaviour you want:
- type 1 to hide the undock button
- type 0 to show the undock button

Now you can safely use your keyboard shortcuts without worrying about accidentally undocking your computer.

Multiple RSS Feeds with DualFeeds

kdmurray — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 07:44:13 +0000

I’m a huge fan of bloggers (and podcasters and well… everyone else for that matter) using full feeds for subscribers to their sites. I’ve got no time for people who demand that I hit their website to be able to read the content. If you want to monetize the feed that’s fine, but let me read it where I want.

That said, I was contemplating this evening whether it would be possible to offer both full and summary feeds from kdmurray.net. The reason? I wanted to start pushing partial posts to Facebook with a minimum of fuss.

The problem? WordPress only supports one post feed out of the box.

The solution? Stephen Cronin‘s DualFeeds plugin (which I found thanks to @bluefur on Twitter). The plugin allows you to create multiple feeds one for full-posts, and a second for post summaries. This is a very elegant solution to the problem. Though I wanted to add the stuff into Facebook, I didn’t want to push whole posts because I did want to try and use this to drive some traffic to the site.

Technically the plugin works very well. I was able to set it up in just a couple of minutes and after about 15 minutes of testing have found that it plays nice with FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin, as well as my other feed-related plugin FeedEntryHeader — the latter as it turns out was also written by Stephen Cronin.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to offer multiple feeds from your site, have a look at DualFeeds. Works like a charm.

Mac Tip: Showing All File Extensions

kdmurray — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:18:44 +0000

OK, for many of you out there, this is probably so basic you didn’t even need to search for it. That said, I figured I’d post it anyway (partly because I’ve been so lax about blogging recently).

If you’ve ever wanted to have OS X show file extensions for all files, all the time, it’s a very simple process.

Click on any finder (or the desktop)
Select Preferences from the Finder menu
Click on the Advanced button
Check off the Show all file extensions box
Close the Finder Preferences window

Voila! All is revealed. Wasn’t that easy? It probably took you longer to read this than to actually make the change.