Category Archives: Podcast

Streamers, Keepers, and Podcasts

“All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”

When it comes to consuming media, there are two types of people: Streamers and Keepers. Streamers are people who consume media via streaming services and have no desire to retain copies of those things. Keepers are people who feel a need to keep a copy of the media they consume, be it in physical or digital format. Streamers are perfectly content to watch movies on Netflix and listen to music on Spotify and feel no sense of loss if or when, like dust in the wind, those things disappear from streaming services. Keepers are still buying physical media and continually filling hard drives with digital copies of movies and music.

While it would certainly be more convenient to be a Streamer, I am, in my heart, a Keeper. It bothers me that streaming services routinely drop old content from their libraries and replace them with new things. Next month Netflix will be removing the first five seasons of the Twilight Zone, Back to the Future 1-3, and Twin Peaks from their platform. That doesn’t seem to bother Streamers, who will just move along and watch something else. It doesn’t bother me as a Keeper, either, since I own all of those things on DVD and/or Blu-ray, have copied them to my media server, and can watch them anytime I want.

Podcasts, another form of media, are considered by most people to be disposable — after listening to an episode, many (most?) people delete it and move on to the next one. Compounding the issue, cell phones, the most popular way to listen to podcasts, have a finite amount of storage space. I currently subscribe to more than 50 podcasts, many of which release at least one new episode each week. If I were to save every episode of every podcast I listened to, my phone would would run out of space very quickly. The podcatcher I use for my phone (Downcast) only saves the latest five episodes of each show by default, and older episodes can be redownloaded or streamed from the original source.

But… what happens when the original source disappears? Many years ago there was a retro computing podcast called the Boring Beige Box that I absolutely adored. Matt Wilson, the show’s host, owned a PC in the late 80s and early 90s and shared his memories and stories from those times. As sometimes happens, Matt eventually lost interest in podcasting. The episodes were hosted on a pay service, and when he stopped paying the bill, they disappeared. Unless you had local copies of the episodes stored on your computer, there was no way to listen to them ever again. Sadly, this is not terribly uncommon. I remember one podcast where after the hosts had a falling out, one of them deleted every episode of their show from their webhost. Gone forever. I had another friend who, for personal reasons, removed 300+ episodes of his podcasts from the internet. In some cases, episodes of these shows were saved by listeners and archived online. In other cases, they were instantly expunged from existence.

That doesn’t work for Keepers.

Many years ago, I found a program that would download podcasts and save them on my computer. It was complicated to use and had almost no bells or whistles, but it worked. Mostly. Later I found a second program that was a little easier to use, but still didn’t do everything I wanted. Eventually I decided the only way to get everything I wanted in a podcatcher was to write my own.

The “program” I wrote (it’s really a PowerShell script) was called RobCast. I’ve been using it for the past two years, and a week hasn’t gone by that I haven’t had to fiddle with it. RobCast was designed to read a series of podcasts from a text file and download any new episodes it detected. The script worked great when things went how they were supposed to. The problem is, things rarely go how they’re supposed to, and the script doubled (and eventually tripled) in length as I continued modifying it to handle exceptions. For example:

  • The script worked great until a feed I had in my list became unavailable. I had to add code to make sure that what I thought was an RSS feed actually was an RSS feed.
  • Early on I made the assumption that all podcasts would be in mp3 format. This worked great until the first .m4a file arrived.
  • I wanted released episodes to be listed by release date, which meant appending the date to the front of each episode. To make this uniform, this meant converting every month (sometimes abbreviated, sometimes not) to a two digit code, converting all dates to two digits, and converting all years to two digits. Nobody’s XML feed is identical, and I had to tweak this part over and over as new exceptions to the rule were discovered.
  • I renamed every file with the show’s title instead of the file name… except some people don’t include a show title, because they are animals. So I had to deal with that.
  • Lots of podcasters put apostrophes and back slashes and all kinds of characters in their show titles which aren’t valid characters in file names, so I had to write a bunch of “replace” functions to remove them.
  • Sometimes, a download would abort for unknown reasons, leaving me with a corrupt file. I discovered that podcast feeds contain file lengths, so I wrote some code to compare the reported length of the file to the actual length of the file. What I quickly learned was, those numbers aren’t accurate. Some hosting websites add advertisements to their shows, so the length presented in the feed is the length of the file before the advertisement was added. Some feeds don’t include the length at all. And then I found multiple feeds that were being manually generated where every episode was listed as being the same length, which means people were literally lying. Animals!

Along the way I added a few neat features to Robcast. One, called “leech mode,” downloads every episode in a podcast’s feed — handy for archiving a a show’s entire run, or grabbing all the back episodes of a show you’ve just discovered. I did a couple of other neat things, but more often than not, most of the work I put into the thing was just to keep it working.

Every few months I would get so fed up with the thing that I would search Google to look for alternatives. There were and are several available, but none of them seemed to do what I wanted them to do. Even the ones that worked didn’t seem to present things in a logical format.

Last week I found a new one (to me) called Grover. I decided to check it out and all I can say it, whoever wrote this program thinks (or at least organizes things) like I do. New episodes are added to an “unplayed” folder and a default playlist. Podcast feeds are easy to add. Podcast refreshes can be scheduled. Frankly it does everything my script does but better, with a slick graphical interface to boot.

The default version of Grover is free. The professional version, which includes additional features such as the ability to update feeds in the background, limit the number of episodes to keep (per feed), and the ability to sync subscriptions through OneDrive, costs $3. The program is available for Windows 10 and some other Microsoft operating systems (even the Xbox), which met my needs.

Earlier this week I purchased Grover Pro and have been running both it and RobCast in parallel. Grover Pro hasn’t failed me yet, and in many (most?) ways works much better than the script I wrote. No more checking logs every morning to see if my script ran properly or not. No more messing with code each time someone decided to add a question mark to their show’s title. No more checking each show to see if it properly downloaded.

This morning, I disabled the daily scheduled task that runs RobCast, and I couldn’t be happier. I never wanted to write my own podcatcher — I did so out of necessity. I’m not jealous that someone did it better than I could. I’m grateful.

The Return of Podcasts

I hadn’t planned on taking a break from podcasting when we moved into our new home back in 2018. It just worked out that way.

I took for granted just how great my old room was for recording at the old house. The air conditioning was silent. The room’s upstairs location blocked the sounds of neighbors mowing and cars passing. The surrounding shelves of toys and books suppressed the room’s echo.

After we moved, I consolidated the function (and many of the contents) of three rooms into one. The new room’s bare, high walls echoed the echoes, and amplified the physical sounds my computer made. Recording anything of quality in that room was impossible. I moved my gear into the front room, and while the sound was a little better, it still wasn’t great. I decided to take a break from podcasting until my backyard workshop and movie room had been constructed. We estimated the whole process would take two to three months. Instead, it took seventeen.

A funny thing happened along the way: COVID-19. Over the past several months, we’ve seen nearly every aspect of the entertainment industry shut down. Sports, cancelled. Movie theaters, closed. Concerts, postponed. Yes, the moves, music, and books I already owned were still here waiting to be enjoyed, but the steady stream of new content I was so used to consuming dried up.

Except for podcasts. Every day, my phone downloads five or ten new podcast episodes for me to listen to. The topics range from retro video games to movie special effects, pop culture, and modern ghost stories. Some of these podcasts are created by celebrities, some of them are shows made by my friends, and some of them are recorded by complete strangers. They are comforting to listen to. Whether the hosts are famous or not, after a while the people on the other side of the microphone begin to sound like friends.

Pre-COVID I listened to podcasts when I could, but over the past several months, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I listen to at least one before starting work, and have them playing in the background when possible while working. I play them in the car, and I listen to them when I’m out working in my workshop. I listen to comedians telling jokes, interviews on NPR, and all kinds of weird, entertaining, and educational stuff.

At least once a week I get messages from people asking when my own podcasts are coming back, and somewhere along the way, I had an epiphany. My shows to them are what others’ shows are for me. Whether they personally know me or not, it’s that familiar voice, talking about topics they enjoy.

And so, about about a month ago, I pulled the podcart out of storage and began working out some show ideas. Over the past month I’ve put out four episodes: two of You Don’t Know Flack and two of my Commodore 64 themed podcast, Sprite Castle. I’ve decided to schedule new shows to come out just after midnight on Thursdays — just in time for Friday (or weekend) listening.

With all my gear set up, I realized something else. The shows I make aren’t just for other people to enjoy. I enjoy making them, too. Everything from the research before the shows to the feedback I get after they hit the internet is enjoyable to me. As much as the time spent listening to podcasts is helping pass the time until other forms of entertainment return, the making of them has the same effect on me.

The room I’m currently recording in is still has too much echo. Thanks to some donations from some of my listeners, I’ve ordered the materials needed to create a sound-deadening booth, which I’m hoping to assemble this week.

Link: Podcast.RobOHara.com

Podcast News and Consolidation!

When I started my first podcast (You Don’t Know Flack) back in 2008, I envisioned it as a complete package. I stood up a separate webpage and WordPress installation for it (podcast.RobOHara.com). I also created a dedicated email address and Facebook page for the show as well. The late 2000s were all about branding.

Time went on, and I launched more shows. I registered more domains like SpriteCastle.com and MultipleSadness.com, and created Facebook pages, email addresses, RSS feeds, iTunes pages, and Twitter accounts for those shows, too.

This was a great idea that didn’t scale well. Each time I launched a new show I registered more domains, created new social media accounts, installed more instances of WordPress, configured RSS feeds, tweaked iTunes, and so on. I set up mail forwarding, automatic updates, and a bevy of notifications, but things continued to grow. It seemed like something was always broken either an email account stopped working here, or iTunes got clogged on a feed there. I was spending more time on all my behind-the-scenes podcast stuff than I was actually recording podcasts. Each time a WordPress update was released I had to set aside time to back up databases, upgrade WordPress, upgrade plug-ins, and fix whatever broke. No bueno.

When I began to meet and interact with other podcasters I learned that most of them were smarter than I am. Guys like Carrington Vanston, Doug McCoy, Rick Reynolds, and countless others had combined their multiple podcasts under their own respective umbrellas (MonsterFeet, McCoyCast, and RickAndViv, respectively). After years of juggling and maintaining multiple sites and accounts, I have decided to do the same.

I have spent the past week exporting, importing, and consolidating all of my podcast-related WordPress sites down into a single website and a single Facebook page.

WWW: http://podcast.RobOHara.com
Facebook: Facebook.com/Robcasts

Consolidating all of my podcasts down to a single website has advantages for both you and me. For me, things will be cheaper and easier to maintain. If I decide to start a new show, all I need to do is create a new category and start uploading. If I, for whatever reason, decide to retire a show, the old episodes won’t go away. And if you want to find out whats going on with one (or any) of my shows, now there’s just a single place for you to check.

Each of my podcasts have and will continue to have their own individual RSS feeds and iTunes pages. Using these, you can subscribe to one, some, or all of my shows. None of these should have changed during the migrations.

RSS Feeds:

Cactus Flack’s: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CactusFlacks
Multiple Sadness: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MultipleSadness
Sprite Castle: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SpriteCastle
You Don’t Know Flack: http://feeds.feedburner.com/YDKF
All RobOHara-Podcasts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RobOHara-Podcasts

iTunes Feeds:

Cactus Flacks: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/cactus-flacks/id1097411896
Multiple Sadness: https://itunes.apple.com/nz/podcast/multiplesadness/id1018455751
Sprite Castle: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/sprite-castle/id827251255
You Don’t Know Flack: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-dont-know-flack/id368604225
All RobOHara-Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/robohara-podcasts/id989487448

The only podcast I record that hasn’t been migrated over is Throwback Reviews, which is hosted by my podcasting partner Sean, and still has its own website. Nothing has changed for it. Throwback Reviews still has the same RSS feed and iTunes link.

Thank you to all of my Patreons who support me over at Patreon.com/RobOHara. Whether it’s $1 or $5 per month, my Patreon supporters are the people who keep my shows going. Without them, none of this would be possible. Thank you all!

Podcast Mania

While the blog’s been more quiet than usual lately, I’ve recorded several podcasts over the past couple of weeks — two of which came out yesterday, in fact.

On the latest episode of You Don’t Know Flack I talk about the dedicated emulation PC I recently put together for our living room. It’s more of a high level look at such devices. I’m working on a more detailed article to go along with it that explains everything I did step by step.

My buddy Zerbinator and I recently started Rusted Metal, a podcast in which we discuss our favorite bands of the 80s. We’re going down the list alphabetically, so in episodes one and two we discussed AC/DC and Anthrax. We’ll be recording episode three this week in which we’ll be discussing Black Sabbath.

And finally, Zerb, my buddy Sean and myself recently spent an hour or so discussing Star Wars and the new Star Wars Episode VII Teaser Trailer over at ThrowbackReviews.com. If you felt a disturbance in the force, that was probably it.

Weekend Updates

Over the weekend I updated the States! section of the website. If you have not checked it out, it’s a list of every states I have ever visited with lots of pictures and mini-stories. In 2013 I added or updated Missouri, Illinois, Indianapolis, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Toronto (Ontario), Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. In this weekend’s update I updated Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.Check your state — maybe I’ve been there!

Link: robohara.com/states

Also last week I posted three new podcast episodes. Of the two for You Don’t Know Flack, one was technical in nature (“Networks”) while the other was non-technical (“The Creek”).

YDKF Episode 149: Networks
YDKF Episode 150: The Creed

I also released a new episode of Sprite Castle, on which I discussed the C64 game H.E.R.O. by Activision.

Sprite Castle 004: H.E.R.O.

I also had to rebuild a 4TB RAID5 container and recover my website from a backup. Maybe I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Here’s a picture of a cupcake dessert bar I visited in Vegas that has nothing to do with any of this.

Recent Podcast Appearances!

I’m home from Denver after attending the Kong Off 3. What a fun weekend! I’ll be writing more about it tomorrow, but to hold you over until then, here are a few recent podcasts I’ve appeared on.

You Don’t Know Flack Episode 145: About Podcasting
Episode 145 of You Don’t Know Flack is all about podcasting, literally. In this episode I talk about what it takes to start and run a podcast. On this episode I was joined by 8 fellow podcasters who also give their input and advice. If you have ever wanted to start your own podcast, this is a must listen!
Link: http://podcast.robohara.com/?p=408

Throwback Reviews Episode 22: Arcades Old and New
In this pre-Kong Off episode of Throwback reviews, Sean, Door, special guest Vic Sage and I talk about arcades (both old and new) and arcade games.
Link: http://throwbackreviews.com/?p=324

No Quarter Episode 58: Warrior
While hanging out in Denver, No Quarter co-host Mike Maginnis invited me over to join he and Carrington Vanston on the latest episode of No Quarter on which we discuss the 1979 vector video game Warrior.
Link: http://throwbacknetwork.net/?p=1496

Flux Capaci-Cast 13: Future Son
On Episode 13 of the Back to the Future themed podcast Flux Capaci-Cast, I join Guy Hutchinson and Jamaal Green to discuss the Data East Back to the Future pinball table, along with some of Michael J. Fox’s pre-BTTF roles. This episode also features an interview with Gavin Fox, the man behind the Hill Valley Project Twitter project.
Link: http://theacpn.com/flux-capaci-cast-13-future-son/

Sprite Castle Episode 24: Donkey Kong
It’s on like you-know-what in the latest episode of Sprite Castle in which I play two different versions of Nintendo’s classic Donkey Kong for the Commodore 64: Atarisoft’s (1983) and Ocean’s (1986). Which is better? Watch the video and decide!
http://throwbacknetwork.net/?p=1498

I’m Recording a Podcast about Recording Podcasts and Need Your Input!

For my next episode of You Don’t Know Flack, I’ll be covering the topic of recording podcasts. I’ve written a loose outline for the show and I have lots of opinions to share on how I do things, but they’re just my opinions. If you currently record a podcast, I’d like to include your opinions as well. Here’s how you can contribute!

Record a brief (no more than five minute) audio segment offering some podcast-related advice. Your target audience is people who are interested in starting their own podcast but haven’t created one yet. During your segment you can talk about any aspect of podcasting. Some useful topics might be:

– Hardware or Software suggestions! What kind of mic/computer/software do you use?
– Technical advice! What do you do to make things sound good?
– Show topics! How do you pick them? How do you plan them? Do you script things out or wing it?
– One host vs. multiple hosts! Again, what works best? What do you enjoy?
– Promoting your podcast! How do you get the word out?

You can tackle one of those topics, all of the topics (if you talk quickly!), or something completely different. Got any production tricks? Have you found a good way to organize your shows? Have you found something your listeners like (or don’t like)? This is a great opportunity for you to share your knowledge and insight with up-and-coming podcasters. (And, it’ll be some good promotion for your own shows as well as I’ll be plugging them on my show!) You could share some things that have worked for you… or maybe some of the things that didn’t work! It’s up to you!

To participate, you can do any of the following things:

01. Record a segment. The segment should be no more than five minutes in length, and in either mp3 or ogg format. Anything up to 25mb in size can be e-mailed to my gmail account. If you don’t know what that address is, I’ll give you a hint: it starts with “robohara”.

02. Phone it in! You can leave your suggestion on the You Don’t Know Flack voice line at 405-486-YDKF. The quality won’t be nearly as good, but at least people will hear what you have to say!

03. Send me an e-mail. If you don’t have the time to record anything, you can always simply e-mail me something.

The goal is to record this show next Monday, which gives you three work days and the entire weekend to come up with something. People want to hear from you! Don’t let them down! Don’t let me down!

Two New Podcast Appearances!

On the latest episode of Throwback Reviews, Ferg from the Atari 2600 Game by Game Podcast dropped by to chat with Sean and I about (what else) the Atari 2600! In this episode the three of us talk about some of our favorite games, some of our least favorite games, how we started collecting Atari games and what our collections look like today. (Spoiler: Ferg’s collection is the largest.)

Link: Throwback Reviews 19: The Atari 2600

The day after Sean, Ferg and I recorded Throwback Reviews, Guy and John J. from the Adventure Club Podcast invited me and Ferg to join them on their show. The timing was a little awkward at first, but everything worked out and I have to say this ended up being the most fun episode of ACP I have ever been on. Everybody was firing on all cylinders that night and this turned out to be one of the best episodes I have ever been a part of. A must listen!

Link: Adventure Club Podcast 72: Fitz, Flack and Ferg

Throwback Reviews Podcast: Forts, Wars & Bikes

We’re getting into a rhythm over at the Throwback Reviews. It’s not a hard set schedule, but lately Sean, Door and I have been alternating between movie reviews and what we’ve started calling “throwback episodes”. On the throwback episodes, the three of us sit around the mic and reminisce about some topic from our poast. On Episode 12 we sat around talking about toys we had (and some we didn’t have) while growing up in the late 1970s/early 1980s. That was a really fun show to record.

On episode 15 of Throwback Reviews we talk about Forts, Wars & Bikes. The original topic of this episode started out as “Summer Fun,” but what we ended up talking about the most was building and playing in forts, playing war, riding our bikes and simply exploring the world. This episode is around 90 minutes long and if Sean hadn’t made us wrap it up we could have gone another 90 minutes easily.

After we were done recording the episode, I sent Sean the following picture:

That’s me, in the spring of either 1984 or 1985. I had that sweet, sweet “Break Dance” sweatshirt in 5th and 6th grade and ditched it before 7th grade. Linda (my sister) is holding an Easter basket, so that’s why I am guessing it was the spring.

The reason I sent Sean this picture was because, in the top left hand corner, you can see my old fort. This is the only picture I can find of it. The original fort was built using wood we found that (I think) said Exxon-Mobile on it — you can see that on the right hand side of the fort. Dad later bought some particle wood panels and cut some windows out for us. The floor consisted of discarded rubber mats from Dad’s work, and there was an old army cot in there to sleep on in case one was brave enough to spend the night out there.

And yes, it really did have a PVC pipe that you could pee in that drained out into the creek. I’m pretty sure Mom made us take that down once she caught wind of what we were doing.

If you love hearing stories about the awesome 80s, check out the latest episode of Throwback Reviews.

Link: Throwback Reviews Episode 15: Forts, Wars & Bikes

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