A friend of mine send me a link to a website that lists hundreds of documentaries and links to where you can watch them for free. I’ve tried read “The truth about good and evil” by Friedrich Nietzsche but struggled with reading it. There was a documentary about it here. Well at least I know kind of what he was about now. And all for free.
I was almost tricked by a very convincing spam that I received this morning claiming to be from gmail.
“Due to the congestion in our Gmail servers,there would be removal of all unused Gmail Accounts.You will have to confirm if your E-mail is still active by filling out your login info below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.”
It then goes on to ask you DOB and some other details.
This is spam ignore it
I have just started to use mailchimp and set it up to mail out every post I put up from my rock bands website.
I am really impressed with it as it’s easy to setup and has lots of videos to show you how to do things. It is also free for the first 3000 emails so it makes it low risk to try out. The analytics seems pretty good as well. Awebber is another highly rated service I did not try this though as it is not free. I have heard good things about it though.
Below are a few comparison blogs Awebber vs Mailchimp
If anyone has any feedback about my choice of mailchimp then I would love to hear your opinion in the comments
Clare and I are now the proud owners of a 20 acre property with 2 dams, 1 house (with solar) a shed and a tipee near Castlemaine.
Politicians (both labour and opposition) have been talking about immigration policies that would see the Australian population to almost double from 22 to 36million by 2050. Australia currently has the fastest growing population in the world.
The Australian citizens have never been asked about this.
Yesterday I watched a video from Dick Smith that basically debunked most of the widely used reasons for a “Large Australia”. He is campaigning to have the politicians actually consult the the people about the population strategy and come up with a sensible plan.
Intro Video
Long Video
“Dick Smith is one of Australia’s most recognised individuals. After a successful business career in retailing and publishing, Dick has become well known as a restless adventurer, making many pioneering and record breaking flights by helicopter, aeroplane and balloon.” More info and complete text on Dick Smiths full website here.
World Growth
Dick also broaches the subject of world population growth and the predicted increase in population from 6.7 to just over 9 billion by 2050. World food production over the last 9 years has remained flat and is looking likely to decrease as more soil becomes infertile. Concern about food availability in the future is one of the drivers that got me interested in permaculture. To see more about me and permaculture go to my permaculture page.
I just published the latest podcast for my band Jimmy Yukka & His Amazing Band. I thought writing a post about how I did it might be useful. For this episode I decided to try to record a podcast whilst walking around a park. Obviously by doing this you do sacrifice sound quality but if this means I can more easily complete regular podcasts then for me its a sacrifice worth taking.
So heres how I did it.
Recording
Mixing
Putting on WordPress
Silly Mic
After testing walking around the park and recording I realised that although the mic in the iphone headset is pretty good but it does get affected by wind noise in addition when it moves and hits something it made an annoying noise. So the first thing I did was cover the cable mic with a headphone foam and attatched it with a paperclip to the cable. I then wrapped the cable around my sunglasses arm to stop it from banging about. Although it looks quite ridiculous it worked fairly well.
The standard voice recording software on the iphone is a bit annoying. I downloaded italk recorder with italk syncthese are both free and I quite like them. With this software you can change the recording quality and pause the recording. There is a good review of it italk here.
I had sketched out what I was going to talk on a paper about the size of a post it pad and then left the house.
I picked up my iPhone and walked to the park and started to record. I realized that I had to walk reasonably slowly otherwise I would be heavy breathing too much. I also have to slow down by speaking a bit. I recorded the show about 8 times and ended up using the last recording.
Some people don’t even do this step. I will have to do a lot more podcasts before I can miss this out. I used to think I was pretty articulate but when I listen to a recording of myself I realised what a blundering dither I am when I speak. So I think I recorded about 25 mins and edited out 10 mins of waffle and errrrrrr and eummmm and ahhhhhh and sneezes and coughs etc. I edited the podcast in Garageband.
Once I finished editing I then move my recording to itunes so I can review it on my iphone. To do this go to the menu in garageband called “share” and then “send podcast to itunes”. I then synch my iphone and review the podcast making notes if theres anything that needs to change. If it needs re-editing I then re-edited the podcast and repeat.
Once I was happy with the recording I then move my recording back to iTunes. Once the recording is in iTunes right, click on the recording in iTunes and select “get info” to setup the information about the podcast episode.
In order to do this you will need add the plugin podpress and setup your podcast. This page here has a good overview on how to setup podpress for your podcast and use it for posting podcasts.
Podpress (see above) will have installed an extra section in the “add new post” screen that allows you to add your podcast file to the new post (which will be the show notes.)
To listen to the final result the podcast “Episode 4” can be listened to or subscribed to from my bands website www.jimmyyukka.com. Earlier podcasts were recorded with myself and Mick using my macbook pro with the integrated mic and recording straight to Garageband.
Podcast Advisor
If anyone reviews this and has any better ideas then please comment below.
Clare and I went to the Projection festival in Melbourne last week. Basically a load of the shops on the street were lit up by projection from sometimes accros the road and in some cases whole buildings were projected on
Clare and the bar in the back was lit up and changed pattern and colour over time
Outside a costume shop
People in the shop knitting
Knitting sandwiches – yum!
We had someone threatening to throw themselves of the build over from us yesterday. We could see it all from our kitchen window. I watched it unfold for for a bit from our kitchen window on the 31st floor.There were 6 police officers and a negotiator trying to talk him down. Burke St outside our office was shut down. After about 5 mins of nothing really happening I decided that either nothing was going to happen for ages or he would jump. I decided I didn’t really want to see either so I stopped and went back to work. When I went out for lunch there was a huge crowd of onlookers on the street. Above is a picture of my office (its the big grey building on left). The “jumper” was on a building opposite.
Details below
UPDATE 2.25pm: ONLOOKERS cheered as man talked down from a building’s rooftop after CBD streets blocked for more than two hours.
Negotiators brought the incident to an end about 1.20pm today, after tense scenes on the rooftop of the seven-storey building today.
Emergency crews raced to the scene near the corner of Hardware lane just before 11am.
The incident brought traffic to a standstill between Hardware lane and Queen St in both directions, forcing trams, motor traffic and pedestrians to be diverted around the scene.
About five police officers, including negotiators, were seen on the roof of the building as they talked to the man.
At least four police cars blocked the streets at the height of the drama as hundreds of office workers watched the scene with bated breath.
Their relief was obvious as cheers erupted from neighbouring buildings as the man was taken into protective custody.
He is understood to have been treated by paramedics a short time later.
Social networks were buzzing with the incident this afternoon, with office workers taking pictures of the scene, and alerting their colleagues. Source the Herald Sun
My brother was trying to change his harddrive on his mac mini yesterday. This video on youtube showed him how to do it -great!
I have just set my blog to automatically update my Facebook and twitter status every time I publish a blog. to to this I have used the plugins FacepressII and twitter tools. Both were very easy setup and both work. I did try wordbook but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work so I gave up.
So now everytime I update a blog the title of the blog gets put into the profile along with a url.
