But it gets amazingly better.

There is a flight simulator hidden in the program! After you install it, you hit Cntl+A (in Linux), Cmd+A (in Mac OSX), Cntl+Alt+A (in Windows). Yes! It works in Linux too.

For those not familiar with flight sims (which would include me), there is a list of the keyboard commands you will want to know. You can navigate quite a bit with your mouse, but you will need the keyboard to get the most out of it.

Click on the screen shot to the right to get a full size picture. I chose LAX as my airport of departure for no real reason other than I had recently been there. You will see in the pic that there are 2 push-pins. I was shocked to see them while flying. Those are stores that I had mapped in Google Earth when I was in Long Beach. The flight sim takes into account all of your personal settings inside of Google Earth. Awesome!

I heard about it from Marco’s Blog. Check out his article for more details.

While I enjoy using Picasa in Linux, it is not a native Linux application. It is kluged into Linux via Wine. This got me to thinking that I might be able to install Wine and get a recent Windows version of Picasa up and running. The only thing that concerned me was that I remember there was talk that the Wine install that Google built for its software was very modified and a standard install of Wine would probably not work.

I did some surfing around and found a nice tutorial on getting the current version of Picasa (2.7 build 28.3205,0) to play nicely with the current version of Wine (0.9.43).

This info is pulled off of a mailing list. The person who posted it said it was not original to him, but he did not know where he got it. If you know the original source of this, let me know. I will gladly give credit.

Let me step you through each part of the process. These steps were originally written for Ubuntu. I will leave them intact and comment under the steps if there are any changes.

The steps with commentary

1. I installed Picasa as usual (v2.2 for linux)

I installed the original version of Picasa for Linux. This is a truly enjoyable experience since it installs (somewhat) like a Windows program. While I am a dyed in the wool Linux user, there needs to be a standard way to install software. Google has done a good job with the installers for Google Earth and Picasa.

2. I started it up and scanned some folder containing photos

Just let it do it’s thing. For me this took no time at all since I had previously had Picasa running on my system, it found all the configurations and photos.

3. Shut down picasa AND the media detector

The media detector is the little Picasa logo that sits in the tray by the clock (on KDE). Right click it to choose the option of shutting it down.

4. Installed wine (apt-get install wine)

If you are using Slackware, then don’t use apt-get. It does not work here. I grabbed the latest version of Wine for Slackware 12 (even though the site is in Italian, the package was English). Install the package just like you normally would any other Slackware software package. If you don’t know how, there are tutorials for that too.

As a side note, and something that was confusing to me, there was no Wine configuration that I needed to do. Just keep plugging through the steps and you will get there.

5. Downloaded picasa 2.5 for windows (wget http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasaweb-current-setup.exe)

Again, this is a step in Ubuntu (and other Debian based systems). Just go download the Windows .exe file from Picasa.

6. Installed it using wine (wine picasaweb-current-setup.exe)

This is done from the command line. cd to the directory where you downloaded the picasaweb-current-setup.exe file and issue this command: wine picasaweb-current-setup.exe

7. When asked if I want to run Picasa, I did so, then I shut down picasa AND the media detector (if running)

This will happen after Wine gets through with the install. The media detector ran for just a second and found only a few pictures. I became concerned at this point thinking that I was going to have to start all over getting the new Picasa set up with my pictures. But that problem is taken care of in the following steps.

7. Moved the old picasa installation (as root):
cd /opt/picasa/wine/drive_c/Program Files
mv Picasa2 Picasa22

Why this is also step 7, I don’t know. You enter the lines under step 7 into your console as root. Each line is done separately. The first line gets you into the directory where Picasa is stored and the second line moves the whole install into a different directory (so you don’t lose it). I believe this is the original Picasa install, not the one you just installed.

8. While in the same dir i copied the new installed Picasa 2.5:
cp -R home/USERNAME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Picasa2/ .

Just run the line of code at your command prompt. You will need to substitute your username where it says USERNAME. That period on the end is important. Don’t leave that off or it won’t work.

8. Then it just worked… Good luck!
I had big troubles getting the start up logo disappearing, this is why some steps are kind of awkward.

That was exactly my experience. It worked! Except…

The fallout (however minor)

I was not able to start it from the newly created desktop shortcut. When I did that, it was like I was starting the new version, but with no photos (like after the first step 7 above). But going to the command line (or ALT+F2) and typing in “picasa” (without quotes) started the program just fine.

My only issue now is with getting connected to the Web Albums (the reason I wanted to upgrade to begin with). I am getting the “Failed to connect to server. Please try again later.” error. This can be caused by a few of different issues. I think mine is tied to the fact that I am outside the US and their only Web Albums server is a US one.

Let me write that up as a separate issue in a later post.

I am not sure what good things should have been loaded with the upgrade, but it at least broke my wireless. My computer did not even see my Linksys WPC11 card at all after the upgrade. Well, that is not entirely true. It knew that I stuck something in the PCMCIA slot, but not what it was or anything.

Trolling through the Ubuntu forums, I found a thread that currently is 34 pages long with people trying to get and give help on getting wireless to work in the new Ubuntu. Actually, it is not so new. It has been out for over 2 months.

By reading through this thread, the best I have found so far is to comment out the two lines in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist that read:

blacklist r818x
blacklist r8187

In my blacklist file, they were the last 2 lines. Now the machine can see my card, but I am still not able to connect automatically like before. I have been able to connect however. Someone said that you need to put an “x” at the end of the wireless SSID name for it to work. It worked for me without this.

It seems to me that something that has drawn this much attention should be addressed by the Ubuntu team. It was working before, what caused them to have to break it?

I am sticking to Slackware on my main box. I did try Slack on my notebook, but sadly, could not get wireless working at all. Ubuntu 6.10 worked out of the box. I might downgrade back to 6.10 if I cannot get this working right.

Watch the video and then continue reading to see how you can make RSS work for you.

Now that you know what it is, why would you use it? As was explained in the video, you can have your newspaper “feed” the information to you. If you like reading blogs, then using an RSS reader can really be a help in getting your information in one place instead of surfing to each blog. Then when you see a post that interests you and you want to comment on it, you can go to the blog to make your comments. This saves a lot of time and makes sure you don’t miss anything.

How does it save time? The reading software will constantly be checking for updates to the websites you are “subscribed” to. When you open your feed reader you will have all the latest news and blog posts. You don’t have to load up 6 different blogs and news sites. Also, you won’t be wasting time if the site has not been updated since your last visit. This is particularly helpful for sites which don’t update often. It is easy to just stop going to look for updates if there has not been one in a while.

It keeps you from missing anything because the reader will pull all the information together in one place. You are less likely to forget a site for a few days (which happens if you individually surf to sites) and miss something important. Again, especially true for sites which don’t update often.

You can get stand alone reader software for your computer, or you can use an on-line reader. I have accounts with Google Reader and Bloglines. Both are on-line readers, but I use neither. I have the accounts, but only occasionally visit the sites. That is because I primarily use one computer and have reader software installed on the computer. The software I use is small, streamlined and fast.

You may want to look at one of the on-line offerings if you move from computer to computer, or you have a good Internet connection negating the “slow as molasses” page loading problem that some of us experience.

There downside of using an RSS feed reader as opposed to visiting the site directly is that you are not exposed to all the ads that the blogger or news site imposes on you. Also, you don’t get “counted” as a page visit unless you actually go to the website. Neither of these issues is a problem for you as the reader, it only affects the page host.

If you want to use an on-line reader, I recommend both Bloglines or Google Reader. I have not used either enough to know which I like better, but they both work. For a stand alone solution, you will have to look around. I use Akregator, but that is only available for Linux. My wife used to use FeedReader when she was on Windows. I have not really searched for one on the Mac. When I am sitting at the Mac, I just use Google Reader. But, I only use the Mac when I am handcuffed and forced to watch a TV show since the Mac is in the TV room. My use of RSS on that machine has been limited.

Do you have a favorite reader that you use? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

I have not touched at all on how to subscribe to a site. Many sites will have a nice little button that will allow you to subscribe right into Bloglines or Google Reader. That makes those options more appealing.

Yesterday afternoon we started having connection issues with our DSL provider, Prodigy. The way it was coming and going, it seemed more like a network problem than my personal connection to the world. But, I called them this afternoon anyway just in case it might be my modem.

The agent that took my call, Victoria, spoke a bit fast and didn’t seem to care that I was not a native Spanish speaker. If I didn’t understand something I would ask for a clarification. Like most people, she just said the same words but a bit louder. I think people don’t understand that when a foreigner does not understand a word, that saying the same word over and over does not make it clearer. You need to find a basic synonym of the word.

Well, we worked through those issues little by little. Obviously that is not what was good about the experience.

She stepped me through resetting the modem/router to the factory defaults and then we messed with some settings inside the modem and it all eventually worked out fine. In the process I had to get a new IP address assigned by the router. She asked me which version of Windows I was using. I told her I did not have a Windows machine, but I had Linux and Mac available to me. When I said that I was sitting at the Linux machine and it was the one closest to the modem, she asked me to reboot so that I could get a new IP. Most of the time I get told by other ISPs that they do not support Linux and therefore I would need to do the configuration on Windows, or they would not be able to help me. She did not mind that I was using Linux nor that I manually requested an IP address from the modem instead of rebooting.

I have even been told by a DSL provider (many years ago) that their system would not work on Linux and that I would have to cancel my service with them if I wanted to use Linux. I had been using their service for 10 months at that point with Linux, it was just that I was having problems with the modem for some strange reason. I ended up hanging up with him and figured the problem out myself.

So, Prodigy in Mexico did not seem stunned that I was running Linux and Victoria did not mind that I actually used my own brain to do what she wanted me to do. Usually you have to go through their exact set of steps or they don’t know how to proceed from there.

It is always nice to have a good customer service experience.

It was not a waste of money for Linux. There was significant media coverage of the fact that Tux was featured on a car. This news release from Tux500.com has some good comments in it as well as some details about the media coverage garnered for Linux.

I am sorry that the car crashed and the driver was injured. But it seems to have been a successful event for Tux. Since he was placed 31 out of 33 cars, there was not much thinking that he would win. Just being there was an honor.

The original goal of the guys at Tux500 was to raise $350,000, enough to fully sponsor a car in the race. Instead, they were able to pull together $18,300 and got a nice prominent spot on the nosecone of the Chastain Motorsports’ No. 77 car.

News.com has some nice photos you can see of the car and logo.

At their website you can also see a nice video that the Tux500 crew put together about the event. I just wished I knew about it sooner so that I could have helped with the promotion. Maybe they will do it again next year.

Here is their news release from yesterday afternoon.

The End of a Campaign, the Beginning of a Movement

Saturday, May 26 2007 @ 10:20 AM MDT
Contributed by: bob
Views: 677

At Noon EDT, the Tux 500 campaign came to an end. The final donation came in, the final piece of merchandise was purchased. We have tallied all of the donations, and what was earned from t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and the like. The final amount raised by the Tux500 project is….

* drumroll *

$18,308.90!

Thank you to everyone in the Linux community that made this happen! Tux is going to look sweet tomorrow on the nosecone of the #77 Chastain Motorsport’s car, as Roberto Moreno guides him (yes, a guided penguin missle!) around the speedway at speeds of 220 mph!

One very interesting thing to note is that over the last few days, on our statistics page, a new distro has been jumping up the charts. Due to the effort of fans of the Linux From Scratch project, it is now the #2 distro in terms of contributions! An additional thanks to you, for the final push over $18000!

Next week, we’ll talk about the project, and where we go from here. Today and tomorrow, we’ll bask in what we all have accomplished… what this community has done is truly historic. And I believe this is only the beginning!

Don’t miss the race tomorrow… it starts at 1pm EDT (UTC-4) and pre-race coverage begins 1 hour before the race in most markets. Enjoy this people… we’ve all earned it!

GO TUX!

I am getting ready to head out on a trip and am taking my trusty dusty notebook computer. The one I use every 4 months when I go on a trip. This is an old 750 MHz machine with a 12″screen. Definitely not the desktop replacement most people are looking for. I also end up putting on a new distribution of Linux just about every time I take it out just so I have something new to play with.

Tonight I was chatting with one of the members of the Pensacola Linux Users Group about getting ready for my trip. I told him I could not go to bed because I felt like there was something I was missing to be ready. One of the biggest things is that I really need access to a few of my files this week, but I did not want to just copy all my documents to the notebook, nor did I want to pick and choose the 100 most important files that I may not need at all.

I asked him if I could set up a VPN in 30 minutes or less. He seemed hopeful that it might be possible. I think he is an optimist. I told him what it was I wanted to accomplish and said I could do it with SSH and SCP if I could just get a VPN set up. He then said I simply needed to do some port forwarding in my router and have the traffic sent to the box I wanted to touch internally.

I did not realize it was so simple. So here is how it works if you would like to do the same. I won’t go into the details of each step. I will assume you have about the same amount of knowledge that I have in this and that, like me, you simply need someone to help you connect the dots. Therefore, I am not writing this for my parents sake.

This assumes also that you have SSH working internally. Port forward port 22 in your router to the internal machine you want to go to. Know your external IP address and then just ssh into the external IP like you normally would an internal IP to get to the machine you want. You can get you external IP given to you by visiting www.ipchicken.com. So you would do: ssh username@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. That is, the username on the computer you are SSH’ing into. Then the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the external IP address of your home network which you got from www.ipchicken.com. You will be prompted for your username’s password. You might also be told that the SSH keys are new and asked if you are sure you want to take that step.

SCP works the same as normal. Just substitute the external IP address for the home network and you are in.

For me, I prefer a GUI solution. So I am using gFTP on the notebook. Then I connect to port 22 with my username/password combo. Then change the protocol to SSH2. ¡Viola! I am connected and can browse my home folder’s file structure. I can then pull anything over that I want, or put anything on the machine at home.

That simple. Whod’ve thought?

Now I can go to bed.

Today Apple published an article by Steve Jobs telling what he thinks needs to be done with the DRM system. If you take time to read the article, realize that this is all very self-serving to Apple. This is not proposed by him because he loves you and me, it is so that we will love Apple more. But more importantly, so that all the countries that are suing Apple for limiting their DRM technology to iPods and iTunes will back off. That said though, this is very good for us as consumers as well. So, yes, he is proposing this for the purpose of not loosing billions of dollars in law suits and potentially having to lock out certain countries from using iTunes, but the side benefit, if it flies, is that you will be able to play your iTunes purchased music on many other devices.

I have owned an iPod for nearly 2 years. I have bought 2 songs off of iTunes and will probably purchase about that many over the next 2 years if things stay the same as they are now. Those 2 songs I bought will never be able to legally play on my Linux machine (which is my primary computer). I also cannot play them on my iRiver MP3 player. But if things change to a model where Apple drops DRM completely (which, by the way, Jobs said he would do in a heart beat, but is limited by the recording industry, this is not his choice), I would consider buying many more songs through the iTunes Music Store, or other on-line music stores.

As it is, I am limiting my purchases from on-line stores to Magnatune. They have a lot of music that I like, but not a lot of music I don’t like. So if your musical tastes are not what mine are, you may not find much there. Magnatune allows you to purchase music for a price you specify (as little as $5 per CD), then share that download with your friends for no extra cost. They actually encourage you to do so. They understand that you are more likely to purchase music if you get a chance to hear it first. They are their own recording label (of sorts), therefore do not have all the big names. But what they do have is top notch. It is not a bunch of independent artists who cannot get signed with anyone else because they stink. They really have good stuff.

Anyway, back to the point of the post. Check out the article. I got the tip off about this article from Podcasting News where they give a good summary of the article if you would rather read a short breakdown of it. I actually have not read the whole Jobs’ article since I got so excited about it that I had to post this. But as soon as I upload this I will digest the article.

Update:
I have read the article now. Wow! While there will be detractors from this idea that Jobs has, I think it holds some validity. He posits (a little incorrectly) that only 10% of the world’s music is sold with DRM and that 90% is distributed DRM free, and furthermore is easily pirateable; therefore, keeping DRM in on-line music store purchases is not necessary. Where he is a little wrong is that the 10% number comes from just music sold through iTunes. But, at most, legal on-line purchases certainly make up less than 25% of the total music purchased.

Very good article. I hope this gets picked up and starts some wheels turning. It really is worth the read if you remotely care. (Mom, that does not include you. You can skip this one.)

It is kinda long, so you might want to bring a cup of coffee along for the ride.

I used to write a lot of longer articles for the group. We are finishing up our 6th year as a LUG. When we first started there were so few with any Linux knowledge that I would do a writeup on every new thing I learned. Now the group has quite a large number of intelligent members that I feel like the newbie in the room. So I have not been writing as many articles for the group like I used to.

Here is an excerpt:

While I titled this How to Podcast from Linux, it really is not Linux specific. The only real software that you need that will be running on your local system is Audacity which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Everything else can be done through the web browser.

What makes a Podcast?
File types
The files can be just about any file type/format you want. For audio podcasts these are usually .mp3 or .ogg. For video podcasting there are several formats to chose from. I am not sure which is the most common since I don’t do a video podcast.

You can read the rest at the P’cola LUG forum.

Don’t forget to check out my podcast at: www.missionarytalks.com

I have been very pleased with how smoothly things have gone. Of course this is helped by my friends at the Pensacola Linux Users Group. I have been in their IRC channel to get help on a few of the technical issues.

Someone asked why I chose Slackware. Really that was not as important as why move from Mandriva. I was getting frustrated with Mandriva. It used to be a very mainstream distro of Linux. Every time you went to install software you were able to download a Mandriva specific RPM and install it. But, those days are gone. When Mandrake merged with Conectiva, things tanked quickly. The community love towards Mandrake seemed to change.

Mandrake was always flaky (for me) on the package management. Sometimes urpmi would work. Sometimes not. Keeping my sources up to date seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Early on I religiously used only packages in the sources. This made sure everything was tracked by the package manager. But then there was always a piece of software I wanted that was not in the repositories. So I would either have to wait, install an old version, or install and hope that I did not hose anything. I got more and more lax on that the last couple of years. Things also got less and less stable.

I have been upgrading the OS on this hard drive since 2002 without ever really wiping it and installing fresh. That is a definite death knell in Windows. Should not matter in Linux unless the distribution providers move the locations of important files from one version to the next. Well…Mandrake and Mandriva have not stayed consistent.

So, why then did I move to Slackware? Here are just a few of the reasons. The biggest is that I am a fan of KDE. Slackware pushes KDE as it’s desktop environment. Many of the really popular distros at the moment use GNOME. While GNOME has improved greatly over the last several years, so has KDE. I am familiar with KDE and there are just a few niggly things about GNOME that I have trouble working around. Though, I have to admit I have run it on my notebook recently and it is a very good desktop environment. I could get used to it. I just don’t chose to.

The second reason is that Slackware seems to hold to more of a standard way of doing things. When you go looking for help online you will find a default way of configuring and setting up software. Then there will be an endless list of “If you are using this distro, then do this. And this distro do this.” With Slackware it seems to follow the default more often. To me, that means I can more easily get help on line. This is another area where Mandriva seemed be be getting left behind. They do things in less standard ways. And, with the community ignoring them more, you get less personalized Mandriva help.

Finally, and this is probably the biggest, I have several friends in the LUG that use it. I have been playing with it off and on for well over a year through either dual boot or on my 20th century notebook that I bought used last year. It has been pretty good to me. And with colleague help, that makes it much better for me. I ran Linux alone from 1997 to 2000. When I fell in with the P’cola LUG, that helped define my distro choices. For a while several of us were running Mandrake. I was finally the last man standing. Though there are very strong opinions as to which distro each member believes is the best, there are several Slackware devotees.

I have played with Ubuntu and really like it. But, it comes with GNOME. KUbuntu was so awful when I last used it, I swore off of it. I have used Gentoo in the past, but only for more of an embedded type environment. I don’t think I could stand it for desktop use. Suse was an option, but I feel they are too much like Mandriva. Though they currently have more community love going their direction. Fedora Core is not an option. I swore off of Red Hat (Fedora Core’s roots) at version 9. Though I never liked it going back to the days when Red Hat 2.something was popular. I kept trying it each new version until they hit 9 and that was the last of the jankyness I could take.

So, there we are. The move from Mandriva to Slackware and the why behind it. I must say, I have been using Slackware for about 24 hours and I have yet to have a program crash. Firefox in Mandriva would crash every few hours on me. With certain games the whole system would go down. I have yet to get the games installed, but that should happen later tonight. We shall see.

Today I purchased an Epson Stylus C67. It is sold in Latin America, not in the US. The price at Office Depot was $549 pesos. That is about $50 US Dollars. The cheapest I have seen that printer for online is $66 (USD). I feel like I got a good deal.

In the process of buying the printer the cashier asked me if I wanted to charge the printer on a 12 month interest free plan they were offering. Hmm, that would work out to less than $4.25 a month. What an idiotic program this is. It is an infection. I can see “12 months same as cash” on a $500 product, but $50? The disease of credit (which is wicked and why so many people are in financial trouble today) has infected México as badly as, or maybe worse than, the US. You can get credit to buy almost anything here. There is one store whose whole business model is selling stuff on credit.

Well, I certainly was not interested in buying a $50 printer on credit. If I cannot pay $50 for a printer, then I don’t need the printer. If it were a pressing issue and I had to do some printing, I could easily go to any one of the thousands of Internet cafés here and print my paper for a few cents. Then save my money for a few months and buy the thing with cash. That is what our grandparents used to do. They did not buy stuff if they did not have the money for it.

So, I told the cashier that I would not buy the printer on credit, but that I wanted to pay for it all at once. “And, furthermore,” I told her, “credit is an invention of the Devil” (in Spanish of course).

Then something interesting took place. She had to call a manager over. Because I was not buying with credit, the manager had to override the purchase. Huh? Why? Well, the “no interest for 12 months” is not entirely true. I found out that if you pay cash, then the printer only costs $494 pesos (about $45 US Dollars). There was nothing on the display saying that it cost less if you pay cash than if you do their credit. I saved $5 (USD), simply because I used cash and not credit. So how do they get by saying that there is not interest if you use their credit? I guess it is not interest if you charge the extra $5 up front.

Anyway, I am pleased with my purchase. This is the first time I have bought something other than food or clothing here in México where I feel like I have gotten a good deal. Normally we would pay much more for something like a printer than the equivelant in the US. The cheapest Epson printer I currently see at Office Depot in the US is $90. That is twice what I paid for my printer here. Never mind the fact that the one at the US Office Depot website has a scanner. It is still the cheapest you can buy from them.

This one works perfectly in Linux too. Or at least as much as I have tested so far.

That said, Apple is shooting themselves in the foot. And, I think they deserve to loose that foot to lead poisoning from the bullet they put in there.

They have started cracking down on companies that use the word “pod” in their products. I think this is fair depending on what the product is. Certainly any type of portable media device should not contain the word “pod.” But now they are going after the word “podcast.”

Apple did not come up with the word podcast. To get a full history of where the word comes from you need to read the Wikipedia article about it. Suffice it to say, it was not an Apple invention.

For those of you who don’t know here is an explanation of the technology. RSS is a technology that allows you to subscribe to websites to see when new content is uploaded. In the ancient past (5-10 years ago) you could subscribe to a service that would go look at websites for you and send you an email when the site was updated [if anyone finds a link to one of those old services let me know]. That was back when pages were pretty static. RSS takes that same idea, but instead of a third party looking at the page, you have an RSS reader that goes and gets the new content and lets you read it in the reader, or gives you a link so you can read it at the page. This is great for sites that change a lot, particularly blogs. www.mythoughtspot.com has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to and your reader can let you know when I update the site.

Podcasting is an extension of that really cool technology. Instead of text and pictures, it is audio (or video) files. When a new file is uploaded, your RSS reader can go and download the file for you and it is ready for you to listen to or watch at your convenience. This special RSS reader is called a podcatcher (unless Apple has already banned the use of that word too). iTunes is a good example of a podcatcher. It happens to be the one I use (on the wife’s Mac). I used to be able to list several other podcatching software, but Apple has already sued all of them and they have had to change their names and I have not kept up with the name changes. The whole idea is that they are RSS readers for audio and video files.

That brings us to the current news. This week Apple sent a cease and desist letter to Podcast Ready. I am not entirely sure what all they do. But part of what they do is provide software that allows the mp3 player to act as its own podcatcher. You don’t even need to have software on the computer. You just plug in the Podcast Ready device into a USB port and it goes and downloads the new podcasts on its own. It does not have to be an mp3 player either. For example, I have a USB drive I can run their software on. Then when I get into my truck that plays mp3s from a USB drive, I could just pop in the drive and my podcasts would be there. How cool is that?

Well, they are being hounded by Apple for using the word podcast. Now the question was proposed by Leo over at TWiT if podcasts should change their name. Part of the argument for changing the name is that we would put this garbage by Apple behind us. The argument against it is mostly two fold. One is that if you give in, then Apple wins. What makes that different from the idiocy of Microsoft and their strong arming? Secondly, “podcast” is a pretty entrenched word. It is even officially recognized in Webster’s Dictionary.

Some of the suggestions for a name change include: netcast, webcast, audiocast, videocast (because podcasts include both audio and video some people suggest that we should separate the two terms), tunecast, mediacast, gocast, pushcast, audcast, vidcast, radio shows (that is clever), echocast, eCast (both video eCast and audio eCast). There are more suggestions in the discussion at the TWiT site, but those are the ones I wrote down. Most are self explanatory. The word cast comes from the word broadcast, or more appropriately as it pertains to podcasts, narrowcast. Then there are a few that need explanation. Pushcast because it uses what we used to call “push” technology. You say you want it and when it is available, it gets pushed to your computer. Gocast because it is something you listen to on the go. You don’t have to be connected to the net to listen like netcast or webcast suggest. Echocast because it is something that is recorded and propogates like an echo through servers to get to the listener/viewer. ECast because it is an electronic form of broadcasting. Then there would be audio eCast and video eCast.

The problem to Apple in all of this is that it is assumed by newbies that you have to have an iPod to listen to these. Why, oh why would Apple want to change that perception? I have talked to many people who have heard of podcasts but think they can’t listen to them unless they buy an iPod. I tell them they don’t have to have an iPod and that any mp3 player would work. Why would Apple want people to assume differently. They have their products being pushed each and every time someone uses the word podcast. No one is infringing on their rights because they do not own the word. In fact, Apple is getting free, get this FREE, advertising each time you read the word podcast or hear it. They have nothing to claim cease and desist over. They have never owned the word. I doubt they can own the word. Why not go on letting the world think you have to have an iPod to listen? I would think this drives a few sales.

So, I agree with a name change, though it probably won’t happen. I don’t know if it will affect iPod sales if the name changes. But anything to make Apple look stupid, which they are being, and lose a few sales of iPods, I am all for. Really, changing the name will probably not affect iPod sales enough to hurt Apple. Too bad. And it will give them what they want. Double too bad.

For the record, I like eCast. There needs to be a distinction between an audio and video podcast. When I go to subscribe to podcasts, if I am not careful, I assume they are all audio. I sometimes end up with video ones which I am just not interested in. So having a name for each would be nice. Audio eCast and video eCast seem to fit the bill for me. Though, I doubt we will see a change.

I am going to try and keep up with my running. May not post as often, depending on how the Internet access goes.

I am armed with a few books. I have my Ultramarathon Man that arrived on Tuesday night. It won’t last long. I am already 1/3 into it. Coast to Coast was not one of the books that fit into my wife’s suitcase coming back. It will come back with my son about the time we get back from our road trip. But, I also got a stack of Linux magazines that my wife brought home that should keep me somewhat entertained.

I will give a full book report on Ultramarathon Man when I get it all read, but let me just say up front, Dean Karnazes is not stable. I don’t know if he knows this, but he is obviously a textbook ADD/ADHD case. Good for him that he found a way to channel that. Too bad it took him till he was 30 to find an outlet.