News items for tag podcasting - Koos van den Hout

Vandaag kwam ik een artikel tegen Generaals b.d. Van Uhm en De Kruif beginnen podcast over oorlog en het leek me wel leuk om deze podcast eens te beluisteren.

Alleen geeft het artikel daar bijzonder weinig informatie over. Het enige wat er te vinden is:

De eerste aflevering van Veldheren wordt vrijdag op Spotify en Apple Podcast gelanceerd.

Maar ik wil allebei niet gebruiken om de podcast te beluisteren, ik wil deze podcast gewoon beluisteren in mijn podcast speler, te weten op dit moment 'Pocket Casts'. Zoals Dave Winer aangeeft in Podcasts are feeds - Dave Winer Scripting News is iets pas een podcast als het een RSS feed heeft. Dus ik zoek een URL van de RSS feed van deze podcast, dan kan ik de podcast toevoegen.

Diverse zoekopdrachten geprobeerd, en uiteindelijk kom ik terecht op Veldheren bij podcast24.nl / podcast24.co.uk waar nog steeds geen feed informatie staat. Maar de URL van de feed is wel uit de source te halen, omdat de podcast24.nl site ook gewoon op de feed gebaseerd is, maar dat zelf niet laat zien. In de source van de pagina zit nog informatie uit de feed en iets wat op een gemangelde url lijkt:

url:"https:\u002F\u002Frss.art19.com\u002Fveldheren"

En als ik daar eens aan snuffel lijkt het er wel op te gaan lijken:

$ curl -kI https://rss.art19.com/veldheren
HTTP/2 200 
x-frame-options: DENY
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block
x-content-type-options: nosniff
last-modified: Thu, 23 Feb 2023 14:50:22 GMT
cache-control: max-age=45, public
content-type: application/rss+xml; charset=utf-8
content-md5: NpD8EsLUoeqYLrvKp3UmZQ==
via: 1.1 haproxy, 1.1 varnish, 1.1 varnish
fastly-restarts: 1
accept-ranges: bytes
date: Thu, 23 Feb 2023 19:55:49 GMT
age: 0
x-served-by: cache-ams12743-AMS, cache-ams21063-AMS
x-cache: MISS, MISS
x-cache-hits: 0, 0
x-timer: S1677182149.621644,VS0,VE843
vary: Accept, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, Authorization,User-Agent,Origin
server: Fastly
strict-transport-security: max-age=300
content-length: 7164

application/rss+xml is het gewenste mime-type! En inderdaad als ik het bestand ophaal en inkijk:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:art19="https://art19.com/xmlns/rss-extensions/1.0" xmlns:googleplay="http://www.google.com/schemas/play-podcasts/1.0/" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Veldheren</title>
    <description>
      <![CDATA[<p>Veldheren is een podcast waarin twee ..

Het zou toch prettig zijn als het vinden van een podcast buiten spotify of apple om niet een halve hack is.

Verder weggestopt in de zoekresultaten, achter allerlei nieuwsartikelen die braaf hetzelfde herhalen kom ik uiteindelijk terecht op Veldheren podcast - Part of Corti Media Network waar wel verwijzingen naar de RSS feed staan, zowel in de pagina als in de metadata. Het kan wel, het is alleen nogal ondergesneeuwd.

Ze zijn er weer! Ruim 15 jaar nadat ik met vertraging ontdekte dat Adam Curry aan podcasting was begonnen is ook Jeroen van Inkel begonnen met een podcast, en gelijk over het onderwerp waar ik graag dingen over terugluister: Curry en Van Inkel, het radioprogramma wat ik elke vrijdagavond wilde horen in 1984-1987.

Ook nu weer met vertraging, want deze podcast loopt al sinds november 2019. Maar dat maakt de lol niet minder! Het is echt weer genieten van de oude jingles, stukken 'aircheck' (opnames die gemaakt werden van de gehele uitzending zoals die er uit ging), gesprekken met mensen die er bij waren, anecdotes en stukjes van de muziek zoals die toen was (geen lange stukken, want de muziekrechten blijven een ding).

De lol die ik er toen in had om er naar te luisteren komt ook gelijk weer terug. Waarbij ik ook sommige dingen ontdek die ik in die jaren gemist heb, wat dan te maken heeft met de ondertussen iets meer gevorderde leeftijd.

Het mooie is dat het me uit de eerste aflevering duidelijk wordt dat al het archiefmateriaal wat in de podcast gebruikt wordt beschikbaar is in digitale en doorzoekbare vorm omdat een enorme fan de hele voorraad met audiocassettes heeft gekregen van Jeroen, en een jaar later was er een gedigitaliseerd archief.

I like hearing about other experiences in amateur radio from around the world. Podcasts are an easy way to hear experiences, news and opinions from other amateurs. And they fit nicely into my daily commute.

The list of amateur radio related podcasts I follow:

• 100 Watts and a wire
• Linux in the ham shack
• ICQ podcast
• QSO today
• ARRL The Doctor is in

I bought the iRiver ifp-795 in May 2005 to listen to podcasts, mostly while cycling to and from work.

But I need to find time to download new episodes on the laptop and copy them in the right order to the storage of the mp3 player. There is an another device which can do all this and can play the mp3 files too: my android smartphone.

So I looked for an Android podcast player which can deal with podcast feeds not in its own directory. After reading an overview article and browsing the play store I found RadioPublic and managed to add my favourite podcasts.

Adding a feed it didn't know was a bit harder than expected. I want to listen to The ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast but it wasn't listed. So I tried to add the RSS feed myself by typing the URL which failed. Adding it only worked out after I opened the RSS feed in my browser on android and copied and pasted the url to the 'search' field.

The application has a nice playlist and I can order the downloaded episodes in such a way that I don't get several episodes from the same show in a row.

Ok, I found one downside: it seems impossible to add an mp3 downloaded via the browser to the RadioPublic playlist.

This evening had a Fox-1A (AO-85) pass at a reasonable time so I decided to drag the entire setup outside and try my luck at a qso. Reception of Fox-1A was bad (maybe I'm somewhat off-frequency) and the major dissapointment was that the receiving side on 2 meter via sdr got deaf when I was transmitting on 70 centimeter. That's not supposed to happen, the whole reason for the full-duplex setup was to be able to hear myself on the downlink.

Anyway, the recording of downlink audio went fine this time so there is a full recording of what I heard. It was a Northwest-Southeast pass which means it took a while before I heard anything because northwest is over the houses. Callsigns heard in this pass: DO3EXE, IZ5ILX, 9A2EY, IZ3KLF, Something with F2D I completely can't decode and "Mr Olla".

My best guess would be a retry on SO-50, FO-29 or AO-73.

Earlier I had the Android application Ham Radio Prefixes - Android Apps on Google Play installed, but it needs some server on the Internet to look up callsigns and determine the country it is assigned to. Sometimes I need to do a lookup off-line, and I noticed fldigi and CQRLOG do that fine when the country data file is installed. So it can be done, I just have to find software that does this right.

On ICQ Podcast Episode 234 - Portable Power Distribution and I heard mention of Pocket Prefix for Android which can be found at Pocket Prefix - Android Apps on Google Play and which works off-line. This was even mentioned on the podcast as one of the advantages. It even gives extra information when available, the given example is that prefix SV is for Greece but SV9 is specific to Crete. Or EA9 is specific to the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla which are located in Morroco (and therefore count as a contact with the African continent).

It's a nice application, thanks to Derek Turner G4SWY!

Recently it seems radio noise levels on the HF bands have gone up again so I spend more time trying to make contacts in JT65 mode since that mode is more robust against noise than PSK31.

To do this I use the WSJT-X software under Ubuntu Linux. WSJT-X is written by Joe Taylor KJ1T. The Ubuntu hams packages had WSJT-X 1.1 and I frequently ran across the problem that it crashes when the Internet connection to pskreporter is impossible when sending spots. In my setup the Internet connection drops regularly when I'm active with JT65 or PSK31 so that was an annoyance. Logged as Ubuntu bug #1673040: wsjtx crashes when internet connection is interrupted.

But this weekend I was listening to Linux in the Ham Shack Episode #184 and in the presenters talking about re-installing a Linux system for amateur radio I heard two words: wsjtx ppa. As soon as possible I looked it up and found WSJTX General Availability Release PPA, followed the installation instructions and upgraded to WSJT-X 1.7.

The main improvement is that it decodes better so I may make further contacts. Sofar it hasn't crashed on an interrupted Internet connection.

I see one problem: it doesn't like talking to my radio via rigctld, giving an error. When I stop rigctld as started by Cqrlog and let WSJT-X control the radio directly via hamlib things work fine. And suddenly Cqrlog sees the QSO in progress and logs it when done.

I like to sometimes add audio to items here on my homepage. In a format accessible for anyone with both download and play in browser options. Until now this was done using a flash-based player but lately flash has not been the secure option.

With the latest browsers it is quite possible to have an html5 audio player, but to keep it accessible for every visitor I also want to keep the flash audio player available. So I looked up how to do that and found Using HTML5 audio and video.

The linked audio is also available as attachments to the homepage RSS feed which is the standard for podcast feeds but since the recordings of satellite passes don't have an audio explanation or introduction they are not very usable as a podcast feed.

The whole podcasting movement seems to be over its top. Podcasting had a start in 2004. Several sources mention Audible revolution - Ben Hammersley - The Guardian as the first mention in "mainstream media" and the start of growth of the phenomena.

According to the article about Podcasting in the Dutch wikipedia the peak of hobbyist podcasts was in 2005, and by 2008 most podcasts were (semi-)professional recordings of radio shows. In 2005 I already noticed a lot of the podcasts that were easy on the ears were made by radio professionals. Adam Curry (Daily Source Code, sometimes still available via curry.com, but Adam is still very active with other podcasts), Father Roderick (Catholic Insider, still running), Luuk Ikink (Luukspod, not podcasting but active on Dutch radio) other podcasters I listened to back then were all trained in media.

Hobby podcasting is a lot less than in 2005. Sites with podcast listings are inactive, forums are sleeping or more about low-budget radio than specific about podcasting. But some are still alive and kicking!

One of my favourite podcasts, Chub Creek switched to m4a audio files and those don't play on my iRiver ifp-795 mp3 player which means I don't get around to listening to them. Open source and some scripting to the rescue can fix this, I found some good hints at .m4a to .mp3 - Linuxquestions wiki and tried them.

koos@thompson:/scratch/mp3/podcast$ faad CC125.m4a 
..
CC125.m4a file info:

LC AAC  2934.618 secs, 2 ch, 44100 Hz

writer: Dave
title: CC125
artist: Dave
album: Chub Creek
tool: GarageBand 6.0.5
..
Decoding CC125.m4a took: 22.10 sec. 132.79x real-time.

And the next step is easy:

koos@thompson:/scratch/mp3/podcast$ lame -q 5 -b 128 --tt 'Chub Creek 125' --ta 'Dave' --tl 'Chub Creek' --add-id3v2 CC125.wav CC125.mp3
LAME 3.98.2 32bits (http://www.mp3dev.org/)
CPU features: MMX (ASM used), SSE (ASM used), SSE2
Using polyphase lowpass filter, transition band: 16538 Hz - 17071 Hz
Encoding CC125.wav to CC125.mp3
Encoding as 44.1 kHz j-stereo MPEG-1 Layer III (11x) 128 kbps qval=5
    Frame          |  CPU time/estim | REAL time/estim | play/CPU |    ETA 
112452/112452(100%)|    2:55/    2:55|    2:55/    2:55|   16.785x|    0:00 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   kbps        LR    MS  %     long switch short %
  128.0        2.3  97.7        91.0   4.9   4.1
Writing LAME Tag...done
ReplayGain: -3.1dB

Good way to warm up the CPUs on the computer: I can see from the 'sensors' output on which core the calculations are running. With two cores, running two processes like these parallel works fine.