Listening

Ebibliomedia makes it possible to borrow audiobooks. Yesterday I noticed that I can download these books via the Cantook ereader app on Android and iOS. With this freedom comes a quick and convenient way to listen to audio books without worrying about losing my place.

With the website interface I could listen to a book but my progress would be lost as soon as I refreshed the page. In such a situation it makes sense to read a book one chapter at a time, and make sure to remember which chapter you have just finished.

There was a time when it was much easier to listen to every episode of a podcast for two reasons. The first of these is that they were new so it wouldn’t take too long to burn through one hundred episodes. The second reason is that podcasts were half an hour long so you could listen to two or three during a one or one and a half hour walk.

Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time.

Plenty of other podcasts last for an hour and a half or more, which if you listen to one episode a week is okay, but I don’t do that. I find a podcast that I like and I listen to the most recent episodes and then I listen to them in chronological order. This takes a lot of time, but it also provides me with an evolutionary appreciation of how things have changed.

Recently I have been Lunix Unplugged and Self-Hosted. It’s by listening to self-hosted that I decided to experiment and learn about Linux by experimenting with Pis and projects created for Pi such as PhotoPrismPi, Pi-Hole and Nextcloud, to mention just a few.

These podcasts kept mentioning boosts, sats, value for value and compatible apps such as Castamatic, among others. I haven’t played with the others but I have played with Castamatic. It behaves like other podcasts and you can choose between using the iTunes podcast list or the Podcast Index podcast list. I used the Apple Podcast list, for now.

There are times when I listen to two or three hours of podcasts a day and I learn from them. I usually listen when I am cooking and when I am walking. For several weeks now I have hardly listened to any podcasts. This is for three reasons.

The first of these is that I spend two to four hours studying a day, so when I go for my walk I think I have listened to the point of saturation and now I’m ready for a change of ideas. Recently whilst walking I spent days reading Gulag by Anne Applebaum and I learned a lot about the Gulag, about its history, it’s pervasiveness in society and more. I also learned about some of the cruelties that people did not try to stop. Cruelties such as the mass rape of women on prisoner ships.

A few days ago I was with a friend discussing the student media within my university. I’m not speaking about the content created by those in the various courses but rather about the student newspaper and television channel. It’s gone downhill over the past year. In my first year at uni although people poked fun at the student magazine they used to get it in order to get all the events listing. It meant that you knew a month in advance what was going on what night and so university spirit was stronger. At the same time, some second-year students of the time decided to create a student television program in which they got up and running external to the student union. In so doing they guaranteed success. Last year the student magazine coasted along and the first discussions about it becoming a newspaper happened. Since then it’s been downhill. We’ve gone from having a glossy magazine coming out once a month with all events listed to having recycled paper as a newspaper. Rather than having people fighting to get their articles published an apathy seems to have formed around the project. There is no features editor, no listings editor, no main editor, and no layout person. This is a uni with 23,000+ students of which 10,000 full time. You’d be led to believe that they could produce some content without too much difficulty. The one thing that’s doing relatively well is the student radio but it’s not independent of the Student Union, therefore, it seems to run better. If they had kept podcasting as they were doing last year then I’d still be downloading and listening to those programs as I walk around London. I’m ready to leave university and get on with other more interesting projects. I’m ready to get back to the world of work. I only have about three weeks left of work.