Cool.

May's Meeting

May 10th is this month's Portland Podcasting meeting at the NE Urban Grind coffeehouse at 7pm. After missing two consecutive meetings, I'm excited to be able to finally attend again. I know Jason Ruby has a great question to ask everyone and get your feedback on, but other then that nothing is planned. Well..not nothing (double negative?!), we'll be hanging out drinking coffee, and talking about podcasting.

If you're new to podcasting or a pro, make sure to make some time to attend this month's meeting.

Took down the wiki

I had an instance of MediaWiki running at wiki.tinyscreenfuls.com. I used it for miscellaneous things (presentations, lists, etc.) for myself, and also for Blogging Academy and the Portland Podcasting community.

The problem is, spam got to be too much of a hassle. At first, it was only a couple of vandalisms per week. I'd simply roll them back, and ban the author. But this week, the volume has increased significantly. I know I could lock down access to it, but I don't want to mess with it right now, so I just took it down.

It will probably come back at some point, in a more secure form, but for now, it's one less thing for me to worry about.

Want to know the ironic part? It never got that much traffic, and MediaWiki enforces the rel=nofollow tag on all links, so it wasn't generating the spammers any Google juice. Not sure what, if anything, they were getting out of it, but they won't be using it at all any more. :-)

Doug Kaye's "Recording Phone Calls" Session from Podcast Academy is now live!

At Podcast Academy last year, by far the most informative session (for me) was Doug Kaye's session on "Recording Phone Calls and Live Events". He taught me everything I know about how to do a decent recording of a phone or VoIP/Skype call, and got me on the right track to be able to do it well.

Here's an excerpt from the summary:

The phone is a fairly complicated piece of technology, Kaye explains. Speakers' voices can be captured at different points via couplers, hybrid interfaces, or ISDN hardware, each of which can be processed with varying degrees of control. Kaye shares "Uncle Doug's Cheap Trick" for recording in a conference call style so that all speakers come through at similar levels. More expensive gear such as a telephone hybrid can produce a professional sound using a "mix minus" approach to separate individual speaker tracks.

I use "Uncle Doug's Cheap Trick" to simulate "mix minus" on my mixer at home, for Skype calls. I end up with my voice on the left channel, and the callers' on the right channel, making post processing and fixing levels a breeze.

At work, I use a handy-dandy little box from ARTcessories called "MyMonitor". It's meant for musicians, but just happens to simulate the effect of "mix minus" (sending your voice but not the callers' back down the line to them), at a cost of $60 (compared to a specialized telephone hybrid device like the Telos One at $700).

If you're a podcaster and/or anyone who has ever wanted or needed to record a phone or VoIP conversation, don't miss this IT Conversations podcast from Doug!