Most of the podcasts I listen to are tech-heavy. Just a warning. I will list each one and give a short description of each an whether its an audio or video podcasts. I have 3 categories: Tech, Gaming, and Misc. I personally use a 30GB Zune (Brown) to listen  or watch my podcasts only because it was such a good deal. I purchased it for $85 on woot.com! The podcast list is shown after the break.

TECH SHOWS

SYSTM [Video]

SYSTM is a hand-on tech show created for the hardcore DIY Hardware crowd. It’s also hosted by Patrick Norton but the show was originally started by Kevin Rose back when he worked for TechTV and G4. You will learn such things as Building your own NAS, DIY WiFi Antennas, and DIY Power Packs.

Diggnation [Video]

Diggnation is a weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories. The hosts are Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht who are both G4 Screensavers alumni. Kevin Rose started the Digg.com website as a news site where users “digg” or vote for the stories they like the most and the most popular hit the frontpage. Well Kevin and Alex review the top stories while drinking tasty beer beverages out of their houses which make for some colorful commentary. You can see why their show is so popular LoL. Recently they have been branching out of their California homes and starting going to areas around the country to meet their fans. Their show usually ranges from 30 minutes to 1 hour. They have a email answer segment at the end of the show and usually show fans in Digg shirts around the country.

GAMING

1UP Yours [Audio]

1UP Yours is the premier videogames podcast where hosts Garnett Lee, Shane Bettenhausen and John Davison report on the videogame industry and the community that surrounds it. This is a really long podcast and it can range from 1:30 hours to 2:30 hours. This is a casual gaming podcast and they stray sometimes from their own format to talking on a variety of subjects. The hosts are editors and game testers from some of the popular gaming publications like EGM, 1Up, GameVideos.com, etc. You will hear them talk about game current on the market as well as those still in production. One of the best segments is “What are you playing?” where the hosts and guests talk about what games they are into at the moment.

1UP Show [Video]

Each week, the editors of 1UP cover new titles and discuss the latest topics in gaming - all the while giving you a behind the scenes look at the on goings at the offices of 1UP, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Games for Windows magazine. The show gives some great insight into the games they review by doing interviews with the staff of 1up while showing you game footage. They also have some great interviews with game developers as well. You can also see great field reporting from such places as E3, Quakecon, and Comicon.

MISC

The Totally Rad Show [Video or Audio]

The Totally Rad Show is the summer blockbuster of geek news shows. Every week, hosts Alex Albrecht, Dan Trachtenberg, and Jeff Cannata rip into the world of movies, video games, tv, comics, and more and pull out what’s rad. Most shows last 1 to 1:30 hours. They have either a audio or video feed. They have a quirky and fun approach to their reviews. Every show is started with the guys recreating a scene from one of their favorite movies of the past.

NPR Fresh Air [Audio]

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio’s most popular programs. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators.

This American Life [Audio]

The radio and TV shows follow the same format. There’s a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It’s mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always. There’s lots more to the show, but it’s sort of hard to describe. Ten Commandents was the last program I listened to and Ira Glass goes over the real ten commandents by personal interviews with each person’s account of one of the ten.

Here is the description of the game straight off the website:

“Jimmy lives a simple life. All he’s got is a roll of toilet paper. Until the faithful day that his TP rolled away. You play as Jimmy on his epic adventure to get back all that belongs to him and find love and meaning to his life on the way.”

This is a cute little game anyone can play and just like crayon physics, its easy to pick up, moderately challenging and pretty fun. Check it out and let me know what you think of it. Here is the link to download the game to try it out:
http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/tp

Here are additional links to Google Code Pages that show the a behind the scenes making of and even an interactive 3D viewer model of some of the effects.

Check out my other story on Radiohead about “Scotch Mist” a video which was released on New Year’s Eve this year and it features every song from In Rainbows to coincide with the “official” release of the album.

Working for a software company, I see our software move through the development cycle and we would not release Alpha software for any kind of public consumption. Alpha releases are purely for our testers to test the software in-house. Only after much testing do we give software out to beta customers.

Too funny!

Digg Link

Gary Vee is Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV which is a Wine Review Show on the internet. Gary owns a wine retail shop called Wine Library in Springfield,NJ. He is much more than that. Let’s see. He runs a retail business full time, records Wine Library TV everyday, records daily video blogs on his personal site, corresponds with fans via social sites like twitter, and the lists goes on. The message of his video speaks to me and drives me to want to make my own content to find my own voice on the net … someday.

Ohhh and he made a second video the same day with an even more powerful video proclaiming April 3rd “GOOD PEOPLE DAY!” Gary you rock!

Animoto is a brand new video slideshow creation website created by techies and tv/film producers. The technology behind the site is based on “Cinematic Artificial Intelligence” that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film. The end result has the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

Animoto is still in beta so you have to signup to use the site. You basically select between a 30 second video or full length video. The 30 second videos are free. Full length videos cost $3 per video or you can pay $30/year unlimited videos. I chose the 30 second video.The site tells you that you need 12-15 pictures for a 30 second video. I chose a mixture of pictures from friends and family.

You then pick the music that plays with the slideshow and you have to the choice of their collection of Creative Commons license music or from your own collection. It does make you verify that you have permission from the artist to use the audio. I just chose from their library to make it easy.

The last step is to give your video a name and description. You then click create video and wait. It takes a few minutes to create so they give you want they call “distractions” which are basically trailers while you wait. It took about 5-10 minutes to complete the process. Once it is done processing, you are left with a slick video you can embed in your own website, email to friends and also post to YouTube all on the same screen. Here is a link to my finished product on YouTube. Here are some screenshots showing you the process I went through on the site:

Below is my embedded video as well:

What are “Freemium” games you ask? Freemium stands for “free-to-play premium games” based on their most popular titles in order to attract new audiences and open new revenue advertising revenue streams. Games like this have been limited in the past to flash or 2D games. Implementing games such as these in the FPS market is a new venture and two of the biggest franchises are taking a stab at it: Id Software with their Quake and Doom franchises and Dice the makers of Battlefield 1942, Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2042.

Id Software is building Quake Live from the widely popular Quake III Arena engine and Dice is building Battlefield Heroes, a brand new “cartoon shooter” similar to the cell-shaded Team Fortress 2 from Valve. Both games will be offering a totally free to play, web based experience that is targeting a broader audience then their typical games which appealed more to the hardcore gamers of the world. This is becoming a popular trend now for gaming with the advent of the Nintendo Wii and more gamers opting to play console games over PC games due to the stringent PC specs required to run the latest FPS games. These games are hoping to capitalize on the idea of the FPS experience without the need for the top of the line PC.

Quake Live was first announced as “Quake Zero” at 2007’s Quakecon in Dallas,TX. Not much has been shown about Quake Live but from John Carmack’s speech it seems like the game will be the same Quake III game from 8 years ago with some minor tweaking. The game will have the advantage of running at 60 Frames per second on pretty much any modern PC. Not much is said about how the advertising will be implemented in the game but if it is like the picture I mocked up, then I’m not sure if I want to play it.

If you want to sign up for the beta go to http://www.quakelive.com and submit your email.

Battlefield Heroes seems to be a rewritten from the ground up since it is to be a cartoon shooter. From what I read on IGN.com’s preview, the game is free to play, but you’ll have the option to spend cash on microtransactions. The examples they gave were visual items for your character (glasses, hats, boots, jackets etc.) and convenience items. How the convenience items work are kind of a different approach to what you have in MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft where you can play someone to play the game for you to get to a Level 50. In Heroes, you pay for items which give you double the experience of what the free players are getting. The gameplay will be third-person but it will switch to first-person in sniper mode with some guns. On the advertising side, the article states that “advertising exists on the website and on loading screens, but not in the actual game.”

Battlefield Heroes Teaser Trailer

[flv]http://download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/videos/battlefield-heroes-trailer.flv[/flv]

Both games look very promising and it will be interesting to see which one wins out in the end. Of the two, Battlefield Heroes looks to be more polished and closer to being released. Keep your eyes open.

On Saturday and some of Sunday I caught up with my usual places on the web and watched some video podcasts as well. Here is a list of the internet jewels I found along the way. Most of these are videos so sorry to those at work (my office blocks streaming video, something about losing productivity).

First we have the latest episode of Diggnation Episode 134 “Dreaming of the SuperBowl” Is it me or are they less funny when they are not drunk? During this episode, Kevin mentioned how he hated some of the features about youtube like its crappy compression and talked about another service he liked called Vimeo which he left had some good content plus HD video. I checked it out and found a killer video someone took in Japan showing 3 areas at night sped up.

Which brings me to my next video which is part of a series called landscapeHD. If you want to see it in HD click this link.

LandscapeHD from LandscapeHD on Vimeo.

Saturday evening was also the Season 2 Opener of Torchwood on BBC America. First of all if you are a fan of the Dr Who series then you will love Torchwood. Man of you will recognize Captain Jack Harkness who popped in and out of the Dr Who series. Episode 1 entitled “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” is a good summary of the episode. This did have alot of kissing both guy-on-girl, and guy-on-guy. The “bang bang” part stems from the fast pace the characters are reintroduced to us and well as the quick return of Captain Jack Harkness, who mysteriously disappeared at end of Season 1. Special Guest star is James Marsters, who you might recognize as Spike from the Buffy series. Very good episode indeed. For a more in depth review of the episode check out Newsday.com’s review.

The last thing is this awesome demonstration of what 4 days, a video camera, alot of running, and some green screen can accomplish. This is a behind the scenes look at a video shoot for a BBC2 TV show called Time Watch:Bloody Omaha. Theses 4 videographers were able to capture the look and feel of the battle of Normandy on a shoe string budget with the four of them taking video on the beach and alot of green screen. Once you see the result you will be blown away. Here is the article and here is the video.

Check out these specs Minimum/Recommended:

• OS: Windows XP/Vista (only)
• Processor:Dual Core 2.6GHz Intel or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ /Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better
• RAM: 2 GB / 3GB
• Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 10.0–compliant video card /512 MB video card recommended (see supported list)*
• Hard Drive Space: 12 GB
• *Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
  ATI RADEON X1300-1950 / HD 2000 / 3000 series
  NVIDIA GeForce 6600-6800 / 7 / 8 / 9 series

Hmm $300-400 console or $2000-$3000 computer. Easy decision for me. The last PC game I purchased was Half Life 2: Orange Box. I guess that will be my last PC game for a while.