This image be our episode 2,089 entitled, describing how I listen to podcast part 2,
it is posted by Mr. X, and in about 18 minutes long, and coming next is it's lag.
The summary is, in this episode I cover the hardware I used over the years to listen to podcast.
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Hello and welcome hacker public 3D audience. My name is Mr. X, and welcome to this podcast.
As usual, I'd like to start by thanking people HBR for making this service available to us all.
HBR is a community led podcast, provided by the community for the community.
That means you can get involved in the code something and post it too. Just pick up a microphone and
hit record or use your mobile phone, your computer, where you've got the hand really.
It's really very easy, which you must have something interesting to record.
So this is part 2 about how I consume or listen to podcasts or something like that,
not quite sure about the tales going to be, but something along those lines.
And this is one, I think I probably cover how I actually did the listen to podcasts.
So we're control playing back podcasts and obviously my previous episode that's falls on from
the previous episode, where I cover mock pee, which is a music player that I use.
And let's just see now what I've got. So I've basically listened to my podcast using
cordless headphones. These are, I think, these are analog cordless headphones. They're not
they're Bluetooth, they're like that. They just basically plug into the audio output of the
device. I'm playing my podcast on, which was originally my home server. If you remember,
it back in episode 2,1912. And then they were my podcast using H poder, which I covered in
2,106. What were you all at nonsense? And so I actually listened to the thing using these
cordless headphones. Yeah, I've got some notes here on cordless headphones, which I'll go through. So
my first set of cordless headphones, I listened to my podcast using cordless headphones. They are
not Bluetooth. It's all analog. There is no encryption. It's all out in the open. The headphones
operate in the 860 megahertz range and use frequency modulation. The user same frequency as cordless
microphones. I regularly pick up the DJ and karaoke singers in the local club behind me.
I often wonder if they pick up my broadcasts. I wonder if they appreciate HPR.
My first set of cordless headphones lasted quite a long time. They had a short
curly cable that plugged into the side of them, to allow them to be charged. After some time,
the quitting around the ear cups disintegrated, and eventually the strap that went over the
head split, and that was the end of my headphones. My second set of cordless headphones were made
by Phillips, and I think they would have been quite an expensive pair. I picked them up,
going cheap, some time later, on another blackboard, I'm a radio rally. They had quite funky
styling, and were a fair bit heavier than my first pair and were quite a bit more sophisticated.
The tuning was very simple, and they had circuitry that looked onto the transmitter's frequency,
and tended not to need re-tuning like my first pair that tended to drift off frequency.
They had one major disadvantage. They were not a snug fit, and if I bent down, they tended to fall
off my head. The extra weight made things even worse. These headphones did not last long. They sat
on a charging base, which made contact with two pins. These soon started causing problems,
and were temperamental at charging. Eventually, the push power button failed.
That was end of set number two. Set number three. The third set of cordless headphones were
cheap pair from Liddles. These were also a bit big. I ended up spending quite some time trying to
find a good replacement pair of headphones, and they all failed for the same problem.
I'm here to tell you that size matters for us pinheads. Things might be
dandy for all you fatheads out there, but for us pinheads it's no laughing matter.
As I said, these days it's almost seems that I'm living in the land of giants.
As all the everyday objects are built for an alien race of giants.
Whenever I sit for a meal, drive a car, sit at a desk, I feel like a child. Nothing fits.
And I don't get me started about clothes. My current set of cordless headphones.
Eventually, I stumbled across my current set of headphones. They are a good snug fit.
Our light have last the very long time recently the coating around the ear cups
have become perforated after many years of relentless use. This hasn't caused an issue
as I've had with much younger headphones, where the coating became crumbly beneath
and caused so much mess that I had to stop using them. I wonder in fact how much longer
these headphones will continue to work. The only fault with them now is that a plastic cover on
one side sometimes slightly pops out, but can be either ignored or popped in with a slight pressure.
And even this was not their fault. This was caused a few years ago when I dropped the headphones
from some height. I was sure they would break, but no, they have proved very sturdy.
When I bought them, I was little nervous about them being on a charging dot like the
philips headphones I had previously. But unlike them, they continue to reliably charge
with it a hitch. So the contacts are obviously made from a superior material.
For all their longevity, comfort and light weight, they are far from perfect. The biggest
problem is that the transmitter and receiver tend to drift, meaning that you need to occasionally
re-tune the headphones. The other problem is that the tuning control is very sensitive. I need
only the slightest movement to find the right spot. Still, these are by far the best
college headphones I've ever owned. Now at this point I could give you the
make-and-model of these particular headphones, but as they have probably been removed from
the market many years ago and finding a pair of second-hand headphones like these would be
difficult. I decided not to do this, as this would make it even less likely for me to find a replacement
pair, if I were to reveal the make-and-modeled to you. So I must decline and apologise for my
selfishness. You know, it isn't easy being up in head like me. Okay, so that's how I
listen to the podcast for the consume. So I mentioned that I use a mock-p music on a command line
player to listen to their podcasts. So how do I actually control mock-p? Well originally, I used
a compact N610C laptop, connected to a dedicated screen session running on my i-pack server. This
was an old laptop which I think only had 256 megabytes of RAM. The laptop was rather heavy,
but allowed me to remotely control my server from anywhere in the house. After that, I eventually
purchased an EEPC laptop and used this to remotely control mock as it was considerably smaller
and lighter than my aging old compact laptop. It was very useful and convenient and I still
occasionally use it from time to time. I wanted something smaller that was more portable to carry around
and stumbled upon the excellent Nokia N810. I seem to remember glad to be the next one episode
about either the N810. This was one of the best solutions I found for controlling the play of podcasts.
The device was ultra portable. It was beautifully constructed with a unique feature unlike modern
touchscreen devices. It had a sorely messed slider keyboard. This made it very easy to control
that encurtes mock player running on my server. It would automatically connect to my Wi-Fi
and SSH into the tax multi-screen session running on my server. It would run an old
day, continuously connected to my Wi-Fi using only one charge. Like the other Nokia devices
of the day, gaining access to the battery was easy, meaning the battery could be replaced,
which I eventually did after much use. The build quality was excellent. The main body being metal.
Eventually my beloved N810 started to fail though after many years of faithful service.
The touchscreen occasionally seemed to lose calibration. This deteriorated until the touchscreen
stopped working all together. The weekpoint in N810 turned out to be the wonderful slider keyboard.
The repeated slider action caused one of the internal ribbon cables to fail.
I must have said the keyboard Internet multiple times each day. I could easily reduce the number
of times I did this, which would have undoubtedly have extended its life. The slider action
was very smooth and was rather addictive. I'm sure this speeded up the device of the device.
I managed to purchase a replacement main internal cable harness. I spent almost a whole day
meticulously breaking the unit down to the lowest level in order to replace the damn cable.
After all this effort the device switched on but the original fault remained.
I'm still convinced it was an internal ribbon cable fault, and I think there may have been
more than one cable and perhaps I didn't get a good connection when I refitted it as a whole process
was very fiddly. The downside was that my lovely N810 was out of action. I couldn't bring
myself to throw it away and I still have it today but it's only used for as a people wait now.
I was never a situation how was I going to continue controlling my remote music player mock
which ran on my headless server. Well the first solution was a Nexus 7 tablet. I approached
the Nexus 7 tablet hoping to use it to replace not only my faithful N810 but also my wonderful
sign 3. It was the first Nexus 7 model with only one camera. The Nexus was fun to play with
but ultimately while it is great for consuming information pushed to you from Google it's really
frustrating if you're trying to produce something on it. Without a keyboard I found it very frustrating
my wife used it far more than me. Switching users seemed very slow and debatory life end up being
less than my N810. Tando not to be an ideal replacement for the N810 and a hopeless replacement
to the sign I did it into was so cumbersome. After about a year my Nexus started failing. I think
there was a fault with either it's inbuilt flash memory or the controller circuit. The whole
experience was a bit disappointing. As I previously mentioned the sound adventures that are working
on my iPad compact server around the time when I got my first Raspberry Pi it's now mostly replaced
my iPad server. My server is now only used to download the actual podcast. I use my pie to listen
to the podcast this provides a number of advantages over my old iPad server. First it used far less
power than my server. I think my server drew about 25 watts from the means. The pie draws considerably
less, probably in the order of two watts. This means I can leave the pie running non-stop all day.
This greatly simplifies keeping track of where I am in my current playlist. In the past I turned
my server off each night only turning it on when I came in from work. I would do an LAS in the
directory I was listening to. I'm redirected to a text file. I'd update this text file to keep track
of what track and position of track I was listening to. In the process of creating these files
I learned a bit about formatting text using standard Linux commands such as cut-sought oxide.
I found this strangely satisfying and was amazed how powerful and flexible these tools were.
Though it did take up a great deal of time. I later improved things and came up with a rather
elaborate and sometimes underlible script that would allow the music player mock to automatically hunt
for the track I last listened to and to then move to the quick position within the track.
Using the pie greatly simplified all of this as I just left it running. This meant I no longer
had the tedious job of creating text files and manually keeping track of where I was in my playlist.
I decided it might still be useful to keep track of my playlist progress and came up with a
much simpler script that runs a cron job to get the current track and position and write it to a
log file. This has done every night at midnight that way should the pie crash which it never does
or there is a power cut which is very rare then it always know where I was within my playlist.
This has proved to work very well indeed with much slower maintenance requirements.
My pie was a very first generation pie even back in the very beginning I found the audio quality
to be satisfactory. I don't know whether I have tough years or are particularly good pie but
I really never had any issues with a pie audio quality. It is a distinctly remember complaint
after complaint on many podcasts in the early days with the Raspberry Pi audio. As far as I'm concerned
the audio quality was certainly more than adequate for listening to podcasts. Over time,
audio has improved greatly on the pie. The biggest improvement coming from software optimization
and continual refinement of the firmware drivers by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
From memory when I first started using the pie, a click or pop could be heard whenever
the audio playback was set to stop. Playing audio also consumed a fear chunk of processing.
These days there are no pops or clicks and you can barely notice any loading on the CPU even when
using the first generation pie. The improvements are remarkable. I also discovered by accident that
it can very easily play two audio tracks simultaneously. Again with barely the technical CPU loading.
That's enough for this episode before you fall asleep. The next part, part 3, will cover
my solutions to controlling mock-p without an external device, other than a triple EPC of course
as well. So I'll cover that in part 3. I hope that wasn't too much and wasn't too boring.
If you want to contact me, I can be contacted by MrX at hpr at googlemail.com.
So that's next time. Thank you. Goodbye listen listen listen listen listen listen listen listen listen.
Listen listen listen listen carefully listen carefully listen carefully listen. I can
I willize by saying that I will provide this!
This is enough!
I think it would be a completely open data,
you will part of the public needs of a human.
You will part of a human.
You will part of a human!
You will part of a human!
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