I’ve listened to this podcast forever, so to be on it myself with the opportunity to talk about my favourite and most used software of all timeāOmniFocusāwas so much fun.
All details of the episode are available on the episode page. The show is also available in your podcast player of choice, or watch on YouTube.
Several years ago I became interested in creating podcasts. As an early adopter, I’d listened to them for years. I decided I finally wanted to try the creation side of the equation.
I’m proud of what I’ve achieved since that decision.
Yesterday, two podcasts of mine were released on the same day. They show two different aspects of my personality and interests. I am incredibly proud of these latest episodes, but also the incredible run of consistent podcast creation I have achieved over the past few years.
NBL Pocket Podcast Episode 268 demonstrates my knowledge and love for Australian NBL basketball, combined with great rapport with my friend, Joe Corr.
Hemispheric Views is carefully and meticulously edited. NBL Pocket Podcast is a shoot-from-the-hip live recording. Two entirely different topics, recorded and edited in two different ways. I’m proud of being able to create podcasts in both forms.
I’m also proud that I have the ability to edit and produce as well. Podcasting has given me a whole raft of skills that I wouldn’t otherwise have.
I am proud of these shows. I am proud of myself for having the confidence and capability to produce these shows. I am proud that both have a large audience of listeners.
On Episode 097 of my podcast Hemispheric Views we held a Duel of the Defaults! competition. Jason and Martin fought head-to-head to see who used the most default apps on macOS. As I was the compere and judge of the competition, it wasnāt for me to speak of my choices during the show.
For the sake of the record, and to follow some of ourloyallisteners who have blogged their defaults, here is my list:
Mail Client: Apple Mail & Fastmail Web App (plus MailMate)
Mail Server: Fastmail & Apple Mail
Notes: Obsidian (plus Agenda & Apple Notes)
To-Do: OmniFocus
iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app
Photo Management: Photos.app
Calendar: BusyCal (plus Calendar.app)
Cloud file storage: iCloud (plus OneDrive)
RSS: Reeder with FreshRSS
Contacts: Contacts.app
Browser: Safari (plus Arc)
Chat: Signal
Bookmarks: GoodLinks
Read It Later: Readwise Reader (will be moving back to Omnivore)
Word Processing: Pages
Spreadsheets: Numbers (plus Excel)
Presentations: Keynote
Shopping Lists: AnyList
Meal Planning: AnyList
Budgeting & Personal Finance: YNAB
News: Apple News (plus ABC RSS feed)
Music: Apple Music
Podcasts: Overcast
Password Management: 1Password
I encourage you to join in the fun, both by blogging your defaults and listening to our show.
This article was originally written for the October 2022 edition of Hemispheric News, delivered as part of the Hemispheric Views podcast member bonus program, One Prime Plus.
A couple of weeks ago I inserted a thread into the Mac Power Users Forum. Part honest question, part hopeful Trojan Horse that might lead people to discover Hemispheric Views.
The topic of the thread was around how people discover new, independent podcasts. This is a problem that I don’t believe has been solved. In fact, I’m not sure the problem has even been considered in any meaningful way. The economics of podcast exploration don’t stack up. Closed ecosystems want to put their money behind their own properties. Independent podcast apps are so often not that independent, because they are “friends” with existing networks.
Overcast is the great example here. Developer Marco Arment has his own successful podcast, and they are tight with Relay.fm. It is a clique and despite their power in the market, they don’t seem to be using it to lift others up.
So how do people discover podcasts? While machine learning might be helpful (other people who subscribe to your shows also subscribe to ‘x’), this could prove to be an amplifier of already successful shows, as well as being a potential negative privacy vector.
I want to find new shows, new voices, but that have high production values. Basically, I want to find other versions of Hemispheric Views. At the same time, I want people to discover Hemispheric Views for themselves. The challenge is the old rule of Dunbar - 90% of everything is crap. How do you get people to wade through the crap to find the good stuff. It’s not exactly an enticing task. How do you convince people that the show you want to promote is not part of the 90%? How do you know it’s not part of the 90%?
It’s a dilemma and I don’t know how to solve it, and I don’t see much appetite from others to do so.
Do our readers know of any great independent podcasts that deserve more listeners?
And can our readers share the good news of Hemispheric Views? I want more people to enjoy our show.
I was welcomed as a guest on the podcast/YouTube show “Throwback Hoops” Episode 46 to talk Australian basketball. We covered women’s world, cup, NBL Round 1, and gave our predictions for the league’s awards. š š
This wide ranging discussion between my son, Benjamin and Jason Burk ranges across a diversity of topics. The conversation touches on the Loch Ness Monster, Scooby Doo, questions as to the intelligence of Hemispheric Views co-host Martin Feld, and ends with a great joke.
I’ve trialled a few different podcast player apps over the past few days. This is a short summary of my findings, after trialling Apple Podcasts, Castro, Overcast and Pocket Casts.
In the most recent episode of my podcast Hemispheric Views I mentioned the time I was featured in the Workbench section of Amiga Format magazine.
I loved the Amiga, and I subscribed to Amiga Format in addition to a few other British and Australian Amiga magazines. The highlight of my month was riding my bike to the newsagent to collect my reserved copy.
I always liked the productivity and system utility applications more than gaming. I was a weird kid like that.
Amiga Format’s Workbench section was the Discourse forum of its day. People would write in with questions (with letters as this pre-dated email) and the magazine experts would publish the question and provide a helpful response. It was this section where I learned so much and to this day, Internet forums are still the best way to learn things.
In any case, I recall being stumped on a problem so I wrote in to Workbench asking for some help. I am sure I sent it via Airmail, but even still, getting a letter from Australia to the UK, then into the printing and production cycle resulted in something like a 6-month lead time. I think I had forgotten about it after a couple of months.
Imagine my surprise then, when months later, I see my name in print, in the world’s best-selling Amiga magazine. This was huge! It was the April 1992 issue. That would have put me at 14 years old. Maybe I was 13 when I wrote the letter, who knows?
I kept my huge pile of Amiga magazines for years. Eventually, though, I had to say goodbye. I kept the issue that I was published in for longer, but finally I had to say goodbye to that one also. But I never forgot that I was in the Amiga Format magazine that had Felix the Cat on the cover.
That takes me to now. My friend and podcast co-host Jason Burk writes the best show notes in the podcasting business. He found and linked to an entire online archive of Amiga Format magazines. This was what I needed. I found my Felix the Cat cover, and brought up the issue.
There it was. Page 209. Workbench. “Missing Drawers”, from “Andrew Canion, Australia”. My letter lives on.
Article Full Text
Missing Drawers
From: Andrew Canion, Australia
I have been attempting to design my own split image icon for use as a drawer. I have copied the Empty drawer from my Workbench 1.3 disk. I have then split this icon using the IconMerge program on the Extras disk.
I then edit it with IconEd, and saved the two images back to disk before joining them into one icon with IconMerge again. The actual changing image works fine when I click once, but when I double click to open the drawer itself. I get an error message telling me that the drawer cannot be opened. I’m a relative beginner, so tell me in simple terms what am I doing wrong?
An icon is just a picture to click on. What you’re miss- ing is a directory with the same name (in this case, empty). You’re clicking on an icon, but your Amiga cannot find anything with the same name. To make a directory from the Shell, type:
Makedir nameofmydisk:Empty
It should work then. For nameofmydisk, put the name of the disk that you’re editing icons on. If the name has spaces in it, then you must put double quotes around the whole thing, for example:
I voice my anxiety about the forthcoming US election. I worry about the place the United States of America holds in the world, and what might happen to this in the future. I also have concerns about what might happen within the country, irrespective of the result.
As I’m no longer playing basketball, I’ve gotten fat and sore. Exercise seems to be my only option. In Nerd Corner, I talk about new audio configurations and a trial of Hindenburg Journalist.
I’m excited to have worked with two other great people to put something new out into the world. Working with Jason Burk and Martin Feld, we have released the first episode of a new podcast, Hemispheric Views.
Our topics for this first episode range across condiments, technology and the price of petrol. Over time we anticipate the show will have a technology bias but we are interested to explore how Martin and I as Australians interpret things in comparison to Jason in the USA.
I’m proud of this first episode and I’ve got high hopes for our continuous improvement.
If you can find the time to have a listen, that would be amazing. Ideally, you’ll enjoy it enough that you will subscribe in your favourite podcast player app, and tell a friend about the show.
I mentioned in Episode 15 of Keep Practising that my Logitech mouse was giving me the #$%@s with respect to the amount of judder and unresponsiveness on macOS. This problem exhibited irrespective of whether it was connected to Bluetooth or the Logitech dongle.
Good news. I may have found a solution. Early days yet, but since applying this fix I haven’t experienced the issue again.
The suggestion was to remove, and then re-add, both Logitech Options and Logitech Options Daemon from the Mac’s Accessibility options, within the Security & Privacy preferences pane, Privacy tab.
This simple - but entirely obfuscated and obscure fix - offers another example of how infuriating the Catalina macOS security model is for users.
I’m not on the Big Sur beta, but I hope that it does better at this stuff than Catalina.
Andrew is joined by his brother, Patrick Canion to discuss his work and life, most notably how he has made the transition to living in Switzerland after spending his entire working life in Perth, Western Australia.
Oh boy, it’s happening to me. Some months ago when I made the decision to start doing some podcasting, I did my research and selected the Rode Podcaster microphone as my weapon of choice.
It’s been working fine for me, but at the same time, I’ve never been totally certain that it’s the right mic for me. I’m an amateur and I’m learning as I go but the Podcaster struck me as sounding somewhat ‘thin’. Plus the gain from the mic was really low. Research suggests this makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to the end result but it still made me curious about other options.
The Podcaster was not cheap so I’ve been reticent to spend more money on hardware. Yet I could resist it when I saw a good price on the new Audio Technica ATR 2100-X which is a combination USB/XLR microphone. I’m still in the USB world directly connecting to my iMac. I haven’t - and at this stage don’t want to - go down the preamp rabbit hole.
Today the ATR-2100x arrived. I’ve given it a 45 second test to date, so this doesn’t act as a review. What I noticed immediately is that it sounded richer and the gain was definitely higher. However, the dynamic range was therefore more limited compared with the Rode Podcaster. In the test I did, the Podcaster handled it all whereas the ATR-2100x experienced clipping.
I will keep experimenting and will likely record my next episode of Keep Practising with the new Audio Technica.
All this is to say, it appears I may be starting the slippery slide towards becoming an audio gearhead. Send help!
Iāve always noticed a distinct intersection between those who like basketball and those who like wrestling. In this episode I discuss my history of watching wrestling. It used to be WWF/WWE, but these days I am more excited by EPW (Explosive Pro Wrestling) - an indie show that operates out of Perth, Western Australia.
In Nerd Corner I talk about my recent dalliance with the fundraising/supporter platform Ko-fi.
I was bereft not being able to record an NBL Pocket Podcast today. So to assuage my sadness I have brought in my son, David, to provide the hot tip. Who does he think will win the tournament? Tune in and find out!
Be sure also to check out the daily podcast we’ve been recording at the NBL Pocket Podcast. Each day we have broken down the TBT2020 tournament and provided a perspective from the point of view of the Australian NBL.
I welcome a special guest to the show, Graeme Speak of BankVault. BankVault has developed a cybersecurity product that can circumvent security risks such as key logging and man-in-the-middle attacks, by offering passwordless logins.
As well as discussing the BankVault product, Graeme discusses his approach to entrepreneurship. We talk about the differences between business in Perth, Western Australia where BankVault has been founded, and San Francisco, California where he is currently based.
A conversation about the risks and benefits of kitesurfing also ensues.
I am joined by special guest Joe, host of the NBL Pocket Podcast. We talk about Joeās experience making the podcast that is focused on the Australian National Basketball League.
We discuss favourite players and coaches, his best interviews, the NBL product today, and how the league engages with its fan base.
We also consider what makes for a quality NBL TV experience.
It was brilliant to be welcomed as a guest by @martinfeld on his Lounge Ruminator podcast. We dived into our respective histories of computing. So much fun. feldnotes.com
Keep Practising: S01, E06: I reflect on how COVID-19 has impacted life at home and on Perth more broadly. In “Nerd Corner” this week, I talk about using Stream Deck in combination with Keyboard Maestro.
Keep Practising: S01, E05: I take on the hippy-dippy topic of meditation, have some follow-up with regards to Australian basketball and introduce a new segment, “Nerd Corner”.
Keep Practising: S01, E04: Basketball. Andrew reminisces about his basketball playing days, and provides us with a scouting report on his own game. š
