Tag Archives: podcasts

How the camel got his hump, by Rudyard Kipling

This is a reading of How The Camel Got His Hump, by Rudyard Kipling, from the Just So Stories.

This book is one of those books that will always be best on paper, to be read aloud. Each of the illistrations in the book has an explanatory note, which tells about what’s going on in the picture and how it relates to the story.

I’ve put the pictures in the podcast, but not the explanations. I’ll keep experimenting with them, but I’m not sure what will be a good way to do them so that someone listening, and not watching, will be able to tell what’s going on.

Anyways, tell me what you think. These stories are some of my favorite, and I’m forcing myself to do them in order, and not just jump ahead to The Elephant’s Child.

Podcasting, Garage Band, Audacity, WordPress, and my patience

Things I’ve learned so far this weekend.

1) It is a much better use of my time to record stuff in Audacity, export it as a raw WAV file, and then drag that into Garage Band. It gives me *far* better audio quality, and tries my patience far less.

2) Although the WordPress documentation states authoritatively that WordPress doesn’t, and can’t, automatically recognize .m4a files as podcasts, this is untrue. It will recognize anything with an audio/* mime-type. The thing is, Apache doesn’t come default with the .m4a file type mapped to an audio mime type.

a) I’ve fixed the doc, so that it now tells the truth

b) You have to add the following to your configuration file, or .htaccess file:

AddType audio/x-m4a m4a
AddType audio/x-m4b m4b

c) I committed a patch to Apache that adds these mime types, so the next time you upgrade Apache, you’ll have these audio types by default.

Note: This patch has been reverted, due to the policy that x- mimetypes can’t be in the default config. While I find this policy to be somewhat silly, I don’t have the energy to debate it right now. So, for now, pretend that item (c) isn’t really there.

3) Running iPhoto, GarageBand, Audacity and iTunes all at the same time appears to be too much for my laptop to handle. But perhaps that goes back to my patience.