Archive for March, 2006
Podcasting with Odeo
Updated on 14Nov, 2006
Odeo is a free and easy to use web site where you can create audio recording of your voice. You can email these audio clips to your friends. If you want to publish audio on a topic on a regular basis then you can publish your recording as podcasts too. Maybe you are traveling in Thailand and you want your friends to follow your trip by listening to your audio clips every couple of days, you can hop into a cybercafe, log on to Odeo and record your audio. Maybe you are a Chinese language teacher and you want your students to listen to audio clips of your lessons every week for practice. I am sure once you start using Odeo, you will discover several uses for it.
Step1: Signing up
a) Sign up to Odeo at www.odeo.com. The sign up is pretty simple, all you need to input is your name, email and password.
Once you are signed on you will see this page.
Step2: Creating a Podcast
a) The first thing we will do is to create a podcast. Think of podcasts as a radio show. You can have a podcast called “My Travels” that might have episodes on your travel stories. You might have another podcast called “Lunch with Me” where in each episode you might talk about a new lunch place you discovered. Later on we will create individual episodes and add them to our podcast. Right now I am just creating a podcast. Look at the My Podcasts tab on the right hand side of your page and click on “Create one!”
b) Odeo will ask you for some details about your podcast. Try to be as descriptive as possible. Enter the description
c) Once you have submitted you podcast details, you will see the following screen.
We are done with podcast creation. I am calling my podcast “Thailand Travel Podcast” . Next we will add some audio or individual episodes into our podcast.
Step 3: Recording and adding audio to your podcast
a) From the My Audio tab on the left, click on Record Audio
You get this new screen - Odeo Studio. Odeo is now loading a recording utility. This might take a little bit of time so be patient here.
b) You will get this window that asks permission to access your camera and microphone. Make sure you have connected a mic to your computer (or your computer has a built in mic). Click on Allow.
c) The recorder is now ready for you to start recording. Click on the Record button and start speaking.
d) When you are done speaking, click on the Stop button. You can click on the Play button to review your audio. If you are not happy, you can click on Clear Audio button to cancel the recording and then record again. But if you are happy then you can click on the Save Recording button.
It takes a little while to save the audio depending on how long your audio is.
e) On the next page you get this screen.
Type in a Title. Make sure that your titles are descriptive enough. You can type in a longer description too. If you have a blog post of some other pages relating to the topic you recording, you could put the address of that page in the Link area. You might also want to add in an image of the things you are talking about.
You can make this audio a part of your podcast by selecting your podcast from the “Place in:” option right at the bottom.
Step 4: Letting your friends know about your podcast
a) Go the My Podcasts tab and click on the name of your podcast.
b) The next page shows you the subscription link for you podcast. You can copy this link and email to your friends or display it on your website.
Step 5: Listening to your podcasts on iTunes
a) If you or your friends are new to podcasts, you can refer them to this section of the tutorial. Your friends may need to download, install and run iTunes (from www.itunes.com) in order to subscribe and listen to podcasts. Once iTunes is running, they will need to go to the Advanced menu item and choose Subscribe to Podcast．
b) A small window will open up asking for the address of the podcast. They will have to copy the address of your podcast feed (from the email you sent them or from your website) and paste it over here.
Click on ok after pasting the address.
c) iTunes will start downloading the individual episodes.
From now on whenever you have a new episode, the iTunes on your friend’s computer will automatically download the new episode.
Technorati Tags: odeo, podcasting
Working with Google Page Creator
I often run Dreamweaver workshop for people interested in making web pages. Most of the time they just want to make a small website and Dreamweaver ends up being too feature rich plus the hassles of finding a hosting site etc. Also, Dreamweaver is not cheap - a big obstacle when you are trying to use it with organisations on a budget. I used to show people how to use blog engines like Wordpress.com or blogspot.com and make them look like webpages (some people just don’t want to hear the word blog).
Anyway, today I got entry to Google’s Page Creator service and I have been playing with it last 20 minutes. Similar to a blog tool, this service offers template that let you change the layout and the look of the site. You can create several web pages and link them to each other.
Highlight a word and click on the link tab on the left and a window opens allowing you to specify the page or website to be linked to.
Click on another tab and a window pops up asking you to upload your image or specify the web address of the image.
The other nice thing is that web page renders well on a mobile browser.
The same page seen on Opera’s mobile browser.
Technorati Tags: googlepagecreator, googlepages, webdesign, dreamweaver
Reading naughty poems at a Holland Village foodcourt
I was looking for my favorite Korean food place at the Windmill food-court at Holland Village and I found that they had moved out. Sadding..It was always nice to talk to the kindly lady running the place, she would keep me informed of the latest Korean restaurants in the city. Some consolation though; the new stall serves Vietnamese food and is run by equally kindly women from Vietnam. They were happy when I mentioned that I have been to their hometowns. The springrolls I ordered were good too.
It always seemed easier to make friends with immigrants as I guess a just little bit of connection, like having been to their hometowns or knowing how to speak a few words of the native land is enough to bring up smiles. Coincidentally, I have also been re-reading poems by a Vietnamese lady who lived in the 17th century.
Ho Xuan Huong was a rarity as she wrote at a time in Vietnamese history when the status of woman had gone down a lot under the influence of Confucianism from China. Spring Essence is a collection of poems translated by John Balaban.
Poems like this one “Phan dan ba” or “The Condition of Women” speaks of life under the male dominated society. Below is a translation of this poem.
Ho Xoan also wrote poems with double meanings often sexual in nature. Here she laments on Sharing a husband. The top two lines are a bit blurred, they read - Screw the fate that makes you share a man. One cuddles under cotton blankets; the other’s cold.
Ho Xoan used Nom, a writing system that uses Chinese characters but is closer to actual Vietnamese speech. Most Vietnamese poets at that time used to write in proper Chinese - a language of the elite.
Here is another naughty poem by Ho Xoan, can you guess what she is talking about?
If you are in Singapore, you can borrow the book from National Library. Link
Technorati Tags: vietnam