Discoveries this week..

I am just a couple of days away from my longest vacation in these three years – two weeks, yay! That doesn’t necessarily mean I am too harassed with work, yet I have never taken such a long stretch off and it is a luxury not to be bothered with checking mail every morning and evening. The off-side of a long vacation usually means an overflowing inbox on the day back which can drain away all the bubbling enthusiasm(even if half the mails are official, company-generated spam). But this time I need not even spare a thought to that, cos it is Christmas season and not too many mails would flood in(even spam might take a break!).

Ok, before anyone who knows my plans for the “vacation” reminds me it is not going to be all sleep and fun(in that order), I know, I know… But it is still a luxury not to worry about the mailbox, don’t you agree? :D

I am a couple of days away from my vacation, with loads on my plate, official and otherwise, to finish off before then. Yet, being the vagabond that I am, I did not stick to what needs to be done and went on to explore… well, quite a few things. And yes, writing this entry is another thing that is not really required to be done at this point of time, but don’t remind me please! That said, I will move on to my real topic.

The first discovery that I made this week was Miro! I know this discovery is not going to win me the Nobel, but it is important to me. Read on to find out why. The path that took me to Miro was BBC, blame the stiff Britons ;) Wandering all over TamilNadu last week, I missed following the news so much, that I went digging into all the news sites I frequent, both regularly and haphazardly. BBC podcasts beckoned and I was frustrated that the last time I had followed two consecutive episodes of one of my favourites “From Our Own Correspondent” was in August. And I was on the road only last week, so that was not an excuse. I decided it was high time I got “something” to organize my favourite audios for me, since I was not getting anywhere with the job myself.

So I went hunting for “podcatchers”, the of course, in the very top was “Google Reader” which I immediately vetoed. Google knew too much of me already(this blog included) without knowing my news and music tastes as well. iTunes was up there too. I hesitated a few minutes before I decided to give it a try. I am not a fan of Apple’s proprietary products, and only grudgingly do I admit that I love my iPod. I convinced myself that having come up with the iPod in the first place, Apple deserved a chance. So with that very noble reasoning I set out to try and configure iTunes with a sample feed. It refused to connect to the web. Excellent, that is it! I decided and struck that option off my list. Alright, I was just waiting for an excuse to get rid of the iTunes option, so what? I had never been a fan of iTunes and the reason I even had it on my laptop was only that worked with my iPod Shuffle(courtesy of IBM).

With the two recognizable choices off my list, I was now faced with Miro, Nimiq, Juice and a few others. I played around with the idea of having a web-based podcatcher, something that would just keep track of my preferences in one place –on the web, not on my laptop. Of course, it had its drawbacks, but atleast it would save space on my already overcrowded harddisk. But I did not get a decent enough option, or maybe I did not look properly enough.

Anyway, I was now left with only the regular podcatchers. Miro looked cute(atleast the red sheep logo did) and the features seemed sufficient for my limited requirements. I hit the download button and forgot all about it for the next few hours. When I realized there was a dialog box open waiting for me to approve the install, I clicked the “Yes” and decided I would configure it ASAP, no IMMEDIATELY. Otherwise it would be another couple of months before I got to it.

Once installed, I saw it was a simple interface, nothing too fancy - a sidebar that listed the podcasts and a bigger right pane that gave the details of each one when clicked upon along with the Download and Play buttons. Adding feeds was simple and it somehow seemed to know when I copied a RSS link to my clipboard. Auto-download options were easy to configure and sensible, though the “Keep outdated items” options of 0, 20,50, and 100 appeared to be on the clumsy side. More importantly, it had an option to pause Auto-download when the number of unplayed items hit a threshold. That is crucial, for I am sure I will not listen to all the feeds I over-enthusiastically subscribe to and like I mentioned earlier, space on my disk is a problem.

I do realize that these features are simple and probably present on most podcatchers, but I am happy with it. Too bad it does not have a facility to follow Text/webpage RSS feeds as well. I have tried many and discarded and am yet to find a FeedReader I really like. And oh, I forgot! Miro is targeted at video-playing and it is not their fault if a primitive like me bothers about plain RSS feeds.

My next discovery is Book blogging! The discovery is still in progress and will be updated soon…. Till then happy no-crypticrunes time! (What else do I say when I bore you faithful readers with a drab post on podcatchers and my non-specific vacation plans :P)