Posts by Dan Misener - misener.org
Flipboard does audio, and why segmentation matters
Today, Flipboard added audio playback controls and a new Audio category to its app: The section is searchable but comes with recommended SoundCloud users, as well as popular shows from NPR (National Public Radio) and PRI (Public Radio International). I’ve played with the new Flipboard for a while, and it’s yet another example of why segmentation matters, and how for public [...]
Radio, comics, and abstraction
It’s been on my “to watch” list for quite a while, and today I finally got around to watching Jad Abumrad’s presentation at MaxFunCon 2010. In it, Jad uses many examples from Radiolab (and borrows heavily from Walter Murch) to create a model that explains the relationship between words, music, various types of sound effects, and [...]
Everything old is new (again)
Cyrus has a piece up at Ars Technica about Boxfish, a search engine for closed captions scraped from broadcast television: Boxfish captures all closed-captioning information, indexes it, then makes that data searchable in a Twitter-style interface. All in real-time. If this technique sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because Google did something very similar way back in 2005: [...]
A very fussy morning coffee ritual
One of the great luxuries of a sabbatical year in France is time. I have time now like I’ve never had it before. Time to go for a stroll, time to sit in a cafe for hours on end practicing French… Most notably though, I now have time to make coffee in a very fussy [...]
Back asswards
I don’t often get my CBC budget cut analysis from the sports section, but maybe I should. From Bruce Dowbiggin’s take on the recent cuts: CBC’s core business, its relevance to the public, would probably be in the following order: 1. News and current affairs; 2. Radio; 3. Sports; 4. Light entertainment. The problem with [...]
Full list of CBC Music direct URLs
CBC just launched a new music service, imaginatively titled CBC Music. It offers access to 40 web radio stations, a vast array of music and blog posts by CBC personalities through a website and via mobile apps. Rather than listen to these stations via a website or mobile app, I’d prefer to listen via VLC. [...]
That time Timbuk2 replaced my 5-year old bag, for free
I love it when I experience great customer service. It seems to happen so infrequently that I feel compelled to share whenever it does. Every once in a while, you deal with people who stand behind their company or product so much that you can’t not tell people about it. For example, when the Australian Boot Company replaced my [...]
My real-life experience using CanadianForex
Bank wire transfers suck. They suck in (at least) three ways: Banks charge a fee for every transfer (my bank, TD, charges $30-80 per transfer) Banks’ international exchange rates are terrible Sometimes, your money needs to pass through an intermediary bank, which may charge additional fees Ugh. So then, when when Jenna and I decided [...]
My new favourite iPhone app: Instacast
I love podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And almost exclusively, I use my iPhone to listen to podcasts. But heres’s the thing: subscribing to and downloading new podcasts to my iPhone is fiddly. Syncing with iTunes on my Mac is fiddly. Downloading new episodes a-la-carte via the iTunes app on iOS is fiddly. [...]
The joy of setting up a French bank account
I’ll begin by saying we were warned. Several people made it very plain to us: setting up a French bank account is complicated, and takes longer than you’d think. So then, the point of this blog post is a) to verify that setting up a French bank account is indeed complicated and time-consuming, and b) [...]