Your Computer Minute with Peter Kay

Want to see how to use this feature the cool way?
Checkout the video for a step-by-step demonstration!
(And let me know if you experienced any difficulties)

If you don’t have an iPod but you want an easy way to synchronize your podcasts with your Pocket PC or any other MP3 player, you can configure Windows Media Player to automatically sync newly downloaded podcasts and even deleted podcasts.

It took a little while to monkey around with this but I got it to work and it works like a charm. Check out the video I’ve put together and let me know what you think!

If you don’t want to watch a video, here’s what I did:

• Set Podcatcher directory
• Set WMP additional directory
• Create new auto playlist
• Insert removable media
• Edit sync settings
• Assign playlist
• Open properties of removable media
• Uncheck convert files
• Check create hierarchy & start sync

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I guess where there are kids, there are bullies. And where there are bullies, there’s a nonprofit organization funded by your tax dollars that’s telling us the obvious: it’s wrong.

Apparently 1 in 5 kids gets bullied electronically and text messaging is the most popular. A report by NCH gives you an idea of what kids are saying to each other, which sounds very much like what we used to say to each other back when I was a kid (except the “we’ll burn your house down” part):

“You’ve got ‘you’re big, you’re fat, you smell and nobody likes you’ right through to ‘we know where you live and we’re going to burn down your house and you’re going to die’”

In fact, there’s even a Web site: http://stoptextbully.com/.

Need more info? Cnet has a good article on it.

So what’s the solution? It’s the same one today that is used to be a long time ago: beat the crap out of the bully. Except now instead of fists, it’s hacking geeks to the rescue! Shut ‘em down, boyz!

Clearly, podcasting can be a huge benefit for schools. I can think of a few applications right off:

• Classes (obviously)
• School announcements
• Teacher reports to the parents
• Guest speaker presentations
• Internal School news magazine
• Faculty development

Here’s an article written by Russell Educational Consultancy and Productions, “Exploiting the educational potential of podcasting“. Take a read and post your comments here. Thanks to Podcasting News for catching this one.

You just gotta love the guys at iPodder, makers of a great podcatcher (I use it and love it). They know they’re toast because iTunes is coming and of course MS can’t be too far behind (if not ahead???). So what are they doing? They’re goin’ out with style by delivering the lastest version 2.1 with a collection of cool features as posted by Podcasting News:

• In response to user voting on the ipodder-dev mailinglist, one-click subscription support has been enabled
• Ability to synch subscriptions to remote OPML files (works with feedmanagers like podnova)
• Auto cleanup: Ability to specify on a per-feed basis that older episodes should be cleaned up.
• Genre overriding in iTunes.
• New right-click option for feeds: Open downloads folder
• Right-click menus in the episodes and downloads tab link to show notes and hyperlinks found within RSS item description.

Way to go iPodder team! You guys rock! You should have made tons of money and been able to retire by now. I’m very sorry to report that you only got a few scraps in your cookie jar instead. I don’t think this is a good example of the Open Source model.

If you heard Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” yesterday you heard him mention that iTunes is coming in two weeks or less.

Get ready all you podcasters for the avalanche of 38Million iTunes desktops coming to a podcast near you. I hope this means my stats will crank up another notch!