I'm having to take a few weeks off from Audio Wikinews because of my work schedule, but I managed to put together a secondary website titled HistoryStack containing the full audio and text of all the This Day In History segments. The site contains 3 new episodes (Battle of Big Hole, William Willett and Hamnet filius William Shakespeare) that I had "in the bank" so-to-speak and they contain some audio clips that I'd never be able to use on Wikinews, so they are kind of a fun departure from what I normally do.

 

On the rare occasion I have any free time at all, I enjoy a good video game.

My all time favorite game is a little title on the PS2 and Wii called Okami. Okami is similar to the modern Zelda games in that you roam around in a 3D open-world solving puzzles, battling enemies and collecting treasure. However, unlike Zelda, the main character is not human, but rather a white wolf, specifically the Japanese sun-goddess Amaterasu.

Okami draws on much of ancient Japanese Shinto folklore and tradition for its story of battling an evil presence in Nippon which has spread its corruption across the land which you, the player, must cleanse.

A key feature of the game is the celestial brush, a game element that allows you to draw on the screen with a calligraphy brush to restore the land, create bombs, slash enemies and even slow time. The brush technique fits in with the graphics of the game which use a sort of cell-shading to create a style very reminiscent of old Japanese wood carvings. In fact this art style is so unique that it may have been a reason why the game never sold well because you have to see it in motion, rather than a static screen shot, to appreciate how incredible the game looks.

However, even though the game never sold well on the PS2 or Wii, a sequel is coming out in 2011 for the DS. This is very good news for fans of the game and currently I'm playing through it again (70+ hours in so far) to get ready for the new game.

I highly recommed Okami to everyone I meet because it is a landmark game that never got the respect it is due and I hope the tens of millions of DS owners out there pick up the sequel in 2011 because it would be great if this franchise could continue.

Reddit is by far the only message board where you can have an intelligent conversation about interesting things every single day. Yeah, it's not perfect and there are trolls and bots too, but if you've ever seen a YouTube comment or been unlucky enough to go to Digg then reddit is damn Shakespeare by comparison.

Now, please excuse me while I adjust my golden monocle, kind sir.

After 60 episodes of Audio Wikinews now in the can, I pulled out the calculator to determine how much time I've spent making these shows and the numbers are ... bigger than I realized.

Currently, there is 12.3 hours of audio that makes up the 60 episodes so if you started listening to the very first show, half a day would go by before you finished the most recent.

Of course making a show takes considerable more time then the length of the finished product. Basically I average roughly 4 hours of work for each episode and since each episode is roughly about 12 minutes long, that works out to 1 hour of production for every 3 minutes of finished show. At 60 episodes that means I've spent around 240 hours (or 10 full days at my computer!) writing, editing, recording and researching this podcast.

All that doesn't even include the hours I've spent getting the Audio Wikinews website up to speed (a project still ongoing) by writing templates, guides, scheduling and making revisions.

And as for the amount of files I've created, the above image of my wikinews folder should give you a pretty good idea of the amount of (external USB) hard drive space I'm using and how much information is generated to make the show.

These images hopefully explain where all these files are coming from. As you can see in the History folder, Audacity makes a ton of files that ... do something, but I have no idea what. Also, I like to give some of the stories funny names - keeps me sane.

Now I'm not digging for a pat on the back, I just thought it was interesting to share and maybe remind everyone of how much work goes into making something like this.

And Audio Wikinews is a labor of love, a long and sometimes painful labor at that, but none-the-less something I believe in passionately and look forward to doing each day. Hopefully you like the show too and will tell everyone you know about it through word of mouth, blog posts, emails, facebook likes, twitter tweets, reddit upvotes, iTunes reviews and forum rants.

Sometimes I feel a little bit like I'm toiling about in relative obscurity, but hopefully with enough time, patience and persistence, something really good will come from all the hard work - like a gig that pays :)

Dan Harlow

I completely forgot that I had taken this video about 3 years ago when I was doing tech support for a local computer company here in Colorado. This flag was located just off Highway 14 between Fort Collins and Sterling along a lonely stretch through the Pawnee National Grasslands.

I know it's not the most amazing video footage ever shot, but there was just something starkly beautiful about this little flag blowing in the wind that day. Maybe it just reminds me of all the Native Americans who used to live in this part of the country but were kicked off their land yet whose "spirits" still inhabit the wind.

I'm not religious or spiritual at all, but if you've ever traveled around the American west and south west, it's hard not to feel a reverence for the land and appreciate that which the peoples who lived here for thousands of years must have felt about this land. It's bleak, harsh, dramatic and quite beautiful.

Too bad it's mostly filled with subdivisions these days.

EDIT : Here is a link to a previous blog post I made here that has a good picture of this flag and a couple of other photographs from that same day.

I'm a big fan of podcasts and since I get to use my iPod at work for the first 4 hours of the day (more when I work overnights), I'm able to keep up with all my favorite shows. This list represents my favorite podcasts and podcasts that are noteworthy. There are other podcasts I do listen to on a less frequent basis that I haven't included here so if you tell me I left your favorite off the list, sorry about that, but there are just so many hours of the day I can spend listening to podcasts.

Hit the break to read the list :

Read the rest of this post »

Unfortunately, my real life job has been much more demanding lately and I have not had the 5 hours extra a day to do a show. I will be getting back to the show soon, so please be patient, but I don't get paid for the Audio Wikinews yet I still have to pay bills. However, I do apologize for the abrupt hiatus.

By the way, I was profiled for an upcoming episode of This American Life. They are doing an episode called Million Dollar Idea and they really liked my submission and so last week I spoke with one of their producers (Robyn) over the phone for about 15 min. I have no idea if my recoding will make the final cut, but it was fun to do.

EDIT (07-26-2010) : None of the user comments made the final production cut. Robyn, the producer, emailed us all to say she was sorry which was very nice of her. And I'm not upset at all since I understand how production works. It was still an excellent episode, even if I wasn't a part of it.

Here is a copy of my submission :

I tried getting this to work a few years ago, but I majored in literature and not chemistry. I now work at Target.

Anyway, my idea is pretty simple, actually. I hate the sound of a car alarm; everyone hates that sound and, besides, we all ignore them so they pretty much just incur annoyance and don't deter theft. Yet what if instead of an annoying sound, the car changed colors, pulsed and glowed?

Basically you inject the car's paint with tiny fibers that react visibly to a low voltage and when the alarm is tripped, the entire car pulses and glows making it stand out dramatically - especially at night. Hard to be inconspicuous driving around in a 2010 diesel Ford F-350 that is glowing hot pink and orange 20 cycles per second - cops tend to notice things like that in the middle of the night, even the color blind ones. Also, no noise, so the baby doesn't wake up when a squirrel "accidentally" sets off the alarm at 2am.

Honestly, I have no practical idea how to get this to work, but I know it can even if, at the end of the day, it doesn't work significantly better than a regular, noisy alarm. Besides, I think I could make a million just from people who are grateful never to have to put up with that honking horn which lasted 16 hours straight in my apartment complex parking lot that wouldn't tow it because the maintenance dude was on vacation and the tow company wouldn't move it because it was on private property and I really needed to sleep after the 12 hour shift I worked because I needed the money so that I could go back to school ...

I digress.

In conclusion, my idea is pretty good, not earth shattering such as solving the NGO problem in Haiti with a paperclip and an LED (which, if that works, is totally my idea for this show and you can just drop the whole car alarm thingy), but totally nuisance reducing which, after all, is the half-cousin of invention; necessity being, well, a more loved family member whose car would never get stolen anyway.