I’ve finished uploading the second talk (actually the first, chronologically) that I gave at Notacon. It’s called “Your Moment of Audio Zen: A History of Podcasts” and I gave it on the Friday before my Wikipedia speech.

The archive.org page for downloading it is here.

Compared to the Wikipedia speech, this is pretty fluffy stuff, mostly traipsing around the subject and the history of podcasting, with a bunch of other trivia and subjects thrown in. Some people who’ve never heard my talking style before the Wikipedia speech who might download this one will be surprised at how much slower I talk in this one. Others, though, are probably happy I stopped talking as fast as I did in the Wikipedia speech.

The actual thing that interests me about this recording and speech, though, is how it was accomplished. You’re hearing a speech recorded using wireless mics I bought for the Text Adventure Documentary, which are feeding into a digital recorder I also bought for the documentary (and a few other projects). Let me go into audio nerd mode for a moment, since some people care about these details.

The wireless mic is connected to my lapel and runs down to a transmitter next to my left pocket (as I mention at the end of the speech, Notacon staff wired me on the right side with a different wireless setup to go to their cameras and mixing board, so I was one wired up bastard.)

The microphones I use are called Sennheiser EW-100-G2s. The digital recorder I have is called a Marantz PMM671. (I call it the wrong model number in the recording).

Hence, when I listen to this talk, I’m actually less interested in the content than how good it sounds. You can hear me very clearly, you can make out the audience just enough for you to be aware I have one, and the thing just does not distort. The PMM671 records everything to a SD card, and can hold about 3 hours of audio, which it stores in .WAV form. The recorder also has a USB port.

So, basically, I could finish my talk, walk over to my laptop, and have a 300mb .WAV file of my speech. Done. That’s fantastic.

What I used to do was put my camera up on the podium, aimed at my stomach, and then record that way. This was uneven at best. Sometimes it came out great, and sometimes I’d wander away from the podium and I’d be screwed. No such problem here! It came out just fantastic.

There were two other official appearances I made at Notacon. A game show called “Wait! Wait! Don’t Pwn Me”, hosted by Nick Farr of the Hacker Foundation, and a panel called “Hacker Media”. I will likely upload the panel, but not the gameshow. No reasonable person wants to watch this gameshow, trust me.

It feels good to be back in the swing of collecting and working. I’ve moved a lot of gigabytes this week, and intend to move a lot more. Expect digitize.textfiles.com to get a mass of new scans, too.

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