Embedded - 13: Introspective Nasal Gazing

Episode Date: August 7, 2013

Christopher White ( @stoneymonster) emerges from his producer responsibilities to chat with Elecia about starting a podcast: the gadgetry, the software, the distribution, and, the big question, why we do it. Links from the show:  Libsyn, a dedicated podcast audio hosting service. SquareSpace, fast and easy website building and hosting. 5x5, Dan Benjamin's (@danbenjamin) phenomenal podcast network. Starting a podcast, Dan's guide to podcast equipment. 

Welcome to Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. Today, Christopher White and I are celebrating a dozen shows by a little bit of introspective navel-gazing. We're going to talk about the technology of podcast. Thanks for being in front of the mic again, Christopher. It's fun to be back. So this is kind of like a software retrospectiveive talking about what we did, what we liked, how we might improve. You've done a few of those, haven't you? Yeah, but usually they don't turn out to work the way they're

intended to. Yeah, I think we're going to do a show about agile software process soon, but not today. What is your favorite episode so far? far uh well i mean that's kind of like asking what your favorite pet is and of course it's the beagle but um i don't think i have a particular favorite episode and you know in mind but except for the flip answer of the one that i've had to edit at least. I've enjoyed parts of all of them. I especially like the ones where we talk to people I think that

are total strangers and have some product or interesting area of expertise that we might not know well or have experience with. So we get to learn something. And so to that end, the episode.

The one where we talked to Light Up. Yeah, Light Up was great. With Josh and Theroon. It was interesting to hear from them, you know, their process of developing the company and, you know, from the ground up from an idea. And how excited they still were about their startup. I kind of want to talk to them again in six months yeah and not just talk about the technical details of well how did you put this together how does it work but kickstarter and

what was the struggle and what was good and what was bad yeah and i like talking to matt from electric imp because i didn't understand that project at all when I read about it. I mean, I thought it was just like a Broadcom Wi-Fi chip. I didn't realize it was their own processor and that it was a whole system. And now he brought me a dev kit and I've been playing with it and I really understand a lot more about it. And I don't think I would have gotten started if I hadn't gotten to talk to him. Yeah. And, you know, there's the other episodes where we kind of dive into something with somebody we know, and that's cool, too. And that's a little bit more, you know, there's a difference between the researchy kind of episodes and the interview kind of episodes. Yes, where the interviews are talking to people. I mean, even talking to Ed and Karen Lightman.

Those were things that I knew the people, but I got to talk to them about what their jobs are instead of just talking about kids and general fluffy things. I got to dig in. I liked that. But I also like talking to Jen and Phil because it's recording conversations we'd have had anyway. That makes recording for me a little easier. So what do you think makes a good episode, having done 11 of these?

Twelve. Eleven if you don't count the music episode. What makes a good one well you know i only i have only listened to a few of them all the way through because it's really hard to listen to your own voice uh and i like the ones where there's more laughter even if there's less technical stuff if there's if there's giggling i'm i'm way more in favor of it the ones that have been super serious are harder for me to listen to. They don't flow as well. And it's clear that I'm trying to do something.

And I'm so driven and trying to do something all the time that it's fun for me to hear it when I'm not trying to get somewhere. Do you think there's a way to strike that balance better in those other kinds of episodes? Well, my producer tells me I need less detail in my outlines and less scripting. But I need to do that sort of preparation to make it even flow at all.

If I hadn't done all the research for Matt's episode on Electric Imp, I wouldn't even have started out with the right questions. Yeah, it's a hard, those are hard episodes to do anyway, because you try to throw demos and actual use into things, which makes for great TV, which this is not. I do tend to like the visual things and then to describe them. But I like doing that. I have fun. I don't, and I don't have trouble hearing those because I was there. I can imagine it. I have had

a few people say, well, the episode where you did this, I didn't really follow it. And so I, I'm aware of that, but like the light up one, I really tried to, I think that was right after I got that feedback, where I really tried to describe what I was seeing and what I was doing. And when I listened back to that one, I liked it. Yeah. I listened to the whole one on that one. It can work. I just think it's sometimes risky and usually requires a great deal of editing.

Yes. You don't like those as much. So let's talk a little bit about the technology. Right now we're using podcaster mics. That's the name, right? I believe these are actually called procasters, although they do have a... So these are from Rode, and forgive me for mispronouncing that. I do not know how to pronounce the O with a slash through it. But it's

R-O-D-E with the slash through the O, and I don't even know what particular language that comes from. I think you pronounce it Bork. You say Bork, Bork, Bork. Okay, so it's the... Send emails to Alicia. Anyway, it's from Rode. I'm going to pronounce it Rode. It's the Rode

Procaster or Podcaster. And the difference between the two is the Podcaster is a USB interface. So it's got the amplifier and volume control and a headphone output all in one package, and you just plug that into your computer. The Procaster is the one we use, and that's because we generally have two people. It's easier to mix two vocals on site using a separate mixer. A lot of the people who are doing the USB ones either have remote guests or something like that, so they're not in the same room. So they're the same mic. They sound the same. They're about the same price. And they sound very good. They're designed for vocal applications and speaking rather than music.

I got the—I'm going to keep coming back to this. So I got turned on to them from reading the blog of Dan Benjamin, who does a huge number of podcasts and has his own network called 5x5. And you like them a lot. You've listened to a bunch of those podcasts, and even our website is a little bit based on the simplicity of their website.

Well, actually, the website's stolen from somebody else who used to be on that network and isn't anymore. But I'll get back to that. But Dan really tries to get quality sound in a broadcast kind of he has a broadcast kind of mindset toward podcasting not the let's throw up some you know skype mics and have a chat in a loud room you know with no sound treatment or anything well then it's because the goal for the podcast is not to sound fantastic. It's to be listenable. And so other people have a much lower bar, but I, I guess maybe I listened to too much public radio where they sound fantastic all the time, even when they are in a

public area. Um, and then these, these, these mics are XLR, which is kind of a musician-y thing. Um, and we have a bunch of other musician-y things because Christopher is a drummer and has been in a band and has all the musician-y things, including the mixer and special stuff like that. If I was doing it alone or you weren't involved, I probably would go with the USB mic because that would be simplest for non-musical me.

Yeah, I don't know exactly how that would work with multiple guests. I'm not sure how to integrate that into a recording. The recording software is two separate inputs and then you'd have two separate outputs for the headphones, so things would get a little messy there. I think I looked into that and found it would be difficult. But certainly if you're talking to yourself, if you're just producing a show and you're doing voiceovers...

I do that a lot. What if we have a remote guest? We haven't tried doing it over Skype yet, and I'm a little iffy about Skype. Do you think we could set them up with the USB mic and then take their audio from their local recording and mush them together, or do you think that'll be harder? That's usually the best way to do it.

That's what most people who do remote podcasts do, is they record together, and everybody hears everybody through Skype, but each track from their mic is getting as good quality as possible because it's recorded onto separate computers, and then you get all the files later and merge them together. It's a bit of a pain, but it sounds better than trying to record straight from Skype.

Though you can record straight from Skype. And if somebody has a good mic on the other end of Skype, that's going to make it better too, and it's probably going to be okay. But you've heard the podcasts where they used a crummy mic and that person just doesn't sound good. You know, you don't want people to listen to something and then turn it off, not because the content isn't good, but because it's hurting their ears. Oh, we don't want the content to be good. That would be just boring.

So, okay, but we have the microphone and then I'm looking at all of this other stuff because the mic is only part. We have these shock mounts and we've got this, I want to call it a spit guard, but that's not a pop filter. Pop filter. And then we've got these really nifty mic mounts. Arms. Boom arms. Boom arms that go, that attach to my desk or when we travel, they attach to other places. And it keeps the microphone mostly in front of me

and these microphones let me move back and forth because i do tend to some i mean they are directional so that gets into yeah so there's a lot of equipment you can buy you probably don't need to start with all of this stuff i I have a little bit of gear acquisition syndrome. So, you know, and I tend to want to, when I'm faced with a problem, I want to eliminate equipment as much as possible so I don't have to think about it and say, well, is this sound bad because we have the wrong equipment or does it sound bad because we're not, we don't know what we're doing? I'd rather know that the problem is that I don't know what I'm doing because then I know I have to learn something, not that I have to buy something um so I try to buy good stuff and I mean

yeah it's probably expensive ish well yeah but you know this is a company thing we let our company pay for this it's for logical elegance It's advertising for us as consultants. But it's also, I mean, that makes it a little cheaper for us. And it's kind of fun to have this be a part of our company. And we have used mics we had before. I mean, that you had for other things. Yeah, and those worked okay. The SM57s? Mm-hmm.

And we used those for the first show with Jen. Yeah. I guess that was episode two. And for the remote shows. And then for the remote shows with Karen and Ed. And Karen, both of those were actually recorded using the Handy Recorder. Do you remember what that's really called? I think it's a Zoom H4.

It's very old, so they have new versions of that. We got that many years ago to record shows, and I got one to record gunshots at one point. Those are little tiny recorders, and they're not awesome. I mean, this is not—it's just going to record to this little handheld thing. And we plugged in the SM57s, and then we held the mics. And I gather my mic technique has gotten good enough that there wasn't a lot of popping, but for Karen and Ed, they had some trouble keeping it in the right angle

so that you didn't get the pop-pop-pop-popcorn sound. Well, it's very difficult, and it's fatiguing to have to hold a mic. Yes. And as a guest, you're on the spot. You don't know what's happening and you're trying to think of what to say. You're not trying to think, am I holding the mic the right way? Am I breathing on it?

That's true. I have gotten okay at being able to talk and kind of hear myself and not hurt my brain with that. But Ed sure was nervous. And I think that does make a big difference do you think there's any new gear we're gonna be looking at no i we have this mixer and that takes both mics and produces a single audio output that goes to usb and plugs into the computer and it's a little bit... And it's a stereo, so we're on different tracks. Yeah, we're on different tracks so that I can edit things separately if necessary,

mute one person if somebody coughs, use some noise filtering so that if one person's talking and the other person's making a lot of noise or just breathing, you know, it can automatically turn that off. It's not a big deal. So maybe a smaller mixer because this one's designed for other stuff. I actually stole it from my music stuff. But no, I don't think we need much different. And we didn't mention our over-the-ear headphones,

although the remote ones we used iPod headphones and in-ear headphones, and those were okay. But the over-the- the ears are so much better yeah these are the sony mdr something um mdr 7506 i've always liked these for music stuff they're very comfortable um they sound good and these are the ones i use when i'm programming and don't want anyone to bother me but they are they're not they're not the most expensive i think they're kind of mid-range headphones, but there are certainly cheaper ones you can get that would do the job.

But that comes back to why headphones? And when we first started, you wondered why we weren't just talking into the mics across the desk. Why would we need to have headphones? We can hear each other. Right, right. Oh, but I don't think that

anymore, because now I can hear when I'm doing weird things, when I'm sniffing or coughing or smacking my lips or popping, but I wouldn't have been able to hear that if we were just talking without the headphones. Yeah, the reason is that hearing your own voice come out of your mouth and your ears is really a different experience than hearing what the mic is hearing in real time. Your voice, it's like hearing yourself recorded and played back, except immediately while you're talking. So you can hear all the idiosyncrasies of your voice as it's going to tape that you normally wouldn't hear if you're not wearing headphones. And it gives you that feedback to say, oh, I'm not using good mic technique. I'm not speaking loud enough. I'm breathing on it.

So it's really, really important to have headphones. And it adjusts the level so that you hear what the other person's saying in the same conversational tone that's getting recorded too. So you can actually kind of hear the podcast as it's going to sound. I don't know. You're a little loud in my head, but that's okay. The voices in my head, they're all very loud. Hmm. Sorry. Sorry. okay the voices in my head they're all very loud sorry and we did take this pile of gear instead

of the handy corner to go talk to josh and throon for light up and there's a cute picture of all of us amid the pile of gear um you said gear acquisition syndrome and that that's been shorthand in our our relationship but i don't think you're the only one with gear acquisition syndrome. They had a fair amount of gear themselves. Well, they had portions of their startup were strewn about the house. And that was one of those tough things because we hadn't done a remote before. And there were three of us. There were three of us.

That's hard because we were used to two. Right, so that's where the mixer comes in. If you're going to have more than two people, then you really start looking at spending more for hardware, especially if you want to have separate tracks for each person. In that case, we didn't. We actually mixed the guests onto one track and then you onto another one,

which can lead to problems if you have to edit something that's happening, particularly on one of those tracks that's printed to merge together. But they were well-behaved and we did fine. Yeah. So let's see what's next on my list of questions. Do you want to talk about software or do you want to talk about why we're doing this? Let's get the software next on my list of questions. Do you want to talk about software or do you want to talk about why we're doing this? Let's get the software and equipment stuff out of the way since we were already talking about that.

So I used Audacity, which is a free SourceForge audio mixing tool, a lot. I mean, enough to become an expert user, even enough to do some changes to the software myself. But that was all when I was doing gunshot location and listening to a lot of sounds, most of which were gunshots. But that's not what we're using for this. We're using some complicated thing that I haven't even been able to figure out at all. It's not that complicated. We're using some complicated thing that I haven't even been able to figure out at all. It's not that complicated. I mean, Audacity and Logic and Audition and a lot of these things are very similar now.

It's just what you're used to. They're all audio recording programs. Audacity and Audition are more suited to recording two tracks and doing work with stereo files. We did stuff with four-channel files, but it was clunky. Yeah. And it's an open-source product. You get what you pay for sometimes. Well, at the risk of irritating everybody who works on open-source projects,

the user interface and design of the user interface are usually afterthoughts on open source projects. So it's a little bit clunky. It's got some rough edges. I found it difficult to work with. It's got lots of modal pop-ups and things when you're doing effects. It's free and it works. And it's pretty good.

It's pretty good. And so I would certainly start there or somewhere similar. But that's not where you start. I use Logic from Apple. I've used it for music projects for years, so I know how to use it. It has a number of nice features. It comes with lots of plug-ins and effects for changing how the sound of the voice is coming across. Can you make me even squeakier?

I can make you even squeakier i can make you even squeakier but i usually try to go the other way i know um so you make me sound like darth vader because that'd be cool i can make you sound like alvin and chipmunks if you want that's not hard that's my normal voice um uh where was i so logic is awesome i think it's not awesome it's just what i'm used to i mean it's pretty good um i don't think it's the go-to thing for a lot of music producers these days a lot of people use pro tools and stuff like that but i will say that logic and and its contemporaries are completely overkill probably for podcasting but being overkill for podcasting isn't... It just means you've got at least enough features

to do everything you want easily in a bunch you never can use. Well, and a lot of software people do have some musical affinity. So you're not going to be the only one who has a lot of this stuff. And you can use GarageBand. That's true.

You can even use your iPad with GarageBand. Yeah. I know some other podcasters do that. With a USB thingy that you can plug USB mics and mixers in. And Logic gives you some things that I never did in Audacity. NoiseGate, what are those? A NoiseGate, it's a filter that you put on an audio track. And what it does is it looks for the sound to be above a certain level. And if it's below a

certain level, it turns it off. So you can think of it as noticing when somebody's talking and automatically turning their volume up, and then noticing when they're not talking and then turning it all the way down. So if somebody's breathing, that's going to be at a low level and that'll be just cut off. If somebody's coughing, they might not be able to cut that off because that's going to be at a similar level to talking. And a nice thing also with the noise gate is if you're in a recording circumstance where you've got people close to each other and you're picking up one person on the other person's mic. Sometimes that doesn't sound very good because you get an echo effect.

It's kind of like a really quick echo. It sounds like you're in a shower or something. So what the noise gate will do is it eliminates the sound of the other person's voice coming into your mic and cuts that echo and makes everything sound really tight. Does it deal with background noise? A little bit. We're pretty lucky because here in our home studio we don't end up with a deal with background noise? A little bit. We're pretty lucky because here in our home studio, we don't end up with a lot of background noise. Um, although we did just stop

because the dog barked, uh, and now we've restarted and we get a little bit of traffic noise, but not very much. Uh, places like where I recorded with Karen, which was a restaurant that was busy, and there was music. Dishes. And the dishes. Oh, the dishes. What did you do to that one? Well, there wasn't a lot I could do. If somebody's speaking and there's background noise coming into their mic, there's nothing you can do because it's, I mean, if you turn it down,

you just turn down their voice too. And if you FFT filter it to do something interesting, you change their voice, which is kind of weird well we don't call it fft filtering in the audio business we call it equalization i see okay um you can do things with eq but like you said it's going to affect the character of their voice but if there's a rumble or something if there's something in a confined range of frequencies a rumble a hiss um that's you can kind of deal with that with eq and usually i actually apply some eq to to cut the low end on the voice anyway and that gets a lot of the background noise it's kind of a continuous thing but things like dishes or sharp noises or things that you know are

indistinguishable from a voice there's not a lot you can do with that. The noise gate does not help with that. Noise gate only helps when there's nothing else happening on that mic besides the background noise. And are there any other features that you use, especially when you're, so EQ and noise gates, those make sense? I use markers, which I think are probably a feature of most recording software. That's when I start giggling or snorting or make things go too loud, or we take a break for a second, you put a marker in and then you know where to edit from. Yeah. Or even if somebody says something interesting and I want to go back to it or, um, that's how we choose our titles sometimes. Right. Um, and like I said, I think every software has that okay so that's recording

software um after we've recorded it uh you put it up on a website and well after i edit it and you well you but you use logic to edit it right and uh it goes up on a website, and we use Squarespace for hosting the RSS feed, and I write the notes, and then you attach it. But there's some other podcast-y thing that goes on, right? Yeah, because podcasts are audio, they're not huge big files, but they're 30 to 50 megabytes, depending on the length of the show. And that's in mono MP3s at like 80 kilobits per second, which sounds pretty good for mono.

So you have to have some place that's willing to host that much data and provide the bandwidth for potentially hundreds of people to download it. Potentially thousands. Potentially. Where is that? That's called Libsyn, Liberated Syndication, Libsyn.com. And they do actually have a lot of infrastructure for the kinds of things we do on Squarespace. They'll host your RSS feed and they'll make a little website for you. I didn't like those features as much as the ones that Squarespace gave us. Squarespace is so simple to use.

I mean, that's what we're recommending our musical, my musical sister-in-law, your sister, and everybody I know who's like, yeah, I'm not really technical, but I want a web page. What do I do? And my answer to that is go to Squarespace. It's kind of funny because Squarespace sponsors about every podcast I've ever listened to. Except ours. You could change that. I don't think so.

So it sounds a little disingenuous. All these podcast people are constantly talking about Squarespace. But it really is easy. And so that's why I like using that. So we have a hybrid approach. We've got Squarespace that hosts the website and the RSS feed. And that points to Libsyn to get the actual files for download. And that's embedded.fm.

Yeah, our website. That's our website is embedded.fm. And then there are a few other things for the website. There's the link to my book. There's the comments page where if you send me a comment, it sends me email, and then I get to read it, and I really like them. So please send me a comment, it sends me email and then I get to read it and I really like them. So please send me comments. Maybe we should put a link for a writer review on iTunes and hope somebody will do that.

I'll look into that. I'm not sure that's possible. But what's funny is that if you look at the statistics, and Libsyn gives you a lot of breakdown of statistics. Oh, is that where you, when you, you told me we were getting hits from all over the world, from Japan and Australia and all of those? Yeah, they'll show you a little map and how many downloads you're getting from each country.

But I was surprised at just how many, probably most to more than 60% of our downloads are coming referred to through iTunes. So they're not going to the embedded.fm. They're using podcasting software through iTunes. So they're not going to the embedded.fm. They're using podcasting software on iTunes. Well, I mean, if you have an iPhone, you don't go listen to the website. You go find it in iTunes because then you can queue it up and subscribe to it.

And getting it on iTunes wasn't very difficult. In typical Apple fashion, it was a little weird, but it wasn't very difficult uh in typical apple fashion it was a little weird but it wasn't it wasn't very difficult no it was i think there was a you know a form you have to fill out to submit a podcast and it's still unclear to me how much you can undo that form once you've submitted it so that's that's what's a little misspell embedded well Well, that was for another place. So, yeah, it's pretty simple. A lot of people think that Apple hosts your podcast files, but that's not true. You have to provide the actual file storage location.

iTunes is just like a library catalog file. Yeah, they're a catalog, and they're an aggregator. So you can go search for stuff there there and it'll keep track of the episodes and you can click on it and do whatever you can do with iTunes and stuff. But that's not where they don't do any of the hosting. And I think Stitcher hosts some of the file, but I don't really understand how that works. I did sign up for Stitcher and again it was fill out a form.

And that one there was actually a human who had to decide understand how that works. I did sign up for Stitcher and again it was fill out a form and that one there was actually a human who had to decide if my podcast was something they wanted to host and they decided yes so yay. But we don't get all that many listeners from Stitcher. It's really hard to tell. I don't see a lot coming in to Libsyn so I do think you're right that they're hosting. I think maybe that's 10%. They're caching something on the Stitcher side. Well, I looked at the stats this week. So let's see. You said, how many other countries did we...

I mean, I was kind of excited when you told me about this, that you could look at how many countries we were being downloaded from. And the Bay Area is a big one one which i guess is mostly my friends and uh and there was some canada which i think probably had to do with electric imp folks hearing about it and then there was um i know there was an australian uh because yeah i know i'm pulling it up now chris svek sent me a very nice note about the show.

I don't remember where Nick was from, but he sent me a nice note. So here are our top countries. United States by far. Canada's second. Japan is third. Japan. Hello, Japan. Japan and Canada are comparable.

They're both big ones. And then United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, China. You know, pretty much where you'd expect. India. I like this one. Blank. Oh, who's from blank? Tell me where blank is.

I don't know. That's the free country that's floating somewhere. Spain, Finland, Korea, New Zealand, France, Egypt, Portugal, Ireland, Russia. See, that's exciting. Belgium, Croatia. I don't know if everybody's listening all the time from those countries, but it is neat. And then we got the onesies.

The onesies are good ones. We've had one download from each of these countries. Bahrain, Mexico, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and Ukraine. So there you go. All right, well, welcome to the show. Keep on listening. Nothing from Greenland. Oh.

Which is an option. They have it listed. Greenland. Yeah. There's a lot of tech in Greenland. It's just under the ice. We are big in the Northern Hemisphere. Huh.

Maybe we should do Spanish language. Although that's not going to work that well. My Spanish is still high school level. Not well represented in South America and Africa. Okay. So I like getting these stats because it's an affirmation that someone is actually listening. There's a big part of podcasting that's all about why would anybody listen to me babble with my friends um not everybody's your friend no wait a minute i don't know if that's relevant right well all right

um but why why would anybody listen to my show i can tell you why i do it um but why why are you podcasting, Christopher? I think part of it's an interesting technical thing to learn about. I've listened to a lot of podcasts in recent years, and I kind of, at least in my mind, like to think about how it's done. And, you know, it's another side of the whole audio spectrum than I'm used to from doing music. And it combines the technical bits. I mean, this is about something you work on.

It's cool to apply those skills to something completely different. There's not many things where you can do that, actually. And to learn the differences between music and vocal production and there are a lot that that was interesting to me and also I think you know as time went on hearing the shows and hearing different people's perspectives on things and things they had to share has been it's been pretty cool it's been an interesting kind of way to encounter things and people that, that we necessarily wouldn't talk to. And to really engage with them.

Yeah. That's what's keeping me doing it, doing, doing the podcast. I, I approached it, well, I took a stained glass class and it was terrible. I mean, it was fun, but the teacher was terrible i mean i don't think he really showed up didn't he like kill four or five students during the class no he just didn't really show up much and when he did a different class um he wasn't really all there in the santa cruz method of not being all there. Email Alicia. But I like learning new things and that one and all of the other weird classes I've taken from

precious metal clay to how to use a laser cutter to how to solder better. I always want to learn new stuff. And it's amazing how these things actually apply to my jobs. Sometimes it's just meeting people who then are technical too, because I live in Silicon Valley and random strangers you meet, half of them are technical because that's Silicon Valley. But a lot of it ends up being a new perspective, a new idea, a new thought, something that gives me some creative outlet. And then that makes me more creative at my job. So I really like learning new things. And after the stained glass debacle, which you did produce a nice little stained glass piece. So it wasn't a glass debacle, I... Which you did produce a nice little stained glass piece,

so it wasn't a total debacle. But you did it, I think, against everything he was telling you to do, if I recall correctly. Well, we're going to have Kristen on next week, and she's a stained glass artist, and she was the one who actually taught me how to cut out things, because otherwise I would have just had a plain piece of glass because he didn't really teach us how to cut glass. Isn't that basically the whole thing?

Yeah. Did I say debacle? I meant debacle. So, you know, taking the classes is cool, but I also was being taken away from Christopher, and I wanted to work with him on something, and I wanted to learn something new. You make it sound like the class kidnapped you. I've been taken away from my husband by this class. And then at the same time, as I was finishing up with the class

and not really looking forward to trying to find a new community course, I did the Embedded Systems Conference and we did a radio show style session where there were three of us and we kind of chatted about getting started and tinkering. And that's the first show. And at the start of it, I say, well, maybe we'll make this into a podcast. And I was not to be disingenuous myself. I was kind of kidding, but a lot of people asked. So, and they kept asking even like a three, three or four weeks later, like, so are you going to have a podcast? Tell me when it starts. And I decided, sure, we'll try this. And I just, we talked about it. We're like, okay, we're going to do six. We're going to, gonna we're gonna start with six that will teach us what we want to know and then we'll walk away and here we are on episode 12 it is a little difficult to sustain it's a lot of work

uh then other than learning how to do it I sometimes am not sure why we're podcasting. I do have fun talking to people. I mean, even people I know, talking to them about things that we don't necessarily talk about because we're friends and not technical partners. And I really do like talking to people I wouldn't otherwise get a chance to talk to. But it's a little hard to say we're going to be doing this in a year because it's, it's a couple hours recording. It's a couple hours of prep. It's trying to find the people. It's trying to make sure it stays interesting. Even writing those, what are they, maybe 500 word RSS descriptions. I actually spend time on those. And you, you spend a lot of time too.

That's only because I keep forgetting how to do everything. Every time I go in to edit a new episode, I seem to have not learned from my mistakes. Or I've upgraded to the latest version of Logic, which works exactly the same, except where it doesn't. It's all the key commands are different. All the key commands are different and something else doesn't work. So I understand that. I understand that not knowing exactly why you're doing it. I think part of it was that we were trying to, you know, put a voice to what we do. And systems are strange.

I mean, there's not a lot. There's a lot of podcasts about technology and Apple and even development. But they're all oriented to that world. Web. Developing apps or the web or just talking about hardware and what's going on in the industry. I think this was an attempt to actually talk about the nitty-gritty of what goes on making devices,

making devices, not making applications for devices. And I think we've been kind of hit or miss on that just because it's a tough topic to get a lot of guests for. Oh, I don't think that's been the problem. I think it's that my view of what a device is is so broad sometimes. I mean, talking to Ed about medical devices, I've worked on medical devices. You've worked on medical devices. And talking to Karen about MEMS and how that industry group works, I've used a lot of MEMS sensors. And talking to Kristen next week, she thinks she's coming on to talk to me about kilns and the technology associated with them and how do you program

them. But really, I'm going to ambush her with etsy and and i have this idea of craft electronics which is kind of a strange idea and i want to see what she thinks about it um don't tell her um i i haven't i guess i mean i guess we talked about keywords in c with jen i don't know whether that falls under devices for you or not. When I say devices, I mean the things that go into making devices. And that's the topic is embedded systems, ostensibly. So, you know, certainly programming them is a huge part of that. Ballistic hats maybe weren't. But going back to what, well.

The music episode. But going back to what, well, going back to what you were saying about the podcast being about a broad range of things that fall under devices and embedded systems, I think I do wonder if we've presented it as a narrower thing than the podcast actually is and that people might not listen to it because, oh my God, it's about embedded systems. That's going to be incredibly dry. They're going to talk about, you know, Embedded keywords in C? No. Yeah, all the time.

Every episode is going to be about embedded. And you guys made that show interesting. But if you did that show every time, Oh, oh no. If you talked about, you know, compilers and this and that and all these little things, if you boiled down the Embedded Systems Conference into your show as if each one was a piece of the areas of traditional embedded systems to people who use embedded systems not necessarily people who develop them so you can get feedback from the people who are actually engaged with them on a day-to-day basis after they're made

that kind of thing and you know like you said talking to kristin about things in the art world um you know that that is part of i guess that's part of making Embedded Systems, but the show is about a lot more than that. Well, I think this comes from, I listen to Splendid Table on APM, and she says it's the show for people who love food. And it's mostly about cooking, but it's also about food in general and food history and culinary arts and all of that stuff. And I really enjoy it. And so when we came up with a tagline for this, the show for people who love gadgets, I wanted it to be about

gadgets and people who love gadgets and people who love making gadgets. And in the same vein as food is such a broad thing, gadgets is huge to me. There are so many different possibilities. Okay, that's fair. And we do have plans for talking to other people. Part of the problem with me not committing to being here for a year is that it's a little hard to plan for shows for big name people.

James Grenning is author of Test Driven Development in Embedded Systems or Embedded C. And he's a great guy. He'd be totally fun to talk to. But he's only in town like one week, a quarter, and he's usually pretty busy. So we'd have to schedule that out pretty far in advance. He said he was interested, but he hasn't committed to anything. And if he wants to commit to a show in November, I'm not sure I want to. And Jack Gansel, I would, one of you recommended that I interview him. I would love to. He's fun to talk to uh but he's only in town occasionally and only to give seminars and does he really want to spend a day teaching and then an evening podcasting maybe but i've been too chicken to ask because what if he says yeah let's do it december i'll

be up then and i'll be like yeah december i don't know um i guess i should stop being a wimp and just accept that this is my new lot in life. I think you need to decide how much effort it really is. I mean, it's not that big a deal. No, I got a little burned out that week where we were going on vacation the next week and I ended up recording three shows all in one seven-day period. That was tough. Skewing your view of things a little bit. And I do want to talk to more people about what they're doing. Neat things like LightUp and

Electric Imp, chip vendors. And there was a venture capitalist that maybe said maybe she'd come on and talk about what does an engineer what should an engineer do to make it so that their startup gets funded i mean everybody the ceo of course is the star of that show but i've been around a couple of startups that maybe if i had said something different they could have gotten better or different funding. Yeah, and I think separately, not talking about guests, I think a show about startups would be probably two hours long at least, but just a roundtable with some folks we know who have been around the block with startups in the past.

Because between the two of us, I think we've seen a dozen or more startups from a working relationship. And some still exist. Some went on to be okay. Most have not. But I think people who have been in our industry through the decade between 1999 and now

have learned a lot and have seen a lot of things. Some good, some bad. Yeah, so that's outside the realm of embedded systems except if you want to really make embedded systems you've oftentimes got to be a part of a company to get the capital to develop what you're going to develop and so that that's another issue on the periphery that would be cool to talk about. Well, and as much as agile software processes applied to embedded systems sounds like an incredibly dry topic, I suspect Curtis and I are going to have a really good time with that. Yeah, I'll turn my headphones down while we're recording, though. Because when I laugh, it blows out your ears, or because you don't want to hear any of it. And I mean, talking about ShotSpotter,

I talk about gunshot location systems, but Rob was a founder and he's so eloquent and he loves it. I got out of it because it was too much fun. See, you're getting excited about all these other... No, and Elizabeth, do you even need an RTOS and how to choose one? I think you've got at least two months of shows already lined up. And Jen's been crazy busy with her new startup. Phil's been, I don't know, he's in the middle of a product ship, but he'll be back.

So you're right. I've got at least eight shows kind of planned, and even some that I don't really, uh, I got a hit from the app mail, one of the product developers to talk about how AT tiny happens. So I should quit being a wimp and email Jack Gansel and James again. And who else? I don people. I don't know. What's the lady's name who was at Steam? Jerry Ellsworth. Jerry Ellsworth might be interesting.

A lot of these would be easier if we could get the remote setup going, and that's something I'd like to do in the near future is do our first. I know we've done on-site remotes where everybody's in the same room, but get Skype going and try that all right all right um let's see what other things do we need to do in the near future i suck at advertising i tried it's a huge problem and we've sort of we've had slow growth in listeners it's been definitely growing over time we've been doing this how long um this is our 13th episode, so this is our 13th week. Well, I guess the first one didn't count, so we've really been doing it for 12 weeks.

The first one was the Embedded Systems one. Yeah, about three months, and we've had slow growth in listenership, but I think we need to do more to try to reach out to a wider audience somehow, and I honestly don't know how. I posted it to the Embedded Systems group out to a wider audience somehow. And I honestly don't know how, but this is the biggest. I posted it to the Embedded Systems Group on LinkedIn and somebody said, you're not supposed to do promotions here. And I posted it as a, who wants to be on my podcast, not please listen to my podcast. And then I asked the guy, why, why did he think it was a promotion? But it was funny

because somebody else that, who I don't't know commented and said, everything on LinkedIn is a promotion. That's why you're here. Yeah, LinkedIn is a wow. So I don't know. But it is hard to, I mean, I have a Twitter feed, but I only get a couple hundred followers, and you've got to. I think we've both mined our followers. Maybe.

We're not going to, you know, the only thing we get out of that is to keep in their minds and remind them when new shows come out. So I think, and I don't know, maybe this is something to do some research on. I don't know how other podcasts go about it. Some of the podcasts I listen to, you know, they have people who are a little bit names in their industry. So they have some. if we did jerry ellsworth or blogs that people follow they have built-in listenerships that just kind of come in

so i think getting guests that you know have some um even michael barr he wrote one of the first o'reilly embedded books um and he's local. I guess I'll make it a... That's another good topic or another good guest. So I think, yeah, having guests and bringing people in with those guests is... Making our guests

do our work for us. But I think there are other ways. I think, you know, I do think we need to engage O'Reilly a little bit more. Yeah, O'Reilly's who I wrote my book for. And they're great, but they're really great at editing.

My editor was great. They're better at doing web and software sorts of things, not necessarily in embedded systems. Their Make Magazine might be a place where we can talk. Well, they don't have to be good at embedded systems. They just have to be good at promoting things. They're good at promoting to an audience of more pure software engineers.

This show would be perfectly suited to... Do you think there are a lot of pure software engineers out there who aren't interested in embedded systems, at least at some level? You know, I've been thinking about... There's a woman who's just getting into Arduino, and she's a web person, and she's just getting into the embedded systems and falling, she's a web person and she's just getting

into the, the embedded systems and falling in love. And I want to talk to her about those initial feelings of, of why would you leave standard software for something that now you you're totally resource constrained and, but she's got that, she's got the bug and i'm i'm excited um but yeah i guess i guess maybe that's part of it is that we should be talking to more pure software engineers about this is a neat field you get math you get constraints you get really cool stuff and talking to them but addressing them and saying, you know, and advertising. Advertising to them. In places that they're looking. And I, you know. Well, if any of you listening have any suggestions, please just send them along.

Or if any of you are famous. And want, yes. If you're famous, please, please let me know. And if I haven't asked you to be on the podcast and you know, we know each other at all, or you can even figure out my Twitter handle, which is at LogicalElliance. Just let me, let me know. I'm always looking for people. And it isn't that I haven't asked you because I don't think you'd be good. It's that I haven't yet asked you to be on my show. I love embedded systems and I really do think that most people have something to say about them, even if it's not obvious. Even if it's the 85-year-old guy who's

learning to use an iPhone and wants to talk about how the UI could be better for an aging population. I'm game. I guess that's not a bad place to end on. Is there anything you want to leave the audience with? Uh, no, I think, you know, we talked about a lot of random stuff and in random order and random order. Um, I think just generally going back to podcasting as a, as a topic, aside from the specifics of the show, it's really up your own broadcast studio and produce your own shows for what's basically nothing. Well, let's say $500. That's not quite nothing. $500, $2,013. If you tried this in the mid-90s, it would have been impossible. It would not have sounded like this. Right. My little Walkman with the tape. And it's the same thing with music.

So it's, you know, if you're interested in podcasting, if you have something to say, if you have some topic, if you have a list of guests that you think might make interesting people to talk to, it's totally doable for, you know, a reasonable amount of money. And you don't have to get all the equipment that we have. You don't have to, you know, you can probably get by starting out with just a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, especially if you ever already have a computer. Or even an iPhone. I saw a couple of really neat blogs about how to do a podcast with your iPhone. Yeah. And there's a ton of great resources out there. And again, I'm going to mention 5x5 to go look for inspiration if you're into this kind

of thing, because they just do a fantastic job producing podcasts and i'm always looking to them for new ideas for how to produce things and and you know to to compare my own work editing and and making things sound good against what i'm hearing there and did you tell me that one time they just chatted about no topic at all that some of them don't even have typical of a lot of the shows they started out as and, and I apologize, Dan Benjamin, if you ever hear this, which you probably won't, but a lot of the shows have a particular topic like workflow management in your job and being efficient

and the get things done kind of thing. And they just kind of dance around that topic. Maybe the first few shows were about that, but sometimes they get things done kind of thing. And they just kind of, you know, they dance around that topic. Maybe the first few shows were about that, but sometimes they get off on a thing. And it's great because it's a conversation with two interesting people. And they do talk about really deep things sometimes in the topic the show is supposed to be about,

but they're free to go often on tangents and that's often kind of cool. Yeah, I haven't been very good about allowing that. I'm a little too much of a control freak, but I think that comes with experience to not try to drive the conversation. Yeah. Which I guess I'm getting. I don't know how to respond to that.

So I will just say. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, that's the show. You've already heard what Christopher has to do with this, and I definitely appreciate what he does. If you've got comments or questions or just want to say hello, or you're going to start your own Embedded Systems podcast,

hit the contact link at embedded.fm or email us, show at makingembed making embedded systems.com. We like hearing from you today. Christopher White and I are celebrating a dozen shows with a little bit of introspective nasal gate.