iBece.org

A combination of factors came together recently and made me come to a great revelation. Firstly, a friend of mine in full-time employment was coming home regularly bursting at the seams with fascinating bits of science trivia. At the same time, I was just beginning to come to grips with the reality of my looming 48 hours in a plane (thankfully not all at once) and the Sagittarius in me was starting to panic. Thirdly, my current clinical placement involves 2 hours of driving every day and I’d gotten somewhat sick of the scenery. When my know-it-all friend revealed the source of his recent wisdom, all the pieces elegantly fell into place.

It turned out that Marty (that may be his real name) had been listening avidly to podcasts, particularly New Scientist’s SciPod. Now I knew all about podcasts already, and I had even installed iTunes at some stage, but I have long held a moral, ethical, social and theological (but mostly financial) objection to buying an iPod. That isn’t to say that I hadn’t coveted Marty’s shiny black video iPod, it’s a sexy toy to be sure, I just couldn’t justify ever getting one myself. It wasn’t until I actually sat down one day and listened to one of Marty’s downloaded podcasts that the potentials of this technology began to dawn on me. My first big realisation was that podcasts, contrary to my previous belief, were not encoded in some Apple voodoo iPod-only format - they were MP3s. Plain old vanilla MP3s. The second realisation was that for less than 50 bucks I could pop a 2GB SD card in my Palm TX and have a defacto iPod Nano. You beut!

Now before rushing out to buy more memory, another potential problem needed to be solved. Being just slightly perfectionistic, I envied the elegance with which Marty could synchronise his iPod with his iTunes collection. Because iTunes is my podcast aggregator of choice, I set about figuring out how to make it talk to my Palm. The solution turned out even more neat than I anticipated. I decided to use a file synchronisation tool to sync the iTunes\Podcasts folder with a folder on my SD memory card. This was made possible by my laptop’s SD card reader. I originally downloaded Microsoft’s free SyncToy, but was unimpressed with its limited features. I finally went back to an old friend, Second Copy, for which I had a licence. Setting up the synchronisation was a breeze but what really blew me away was how the process worked. As soon as I inserted my Palm’s SD card into the computer, Second Copy popped up a window and asked me if I’d like to sync the files. One click and a minute later all my new podcasts would be waiting for me on my card. No need to open iTunes, or manually run Second Copy. Again, you beaut!

Now all of this is of particular relevance to anyone wishing to use their PDA (Palm or otherwise) or mobile phone to listen to podcasts. Of course it would work just as easily to listen to music, but I’m sure you’ve already figured out how to do that yourself. The only drawback is that there is no way for my Palm to tell iTunes which episodes have been listened to. As a result, I have to either let iTunes automatically delete old episodes, or manually flick off the ones I’m done with. This is really a small price to pay, and certainly far better value for money than $200 for an iPod Nano 2GB.

With the logistics out of the way, I’ve now started broadening my horizons with podcasts on topics ranging from religion, to science, to medicine - in fact, as the blurb of iBece.org says: “Life. Medicine. Technology.” My daily sojourn to Redland Bay is now better spent, I’m looking forward to catching up on back issues of SciPod on my flight to Europe, and Marty doesn’t seem quite so smart any more.