Congratulations, iPhreaks, on 100 Episodes!

 

02:50 - What’s Up, Ben Scheirman?

03:30 - What’s Up, Rod Schmidt?

05:18 - The Evolution of The iPhreaks Show and the Panel

07:32 - WWDC

08:00 - The Amazon Dash Button

09:28 - WWDC (Cont’d)

11:34 - Show Topics: Growth

15:10 - Favorite Episodes

20:38 - Ben’s Guitar Podcast: Vibrato.fm

27:48 - The Show Process: Scheduling => Final Product

30:40 - Getting Good Sound

37:20 - Listenership: Finding Our Audience

Picks

Shanghai (Ben)
Scanbot (Ben)
Vibrato.fm (Ben)
Electro-Harmonix SOULFOOD Distortion/Fuzz/Overdrive Pedal (Ben)
Hire Rod! (Rod)
GoPiGo (Rod)
The New James Bond Trailer: SPECTRE (Rod)
RATIONAL FUNK with Dave King Video Series (Jaim)
Shun VBS0200 Sora 2-Piece Knife Set (Alondo)
CompareFolders (Andrew)
TenFourFox (Andrew)
The New Nintendo 3DS (Andrew)
Steelheart (The Reckoners) by Brandon Sanderson (Chuck)

 

So is Chinese food like Chinese food?

If you’ve been to China town in any big city, you can get pretty much what you see in China. We were eating some soup, I said, “Do we have any Sriracha to put in the soup, like some hot sauce?” I showed them a picture of it and they had no freaking idea what Sriracha was. And I was like, “It’s so weird, it’s in every Asian restaurant in the US.”

Yep.

Hey everybody and welcome to episode 100 of the iPhreaks Show. This week on our panel, we have Alondo Brewington.

Hello from North Carolina.

Andrew Madsen.

Hello from Salt Lake City.

Jaim Zuber.

Got my party hat, streamers, confetti – turns out I didn’t think this through, this is going to take forever to clean up [chuckles].

I’m Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. We also have two returning iPhreaks panelists. We have Ben Scheirman.

Hello from Houston.

And Rod Schmidt.

Hello from Salt Lake.

So we haven’t talked to you guys in a while, what have you been up to since you've retired from the show?

I left my company to go independent which has been exciting and scaring. That’s pretty recent news for me.

Welcome to the dark side.

Yeah [chuckles]. So I got more contracts than I can accept right now, which is a nice way to start this. But obviously, there’s the other end of that where you don’t have any work to do.

Done some traveling, went to Amsterdam early March, and I just got back from China, which has been awesome.

Still working on screencasts stuff. That’s pretty much what I’ve been up to.

Pretty cool. Rod, what have you been up to?

Let’s see, I got a haircut last week, does that count?

[Chuckles] Maybe.

I’ve mostly been working on client – doing client work for one client that has me on retainer every month. I do that for a couple of hours every day. Then I work on my own stuff the rest of the day.

Went to the US Open last year in September. That was a lot of fun. I love New York. Yeah, pretty much straight forward normal stuff.

Nice.

I got to second that US Open; I love going up to the [inaudible 04:02]. It’s awesome for tennis.

It’s my favorite tournament. I’m a big tennis fan, and I play tennis. So that was a big thrill.

So the next time we all get together, which we’ve never actually done, you guys can actually go play tennis.

Yeah, I’m a little rusty. Rod will probably whoop me pretty easily. I’m probably a C player at this point.

Uh huh. Are you in New York Alondo?

No, actually I live in North Carolina now. I’ve been here for the last two years after living in Atlanta. Atlanta has a really big tennis community.

Uh-huh. I’m officially a 4.0 most people would probably call me a 4.5 if you know what that means.

I have no idea what that means [chuckles].

Is that good or bad?

Most people are 3.5s and 4.0s – the vast majority of players.

So you’re worse or better than the majority of the players? [Chuckles].

I am slightly better than the vast majority.

Okay. Why don’t they have these kinds of scores for programmers [Chuckles].

There’s no way to measure it I guess; probably. How would you measure it?

I don’t know, but I’m a ten [chuckles].

I’m an 11 [chuckles].

Geek fight, geek fight.

I’ll take my certification, and you two can be a 12 [chuckles].

That’s right.

That’s exactly right.

So Rod and Ben and Andrew, were you part of the original panel or did you come in later? I don’t remember.

No, I think I started on about episode 12. So I was not here at the very beginning.

Okay, and we also had Pete. It feels like I’m forgetting somebody, but I don’t think I am. So yeah, this show got started because I wanted to learn how to do iOS development. This is where I came from to do this. So I reached out to my community which was mostly Ruby and JavaScript programmers, and I asked who they thought I should get as panelist on the show. That’s how we wound up with the panel that started with.

Then as you guys come and go, we’ve brought in other people. Andrew, I know how we found you because I already met you at the CocoaHeads meetings and stuff. Jaim, I don’t exactly remember how you came into this show, do you remember?

I just hacked into Skype one day and just showed up [chuckles]. No, I had listened to other podcasts you had done, the Ruby Rogues and you mentioned you were starting an iPhone one. I’m like, “Oh, I do iPhone. Maybe I could do a podcast.” I think Pete put out a call on Twitter for an extra panelist. So I thought, “Hey, I’ll sit in, see how it goes.” No one told me to go away so I kept coming back [chuckles].

Nice.

I’m looking at the rest of our episodes, my first episode was episode 14 about debugging. The best I can tell, Jaim, you started the next episode, episode number 15 which was about CocoaPods.

But I don't think I realized that you were new; I thought you had been on for a long time. Of course a long time at that point was like three months [chuckles].

Yeah. Then Jaim met Alondo at a conference. I don’t remember the details. Maybe you guys could tell that story if there is a story.

We met at AllConf last year. I don’t know if Jaim had a ticket for WWDC. I know I didn’t. We met in one of the sessions and just started talking. At lunch one day he mentioned the podcast and I mentioned I have briefly done a podcast for my friend [inaudible 07:19]. We did ten episodes and it was very short-lived. He invited me to come on and it's similar to him – no one’s kicking me off yet so I’m very happy to be here.

Very nice. Speaking of WWDC, does anyone know when they’re going to open up the lottery for tickets this year?

Should be any day now I think.

Could be within the next five or ten minutes.

No! Okay.

If it happens and I just hang up the phone, you’ll understand.

We’ll just pause. This is recorded, it is not live.

Well, even though today is Apple's 39th Birthday as we record, I don’t think April Fool's Day is a good day to put tickets on sale because nobody knows if its serious or not. Otherwise [crosstalk 08:00].

Amazon dash button?

I did. That seems apparently not a joke.

Seems like a real product and honestly I wouldn’t blame anybody for buying this product. It’s just an odd time to launch a product that is in the gray area of what can be considered ridiculous.

I requested one; they’re supposed to be free.

I guess that makes sense because you’re just going to buy more products. I was wondering if did they cut up a plastic insert of the logo, or is that a cheap screen that has terrible refresh rate but can show the same image indefinitely.

I got a feeling that it was a sticker. They mentioned something about when it’s still weeks out, you put your email address and say they’ll email you when they’re available. And you pick – when you order the button you pick which product that’s for.

I think what we’re experiencing is a genius Amazon product marketer who says, “I have no idea if this product has a market. So we’re just going to throw it out there the day before April fool’s day. If the internet laughs at us we’ll say, “Ha-ha, it’s a joke.” And if we get 12 million orders, then we have a hit on our hands.”

Yep, I like the idea as well. You run out of toilet paper and you push a button then you call for help.

Then you wait two days and then your toilet paper shows up [chuckles].

Too uncomfortable [crosstalk 09:26].

Delivered by a drone [chuckles].

Back to WWDCDC, I think, should be anytime. It seems like it's right around the beginning of April last year wasn’t it? And every year recently.

Yeah, I sincerely hope I get a ticket this year. If not, I will still be there most likely. But I felt behind on the videos because I went last year and did the [inaudible 09:48] WWDC where we rented a hotel conference room. About 20 or 25 people pitched in to have a projector and a screen and internet and all that so we could stream the videos. We got through three to four per day; I think that’s about right.

But it was like a community decision, so if I wanted to watch an AV Foundation thing, it applies to less people. So we went with the middle of the road. Obviously, there was the Swift stuff, so that took precedence just as a general subject to cover.

When you’re there hopefully with some people you know, you can be like, “Okay, I’m going to go to this one, you can go to that one and we'll exchange notes.” So we know which ones are worth taking the time to watch later.

Yep.

[Crosstalk 10:32] Ticket this time, I’d like to go at least once just to say that I’ve done WWDC on my own golden ticket.

You definitely should, Alondo, at least try. Certainly, there’s no guarantee. My thinking is if I were guaranteed a ticket this year, I would not go, but because it’s a lottery and because I have this feeling that it’s a once every decade thing now, I'm just always going to put in for a ticket. And if I get one I’d go. We’ll see.

So is that how you rationalize that to your wife? [Chuckle] It’s just like a lottery – if I get one, I have to go.

Oh yeah. That’s what I – no, she’s completely fine with it.

I should do that.

In fact she might go. She went to San Francisco with me the first time I went and just hung out in the city.

Yeah, my wife’s birthday is right around that time and so it’s always if it encompasses her birthday that’s kind of crappy. Last year, the weekend was her birthday so I said, “Well, your birthday present, how about you come to San Francisco?” And she had never been so that was awesome.

Veteran move [chuckles].

I want to turn the topic back to the show. Are there things that we were talking about, about two years ago when we started this show that are no longer relevant?

Yeah, because Objective-C is dead. So we got to redo all of these in Swift.

[Chuckles] You’re not a little bitter that we talked about that last week, are you?

No. No, I don’t mind. I haven’t heard it so I don’t know if the conclusion was yes, it’s dead or no, it’s alive.

Yeah, we settled it. It’s done.

I’m sure. Start rewriting everything.

My desk, my podcast listening has plummeted because I no longer have a commute so my backlog for podcasts is huge. So I haven’t actually reached that one yet. I think I’m 5 or more episodes behind at this point.

I think my last episode, at least the last one in my notes was episode 59. So that was probably a little over a year then.

Yeah, about a year.

Yeah, that makes sense because my first episode was 61.

Now we can prove to the world that we are not actually the same person.

Yes. [Chuckles].

I’m sure you both look a lot alike.

Stunningly handsome, I assume?

Absolutely.

Your picture is not on Skype [chuckles].

Oh there’s a picture of me but it’s very blurry and [crosstalk 12:51]. I think you were playing golf maybe Alondo?

Yes, indeed.

Are you good at golf or bad at golf?

Much better at golf than probably anything else.

Oh man, I was going to go golfing with you but I’m going to be embarrassed.

No, I’m great company though.

Oh, okay.

I’m not hyper competitive anymore.

I think that would be a blast. I golf. I don’t golf well, but I golf.

Speaking about show topics. My own feeling and also I’m reading back through all of our shows just because it’s interesting. I think we’re talking about a lot more – I don’t know what the word is, maybe fundamental stuff. We did a whole show about memory management and a show about XCode, a show about core data and a show about debugging.

They were these core topics. As time has gone on, and we’ve covered those, we’ve move in to some of the more surrounding topics we’ve talked about. Xamarin, building hardware, and things that are maybe not so core to the average iOS developer. I think that’s been good because it exposes even experienced developers to stuff that they don’t necessarily have any contact with.

Yeah, I think part of the reason for that is that I was working hard to line up a lot of those shows. As I said before, I started the show because I wanted to learn how to do iOS development. So those are the things I wanted to know about.

I definitely think the growth of the ecosystem is really [inaudible 14:07] the topics. I like the idea thought of going back and revisiting at times though, because it’s sort of like a lot of listeners are just coming on board to iOS. They may not have access, they may not know to listen to the backlog of topics and whatnots. Then things change too.

We have practices that change. The way we use our patterns may be different than they were a couple of years ago or changed in the language or introduction of a language for instance. All these things have impact, so it’s nice to have the breadth of topics that we can introduce and revisit.

Yeah, it’s almost been two years. 2013, iOS 6 was probably bleeding edge at that point. We talked about Auto Layout when it was new. Most people weren’t doing it, now it’s the default for a lot of things. So we can always learn new things as we adopt the new technologies.

Yeah, and of course Swift really actually has changed some of these topics. We could probably do a new topic about memory management and how it’s different and mostly just way easier but different in Swift.

Was there a particular episode that was anyone’s favorite episode, one that really stands out?

I’ve always said this, but as much as I love guests and the perspective they bring, I think there’s a

lot of expertise on the panel. And so I’ve enjoyed the episodes where we’ve not had a guest and where we’ve picked some topic and just talked about it with each other.

I agree, actually. One of the ones that stood out in that regard was that I thought was particularly helpful – even heard was particularly helpful – was the one of finding jobs. That was just the panelist talking about how to get started and how to make yourself marketable and known. I got some [inaudible 15:45] it definitely was something that is helpful.

We can help listeners not just improve in terms of different techniques and different APIs, but just the practice of software development in general.

I got some good feedback on that one, too. It seemed like it was one that – it's just relevant to a lot of people but it’s not something that is necessarily covered all that often.

Yeah, it’s one of the things that if you’re an employee, you don’t think about because you get a job. I show up every day at this place and they pay me; you don’t worry about it. Some of us are a little on the edge and deal with that on a weekly basis.

For me it’s much more about the people that I’ve been able to meet. Some of the people that we’ve talked to on the show that really stick out to me are Jonathan Penn, Saul Mora.

I actually went to lunch with Saul right after we did the first episode we did with them on core data just because I was in Denver. So I emailed him and said, “Hey, do you want to meet?” He was like, “Sure.” So we grabbed lunch and chatted. It was a lot of fun.

That kind of thing where its community or just cool people out there – those are some of the ones that really stick out to me. It’s just fun. Then again making the connections at Salt Lake CocoaHeads and stuff and seeing Rod whenever I actually do make it out there, and Andrew is fun.

Yeah, definitely. One of the most rewarding things about doing this show is talking with smart people who are doing cool things in iOS and getting to ask them questions, pick their brain. I’ll do an intro if I speak at a conference saying, “Hey, I’m also a part of this podcast – iPhreaks. Don’t listen because I’m this brilliant person, listen because I get to ask these people questions and learn from them.” I get a ton out of it so other people do too. We get a lot out of it, too.

Yeah, speaking of brilliant people, I think one of my favorite episodes was episode 24 with Mike Ash. That was a fun conversation.

I’d love to get Mike back on for another episode about something different.

Like Swift. Yeah, he’s dug into some gnarly Swift things.

Right, I think he talked about 64-bit which was a good topic but there’s so much more that he’s an expert on.

iOS has gotten so broad that people that [inaudible 17:58] things, still do the low end things. So it’s hard to know everything, but\t’s good to have people that come and being part of that perspective.

Yep, one of the other connections that I made that worked out nicely for me was I wound up doing some work for Ben Lachman after he was on the show. They actually hired me to do some rails work. That was interesting to have work come off of the iPhreaks Show.

[Inaudible 18:22] I speak at a conference and people come up to me and say, “Hey, I’m a fan of the show,” and like, “Oh, cool.” I realized that there are a nontrivial number of people that think my name is James Uber [chuckles].

Yeah, just by the sound of it. I’ve got the name that usually you think you heard wrong. It’s cool to go in public and hear people that listen to the show and they like it.

I was surprised; I was at WWDC last year and, “Oh, you’re on that show? Say something.”

[Chuckles] I get it.

Do a beer pick.

That’s right [chuckles].

I’ve been teaching one day a week at an iOS boot camp here in Salt Lake and been having a lot of fun with it, getting to work with people who are brand new. Last week, one of the students sent me a message to say that he was listening to a podcast and there was a guy with my same name on it [chuckles]. He said he couldn’t quite believe it was me.

He seemed just – I don’t know but the word is very surprised and shocked. He had already been listening to us for so long and didn’t realize that one of his teachers is also one of the people on the podcast.

It’s certainly fun to run into people in real life that listen to the podcast. That actually happened to me a couple of times now.

He was start stuck.

Yeah, right.

It’s funny because I’ve gone to code camps where I was at Mountainwest JavaScript, NG-conf, Mountainwest Ruby Conferences and yeah, I’ll be talking to somebody and somebody also walk by and do a double take because they hear my voice and they listen to one of the shows. It’s really kind of funny and a little bit uncanny.

It’s true; if you listen to the show and don’t know what we look like, unless you dig into it a little bit. [Crosstalk 19:59] Just by my voice. I have no idea.

Eventually I’ll get host profiles working on DevChat. We’ll have you guys update and put pictures up.

I’ll have to get a new headshot.

Me too.

I was actually telling my wife just the other day that I want her to take a new picture of me because the one that’s on everything on my GitHub and Twitter is two or three years old.

Mine too.

I just had one done this last year, so I’m set.

Yours looks profession though, Chuck.

It was professional.

It does. I need something where I’m not wearing a Green Lantern t-shirt [chuckles].

Awesome. So Ben, I heard that you started a guitar podcast?

I did, in my copious free time. I decided to talk about guitar gear and tone with my friend Daniel Pasco. Who – have we had on the show before? I don’t know if we have.

I don’t think so.

I don’t think so but we should.

I could put in a good word [chuckles]. Anyway, he and I would talk to Twitter and iMessage about geeking out about gear or check out this thing I put together and recorded. I started to think about – do any guitar podcast like this exist? I went and look and there’s not really – there were none that fit the description that I had. Some of the ones I saw were pretty old and not updated anymore.

I asked him if – what he though and he said, “This must exist and you should be the one that host it.” So we had a shared Google doc where we were just jotting down ideas. It’s different in the – you can usually, in our circles we can usually find the programmer that we know of on Twitter or speak at conferences or who are known. You can just email them and be like “Hey” and most people say yes.

It’s not like I can say, “Hey, Slash come on my podcast and talk about your tone.” [Chuckles] It’s a little bit harder. Also, I feel very confident in speaking about doing development topics and I feel terrified talking about guitar because I don’t consider myself an expert at all. More of an enthusiastic, like the eternal beginner. So that’s been fun.

I was hoping that I would just like – it would be insanely popular and I’ll be forced to buy a new guitar gear as a tax write-off to demo on the show. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Wouldn’t that be a tragedy?

Yeah. Or they would just throw it at me and say, “Please Ben, we would give you our amp, just mention it on the show.”

Say something good about it [chuckles].

Yeah.

No strings attached.

I’m not against selling out [chuckles].

I’ve been listening.

Oh good so we have at least one listener.

You have one listener. I’m a fan. I learned stuff like the recording aspect. I don’t do that much. I studied audio in college but I don’t do that much with computers. I pick up stuff.

Well, great. That’s good to hear. We’re a little behind because we record our stuff in logic and then we merge it after [inaudible 23:08]. So I was in China with the worst internet connection; I couldn’t actually download the logic – the rar recordings to edit them. This week, I should wrap that up and we'll resume our weekly schedule.

Yeah, so check your – a long time ago you posted a video of your recording gear and how you do the mix minus set-up with your voice versus Skype guests and that sort of thing. So I have a similar set-up that was helpful for me to decide what to buy. I have the same mic you do, as long as you’re still using the Heil PR-40.

Yes sir.

I bought an Onyx 820i FireWire Mixer, and so I've got my mic in channel one and then I’ve got a USB soundcard which – I have an auxiliary send one turned up on my mic. That goes into the input of my sound card and into the Mac and then out again from the USB soundcard and into a different channel on the mixer so that I could control the levels independently. And I have enough space so I can have enough Mac with another loop if you will, so that I can send all the audio plus the audio from Skype guest one to auxiliary send two and vice versa.

The benefit of doing that is when I go into logic and hit record, I can record all eight channels independently. So if somebody coughs or if the dog barks or something, if I get garbled audio for a little bit, I can just mute that section of that one person. That works pretty well.

I got my guitar. This is actually been the interesting part. Getting my guitar plugged in so that my Skype guests can actually hear the process effects so if I’m using process effects in the computer, I have to loop it back into the mixer which has been interesting.

Have you figured out how to jam through Skype yet?

[Chuckles] That would be terrible. The latency is so bad.

I was going to say that.

Because we have to line up our audio right. Even though I’m recording my co-hosts in a discreet channel, I’m eventually going to throw out that audio. It’s just a reference or a backup for his local recording. So we do a 1, 2, 3, clap. It’s just hilarious when I’m like 1, 2, 3, clap, clap. It’s so – even though in the final recordings we can line up the two claps and the conversation will flow pretty nicely.

That’s been nice to have good quality audio on both sides. It’s really tough on a show like this when you have five or six people together. You would need to have some serious equipment and multiple Machines to pull this off.

Yeah, so what I do is I just have all of you on one channel and I’m on the other. I think my dream is to get a series of Machines that you would each call into so like yeah, you would be Skype guest, 1, 2, and 3,4,5,6. My mixer has 14 inputs on it so I could definitely do that.

I’m not sure how painful it would be to start the call because I’d have to remote desktop into each Machine.

I think with Skype you can have the auto answer thing so you can just be like, “Here, call Skype guest 3.” I think that’s how you would do it.

It’s been interesting trying to get it all set up. It’s funny, there’s like 80 knobs on this thing. Sometimes I’m like, “Can you hear me?” And then they're like, “No.” I’m like, “Okay.” This, this, this. I need a stupid checklist now just for getting this thing working.

Yeah it’s been nice and then I have a hardware recorder that I can use as a back-up in case logic fails, which it did one time but luckily I was able to recover the audio through. I forget how but I went searching for the rar recording and it was there.

Yeah, I record everything to hardware.

It’s been a lot fun. I don’t know how long we’ll still have stuff to talk about. Guitar stuff changes way slower than computer stuff. So a lot of these topics are evergreen. So if we’ve already covered it, what else are we going to do other than start having guests which I think is something that we might plan on doing.

I have to say that with the guitar stuff, it’s pretty interesting how much of it shows up at CES at the Consumer Electronic Show, and how many of the big sponsors are huge audio equipment, or guitar companies. Gibson has been a big sponsor for the last couple of years.

There’s a lot of money in it. People will spend thousands and thousands of dollars to try and sound like their favorite band. Don’t ask me how I know this at all [chuckles].

That maybe something that would be interesting to talk about briefly is just the process of getting the show together. So typically what happens is I’ll get – somebody will email me or one of you guys will come in and say, “Hey we should get so and so on the show.” Usually at that point all I have to do is hand it off to Mandy and she’ll gets it scheduled.

Then once it’s scheduled, then she’ll send a reminder email out on Sunday – we record the show on Wednesday. She does that for all of my show – she sends in a reminder on Sunday or Monday at the very latest saying, “Hey, you’re scheduled to come on this week. Here’s what time to be here. There’s a guest checklist that walks on through connecting to me on Skype and some of the other things they need to set up in order to make everything happen.”

Then she asks them for any links or talks or articles or anything else that we should look at before the show. Then we all get those and then some of us will look at them and some of us won't. I sometimes do and sometimes don’t. It just depends on how busy I am and the fact that I have four other shows.

Anyways, once that happens then we get on the Skype call and record it. If you want to see my set-up you can go to teachmetocode.com/mydashpodcasting-setup I think or something like that. It’s the top article because I haven’t updated that site in a while. Anyway there’s a video that walks you through all the equipment I use to record the show. That’s the one that Ben was talking about.

17] R-08 HR. They don’t make those anymore now; it’s the Roland R-05, it's the new version of it. I record it on there and then I copy it on over to Dropbox when we’re done. Mandy does all the editing and puts it up on the website, writes the show notes and all of that stuff.

I use the Zoom H5. I was looking around at all the different ones, and that one seems to have good reviews as well.

Yeah, the Zoom H5 I’ve played with. I don’t own one so I haven’t used it too extensively. The thing I

like about the Zoom H5 is has XLR Inputs which are the three prong microphone input if you’ve seen the cords for those. And it has a lot more features on it as far as being able to mix stuff and add effects and things like that.

Yeah, you’ve got a compressor built in and noise gates and phantom power if you need it. Which have been nice because I did a super secret project which included lapel mics and a camera and all that stuff. It was nice to build a – plug the lapel mics directly into the mixer – sorry, the handheld recorder. Then I mounted that with a hot shoe mount on the camera.

So I actually had a room camera which is the zoom’s mic capsule, it’s got an XY Mic on top of it. Plus the lapel mics which are kind of cool.

Yeah, I’d like to get a little bit more studio set up here. But right now I’m really set up for audio recording. I’m not super well set-up for video.

I eventually bought some studio monitors to mount on the wall. So I got some KRK ROKITs, and then I have sound dampening, it’s like two inch thick fiber glass panels to help reduce the echo in this room.

Because when I first moved in – I’m in a new house actually, I’m not recording in my bedroom like I used to. In this room, there were French doors with glass panels on them and hardwood floors and so I would speak and you can’t really – you don’t really notice it, when you just walk in a room and you just start talking, but when you go back and listen to a recording later, you’re like, “Oh god, this sounds awful.”

The room before was like carpet and there’s clothes and a bed and everything else to deaden the sound. So I bought a rug and I bought all these fiber glass panels. I bought let’s see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 of them. So they surround the entire room. They’re pretty huge. You can just tell without even talking you can walk in the room and it feels like the room has closed in on you a couple of feet, like it sounds smaller, if that makes sense. People who don’t really know about sound or audio walk in here and be like, “Wow, sounds different.” I’m like, “Yes.”

I believe the technical term for it is less echo-y [chuckles].

It’s definitely true. I mean I’ve I’m just talking in front of a 27-inch [inaudible 32:13] which is just this giant sheet of glass and so the audio bounces immediately off of this and back towards me.

My mic is positioned basically directly in front of me and is like a directional mic so it’s not going to pick up the majority of that sound because it’s coming from the wrong angle. It’s going to be like 20 or 30 db lower than the audio coming straight in to end cap of the mic, which is fine because when it hits the back wall behind me and reflects again, that’s when I have problems so the fiber glass panels help to just nuke all that reflection.

Yeah, I think eventually I’d like to get to the point where I have a video set up where I can sit in front of the camera and talk. What you’re talking about – I have some sound dampening foam; I just haven’t put it up anywhere. For the most part I’m speaking at my monitors but I’m in a large enough room, its carpeted. I don’t get enough echo bouncing off of stuff I think.

The other thing is, is that I’m practically sitting in a cubicle. If you could see my desk it is a cubicle. My wife found it online somewhere and so that’s what I’ve got and so it dampens a lot of the sound. It just absorbs it.

It was a different story when I started podcasting from my kitchen [chuckles].

It’s like the worst room in the house to do it. Maybe a bathroom would be worse.

Yeah.

I’m finally trying to upgrade my podcasting set up after starting. I think the first probably 30 episodes that I was on the show, maybe not quite that much but I just recorded with my Apple white earbuds.

I notice.

Yeah, and I know it sounded bad but I had never done any podcasting before so I at least bought a real mic but I’m not working to get a boom and a shock mount and pop filter and all that so that there isn’t so much key board tapping noise.

So now that we’re on our 100th show, I’m going to take it seriously [chuckles].

This might be a thing. Definitely the earbuds are a step above just the microphone on your MacBook where you hear all the Skype interactions and the clicking and the typing.

Derek Bailey, he went through – he has a podcast about podcasting. I don’t remember what its’ called.

I don’t know if he does it anymore, is it Signals and Leaves.

Yeah, that one. He had an audio on there about getting good audio quality. Like you said the earbuds are a step above because you’re basically bringing the mic closer to you which means you can the gain on the mic can be lower to capture your audio. So the gain on the laptop mic is so high and is omni directional and so it’s going to pick up everything in the whole room equally. So that’s one step up.

One of the things he talked about is even with a good mic if you’re in a crappy room, it’s going to sound terrible. So he moved into his bathroom to show how bad that would be and then he moved to his closet which was like the best possible room. You had all those clothes hanging up, there’s nowhere for the audio to bounce off of.

41] was 350 or something. Then there’s some higher than that. When you get into that range, you have to be a nut to really appreciate it.

If you’re familiar with the electrovoice RE 20, those are about $500 and you see them everywhere. If you watch ESPN or CNN or anybody who’s got a microphone in front of them – they’re all over the place. Pretty much every radio station.

Yeah.

RE 20 is very common for [inaudible 36:10]. Microphone's one big link in the chain here; A2D is one big one in your room, as you said. You get a reasonable mic in a bad room, it’s not going to be worth it, but those are the big ones that cause problems.

Here I am just talking to a USB mic just a little offset from my Thunderbolt monitor. So I’m not getting that many direct reflections but pretty much in a small box from my room.

A couple of the guys on the Adventures in Angular Podcast, they actually bough whisper rooms which are basically recording booths. That pretty much eliminates a lot of the echo because they are lined with the sound proofing and everything else.

Those are great for voice over’s and podcast where you don’t necessarily have to have your computer in front of you. But for screencasting, I’m usually doing it live – talking and typing at the same time. So I have to be able to see what I’m doing.

Yeah, they both do courses for [inaudible 37:08] sites so they have a desk in there with their computers in front of them but yeah, it's an interesting thing. For me it would be nice because then if my kids are fighting in the next room then I could just not hear it.

I do have one question for you guys and that is, so this show doesn’t have an embarrassingly low number of listeners but compared to my other shows, it is significantly lower. And I’m wondering if there is a better way to reach people, to get the word out about the podcast. So we get a few thousand downloads every month, Ruby Rogues and JavaScript Jabber are up a 100,000 downloads a month.

Oh wow. Yeah, it seems like a [chuckles].

Yeah, I don’t think if it’s the audience, I don’t know if it’s something else. I don’t know if that number is really terrific for this audience or this area that we’re in.

That’s a good question. I would probably start by just trying to compare with other podcasts that are popular. At the time when this one started, there were only a few, maybe one or two others. NSBrief was one so maybe have a baseline to compare it because I don’t know how many listeners you have.

I’m probably the worst person to ask about this. I always joke about how bad at marketing I am.

You could sponsor some user group, sponsor some development conferences like iDev360, the small ones, maybe.

Yeah, I think something like a – some sort of presence at conferences would be good. I wonder though, I’m trying to think about how I found out about podcasts that I listen to. It’s mostly just recommendations. I think it’s mostly that I’ve seen people tweet about them.

I agree, most of the time I’ve heard it’s just been from blog posts or tweets, word of mouth, talking to people at conferences. So no real, what I would consider, hardcore marketing in that regard.

I don’t know if real hardcore marketing would actually work in that case. I think mostly it is just being out there in the community.

I will say too, I’ve also heard a few people speak very vocally. I know it’s just maybe a few vocal people at conferences talk about podcast fatigue and just not having the time to listen to podcast because they always complain that most of them are too long or they’re not really getting at what they want to listen to. So I don’t know what type of feedback we get if we’re addressing those types of concerns at all.

I mean I’m always happy to talk about the topics that we’re talking about, but I’m not sure what the audience is saying.

Yeah.

Yeah, I definitely have podcast fatigue. I thought I was subscribed to too many before I stopped commuting and now that I don’t commute anymore, it’s exhausting how many podcasts I – just don't have to listen to.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. I have a whole bunch of podcasts that I have listened to overtime. But now I’ve gotten into audio books and things like that and so I’ve got – I think I’ve got three or four hundred podcasts in my podcasts app. Let’s see – 514 episodes that are waiting for me to listen to them.

Oh, geesh.

Because I’ve just not gotten around to listening to them. I’ve been busy, and so I pick and choose the ones that I want to see and hear. But yeah, I’m not picking up any new content unless it’s so compelling that I can drop something else.

Time to declare bankruptcy, Chuck [chuckles].

Yeah, probably.

All the tech news ones like – they're talking about like, “What do you think the Apple watch is going to be? They should have this or the new MacBook.” And all these rumor things. It’s kind of nice to be able to just say delete because that would be painful to listen to. People speculate about stuff that’s already announced. So sometimes it pays off.

Honestly when we get closer and closer to WWDC just like an enormous amount of human energy is spent trying to speculate on what Apple is going to do. In general, I can tolerate a little bit of that because people want to know right? I want to know what’s going to be covered also. But then it’s funny how worthless that information is. Like the day after the conference or the day after the event.

I actually appreciate it on iPhreaks. I don't think we really do a lot of that. We tend to talk about concrete things and we’ll talk about the new stuff after it’s been announced.

Yeah, I think the worst that we do is we’ll talk about some technology that just came out. We may spend five minutes speculating about where it may go.

Sure, that’s not obsolete quite as quickly as recording a podcast the day before the keynote and then two days later it’s pointless.

Anyway, anything else that we should cover or should we get to the picks?

I just want to cover saying thank you to all of you guys because I really enjoy doing this podcast every week. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the people on the show and also out guests and the feedback that I have received from listeners have always been something that makes me happy. So I’m glad I’ve been able to do it for a hundred episodes and hopefully – well, not a hundred episodes for me – but up to our hundredth episode and hopefully we can do a hundred more.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. It was a lot of fun. We should do the two hundredth episode celebration next week. You guys ready? [Chuckles].

I don’t know. The schedule's not quite that open.

We just did episode 200 for Ruby Rogues. Been doing this for a long time.

Alright, let’s go ahead and get to the picks. Ben, why don’t you start us with picks?

I just got back from Shanghai so I think I will pick Shanghai. That city is amazing. I spent two weeks there, and I feel like now I have just begun to sort of experience China and now I want to go back. So I will pick that.

Also as a part of this, it was a business trip so I had to track the receipts that I was spending money on. So I was using the app Scanbot which I’ve used three or four different apps. This one’s my favorite. Basically, as soon as you open it, it launches straight into the camera and you don’t actually have to push any buttons. It just shows you a rectangle around where it can find as a receipt and it might say “move closer” or “hold still” then it’ll just take the picture automatically. You can configure sources of where you want the PDFs to go.

Actually before that it has like filters so you can do high contrast filter. So I have this sending to Evernote and to iCloud. So it just drops it straight in there, and when I’m filing my expense report, I can just – I use FreshBooks for that – so I can just click, attach receipt and it’s already on my computer, which is super nice.

Let’s see, what else. I guess we mentioned my podcast. I don’t know if we talked about the URL – that’s vibrato.fm. Since we also talked about guitar stuff, right before I left for China, I received an Electro-Harmonix SOULFOOD pedal. I got about maybe thirty minutes to play with it before I had to leave. This is a clone of the Klon Centaur which is like a highly sought after pedal.

When the guy released this one for order, they sell out the same day. Then people sell them for twice as much on eBay. There’s a lot of hype on this pedal and there are a lot of clones also. This clone happens to be very good and also about 60 bucks which is awesome. It's about a tenth of the cost if you get it on eBay. Check out the SOULFOOD pedal by Electro-Harmonix. It’s an overdrive pedal. That’s all I have.

Very nice. Rod, do you have some picks for us?

Sure, first of all I’d like to say that I enjoyed my time on the podcast as well and also available for hire if you need a contract filled, hit me up on Twitter @rodschmidt.

My first pick I guess would be – I’m currently building a robot so I bought a GoPiGo which is from Dexter industries, which lets you use a raspberry pie and a board to control a motor. You connect the raspberry pie to this board and it comes with the kit with the motors and the wheels and everything. You put those together and you can write Python programs or any language you want really to control the robot. You can also get an ultrasonic sensor and a camera and a servo and various things to do with that. So I’m having fun with that.

I’ll pick the James Bond trailer that just came out. I’m a big Bond fan and the trailer for the next Bond movie Spectre looks really good. Really setting a nice mood for the movie. So those are my picks.

Awesome. Jaim, what are your picks?

Okay, I've got one pick. It is a video series, an instructional music series by Dave King, the drummer. You might be saying, “I didn’t know you play drums.” I don’t play drums, but it’s not really a typical instructional series. It's part satire if you like Christopher Guest movies like A Mighty Wind or Spinal Tap. It's part performance arts.

Dave King’s kind of nuts, but he’s really one of the better drummers that’s come out in the past couple of decades just watching the jazz world. Very entertaining, I’ve laughed out loud on every episode. You probably don’t need to see everyone but definitely check out the first four. Check out RATIONALFUNK by Dave King.

Cool. Alondo what are your picks?

I have one pick this week. It is a gift that I received from some friends of mine after coming down for a stay at my house. It’s a running joke that I needed better knives for cooking, for prepping food. So I got the – I was gifted the Shun Sora 2-Piece Knife Set which includes a paring knife, a three and a half inch paring knife and a six inch chef’s knife and then the sharpener, and it is amazing. I love this thing. I’m prepping things for meals. I’m now even cooking just so I can use it to pare vegetables and cut things, but it's pretty awesome.

I find that a little frightening that you enjoy cutting things so much.

But it just makes slicing and dicing so easy [chuckles].

A good knife is a life saver.

Andrew, what are your picks?

I got three picks today. My first pick is an app that I – saved me this morning called compare folders and it’s a free app on the Mac app store. It actually has a five dollar in app purchase to add a check sum and compare feature, but all it does is you drag two folders into and it tells you if their contents are equal. The fact that it can compare files by check sum just so happen to mean that it was really useful for me this morning.

Part of the reason I’m also picking it is that it turns out that the whole thing is open source even though it’s a Mac app store app. Those are rare, so it’s fun to have a Mac app that is on the App store but is also open source.

My second pick is another Mac app called TenFourFox. I don’t know really why but I pulled my old Powerbook G4 out the other day and I needed a browser that actually could load modern sites. The version of safari that’s on it is pretty bad now. Chrome of course won’t run on it but there is this TenFourFox that I think just one guy pretty much is maintaining a fork of Firefox for Power PC Macs and old versions of OS 10, but it’s like the modern version of Firefox. It’s pretty cool but I also like the website because he’s pretty fun and funny and lighthearted with his website, sort of parody to Apple’s website.

Then my last pick is the new Nintendo 3DS. This came out, I’m not sure. I think it came out in the US a couple of months ago but I bought one this week and have been playing it. It’s the first 3DS I've had. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. I think Nintendo has done a pretty good job with it. So those are my picks.

Nice. I’ve got one pick, I just finished the book Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson. Really enjoyed that. That’s pretty much all I’ve got. It’s a fun book, futuristic, people get super powers and then abuse them. So it’s kind of an adventure. It’s awesome. So that’s my pick.

I guess that’s all we’ve got so we’ll go ahead and wrap up and we’ll catch everybody next week.