Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Hanselminutes Podcast 34

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Hanselminutes Podcast 34 - Scott talks to Chris Sells

Posted in Podcast

My thirty-fourth Podcast is up In this unusual episode I head over to Chris Sells' house to chat. It's a little longer than usual, but Chris is an interesting guy. We ramble, but cover software design, user experience, programmer personality types, and Windows Vista. This is the first show I interviewed someone on (not counting the TechEd "on the floor" show) so if it's interesting (or not) let me know and we might do others.

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The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. There's a number of other ways you can get it (streaming, straight download, etc) that are all up on the site just below the fold. I use iTunes, myself, to listen to most podcasts, but I also use FeedDemon and it's built in support.
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Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

Posted at 2006-09-27 10:48 AM by Scott
Comments [12]
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 10:30:48 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I enjoyed the new format a lot. You guys were really having fun geeking out, and the enthusiam came through in the show.

Re: Itunes

While I don't think there's a way to say "fill up the rest of my space", fixed quotas are easy to do. It's pretty common to use a smart playlist along the lines of "Give me a randomly selected gigabyte of music I have never listened to" or "a randomly selected gigabyte of music that I have rated 5 stars"

By combining different smart playlists together, you can maek more complicated rules. For example, if you want to combine 'And' and 'Or' rules, you have to use at least two playlists and have one playlist reference the other.

For me, the feature that makes me feel like a loner among the millions of users is that there's no way to delete things from the iPod itsself. I put a ton of one-off content on my iPod like Podcasts. In fact, that's pretty much all of the content on my nano. I frequently skip through them like the radio and only listen to a few of them all of the way through. But there's no way to mark a podcast and say "Get this off my iPod the next time I synch". So everytime I sit down at my home desktop, I have to spent 10 minutes pouring over the content on my Ipod, straining to remember whether I decided to skip that particular show or not. You can't use a smart playlist that filters on playcount, because when you only listen to a portion of a podcast it won't increment the playcount.

Jon

Wednesday, September 27, 2006 12:41:41 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

That was a GREAT format! You guys are both very interesting, and to hear you get all excited about nerdy stuff just makes us nerds excited too.

I like less formal conversations that are chock-full of real content, rather than structured interviews.

Ben Scheirman

Thursday, September 28, 2006 5:58:49 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Loved this show (got about half way through on my drive in, will finish it on the way home...). Wanted to add that winamp has a fill feature to do exactly what you're describing. Its not worth a whole lot, though, as your itunes purchases won't work. Its in there if you want to check it out, though.

Tim Coker

Thursday, September 28, 2006 6:58:45 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

You mentioned running the old Program Manager in Windows XP. It is actually still in WinXP and is located at "Windows\System32\ProgMan.exe". But, the sucky thing is they disabled it in WinXP SP2. If you run it in WinXP SP2, it doesn't error and it doesn't do anything.

Chris Pietschmann

Friday, September 29, 2006 9:38:44 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

One of my favorite episodes so far, I really enjoyed it.

I met Chris Sells at PDC03. I planned on asking him a bunch of stuff, but I just walked up, stammered "I know you", and scampered off. I ;)

Gerrard A Lindsay

Friday, September 29, 2006 10:53:42 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

My apologies for seeming unapproachable, Gerrard. If you'd like to try it via email, I'm happy to answer your questions.

Chris Sells

Saturday, September 30, 2006 6:33:27 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Finally listened yesterday - best episode yet.

Joshua Flanagan

Sunday, October 01, 2006 4:56:03 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I guess I should be posting here not at Carl's blog here.

Anyway maybe you should set up a blog/comments on hanselminutes.com.

You could even duplicate the posts here some how.

Jonathan Parker

Wednesday, October 04, 2006 12:31:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Oh, it wasn't you at all Chris, I just freaked for some reason. I don't actually remember the questions anymore...

Gerrard A Lindsay

Monday, October 09, 2006 10:37:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Scott - in case you still would like to query the state of the keyboard (or a particular key) from a console app, I wrote a short post inspired by this podcast that might be useful.

http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2006/10/get-key-state-from-console-application.html

Hope it can help...

Aaron Lerch

Tuesday, October 10, 2006 8:01:05 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

Great show as usual.

It’s obvious from the other comments that we are not alone in our iTunes pet peeves. Your show inspired me to finally submit my list of enhancements to iTunes at:

a@http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html@http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

My #1 pet peeve: after any podcast finishes playing on your iPod you get taken to the start menu! Of course no one ever listens to two episodes of the same podcast in a row. Apple must think that after something as mentally taxing as listening to a podcast you need to browse some photos or play some games.

Maybe if we all submit our ideas iTunes will be wicked awesome by v8...

Tom

Tom Wayson

Monday, October 23, 2006 12:30:32 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

I'm slow, but I'm old. :) Just finished listening to this podcast.

re: iTunes authorization. You can de-authorize computers from within iTunes. In 7.01 you click on the "Store" menu and select "View My Account". Then you can sign in and it will show you your account information, including how many machines are authorized to play music from this account. If you are signed into the ITMS, you can also click on your account name in the upper right hand corner. That's not very intuitive. Once you have authorized all 5 machines, a new button will appear that says "de-authorize all machines". This reset button will allow you to start over.

I ran into the same problem you did, I paved a few machines and lost a few of my "authorizations". At first I thought it was a pain to have the "authorizations" being unavailable to me, but I realized that as long as I could authorize more machines, I was still OK. Fortunatly, they aren't gone forever.