Last week I was catching up on some podcasts and found myself sufficiently bemused by an episode of The Adventure Zone that I posted a Thought about it. In putting the Thought together I found myself searching around for ways to link to the specific episode I was talking about. Shortly after I finished that post I found myself thinking about building a a way to embed a podcast episode.
Shortly after I whined about the iOS 14.5 version of the Apple Podcasts app I went on the hunt for a replacement. I had simply lost too much time fighting with the constantly changing defaults and random breakage. I tried several and as I bemoaned, several options I tried were unfit for purpose.
The whims of the Internet never cease to annoyamaze me. I used
to have a little piece of software that would record
Howard Stern and
A State of Trance using my Sirius radio
receiver and turn it into a podcast that I then synched to my BlackBerry.
At some point after the Sirius/XM merger they stopped carrying ASOT and
so I was left with
Above & Beyond Group Therapy to keep
me entertained during my weekly chores and yard work. Imagine my annoyance
when they decided to nuke their podcast into a 20 minute advertisement for
their 2 hour show which has been relegated behind the streaming service
hegemony. There are few things I do better than hate-write software so
away I went. Turns out both Armin and Above & Beyond publish YouTube
playlists of their shows so how hard can that be?
I've always been fairly adamant that unless the built-in application for core mobile device functionality (things like contacts, calendar, phone dialer, SMS messenger, e-mail, camera, photos, music playback) is unfit for purpose that I would use it. A lot of it comes from a long history of third party applications just never being quite as well integrated as first party and my reliance on these functions. I have very few apps on my phone and other than SMS messaging the most often used is the Podcast app. Sadly iOS 14.5 seems to have opted to replace the podcast app with something no one bothered to use or test.
In a lot of places school has started back up and based on the amount of traffic I have seen people seem to think that things are returning to normal in spite of the fact that it absolutely has not. Record numbers of people are still out of work even if you ignore the number of people getting sick and dying from the pandemic.
It is that time of the year again, so below is a list of my favorite
podcasts this year. As previously,
and previously I am not
throwing shade on any previously mentioned podcasts. I am still very
much enjoying the ones that are still running. I will call out a couple
previous podcasts that stood out to me this year, but think of this
exercise as additive.
Last year I wrote about my favorite podcasts
so I figured I'd do the same this year. In no particular order, though
I will call out the ones that I'm still listening to first.
So, I mentioned a while back that I watch Acquisitions Inc on the yubtubs. Well through there I also started watching Dice, Camera, Action. During the Stream of Many Eyes event there was a DCA episode featuring Travis McElroy and that reminded me of the fact that I have had The Adventure Zone languishing away on my iPhone for a while now, un-listened to. Now I'm pretty terrible about keeping up with podcasts (there is so much good stuff out there to listen to and watch these days) so I just wanted to toss out a few words about what happened next.
I don't listen to a lot of podcasts these days, in fact most of the time I listen to either Sirius XM or my music collection that I've curated into iTunes over the years. There are some times when I'm in the mood for something different and these are the podcasts that I have been actually listening to this year.