History of Gaming

I have had a particular interest in the history of computer gaming, and love reading about the developments and how one game led to the creation of a genre, such as Dune2 starting the whole Command and Conquer phenomenon (which incidentally also led to Warcraft), and early games like Wolfenstein 3D tht is now the first person shooter etc.

A great (online) TV show is called Play Value, and is a very well produced, short (10 minute episodes) look at the whole game development, hardware, software, personalities behind the scenes etc

Currently hosted by On Networks (I pick up episodes through iTunes)

If you are interested in computer gaming, and are interested in how we have gotten to where we are today, this is definitely worth a look.

A book that may also be of some interest (if only for the various game screen shots), is called “High Score!”

This is not to be mistaken for the documentary “High Score” made back in about 2005, where Bill Carlton attempted to break the 80 million point record for “Missile Command”

The documentary byline reads “One Quarter. Two Days. No Pause Button” Hopefully the documentary isn’t as long as the game lasted!

Adobe TV

Adobe have released an online TV channel that may be of interest to some.

This is in addition to a number of video podcasts that are available through iTunes with tips, tricks, techniques and methods on various Adobe products.  There is now so much info out there, to watch it all you’d hardly find time to actually get anything done!

Assembling a Podcast

The steps involved in producing a podcast are surprisingly straight-forward, but it took me some time and research to find out just how to go about it all. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of instructions – at some stage I may put together a bit of a video package of the steps, but in the meantime, this is a down-and-dirty solution to get prospective podcasters started at least.

It can be either an audio or video podcast – the steps are pretty much identical. I haven’t tried to do an audio only one, and as funny as it sounds, you’d think video was harder. In reality I guess they are about equal, but I haven’t tried an audio only one before. That isn’t quite true – I haven’t gotten an audio one to the stage where I thought it would be interesting enough to podcast, whereas I seem, strangely, quite happy to stand in front of a video camera. Weird huh.

What you need for the process is:

1. Somewhere to host the audio file. This can be your own server (for my very first episode, I set up a Mac at home as a web server, but decided as the show quickly grew that I didn’t have the bandwidth to support such a move, so looked for an external solution). There are plenty of free solutions for this, but remember that if you continue to grow your site, that your need for storage space will also grow. Have a look at blip.tv – I use it for my videos, and it also can take audio files. They need to be mp3 for audio, and mp4 for video if you intend to get the result into iTunes. I have no idea how much space I am already using (for free), but it must have already passed 3GB. You set up a show, upload your files and that is step one complete.

Actually, the direction blip.tv has gone, that may actually be almost all you need to do – they now have check boxes for you to have that ’show’ iTunes ready. What that means is there is then an iTunes compatible feed ready for you to link to iTunes. So if that is all you want to do, skip ahead to the final step!

2. If you want to take it a bit further, the next thing is to set up a blog, and make a post that includes a link to your audio file on blip.tv I set a category for those posts called podcast, and that gives me a RSS feed with just the relevant posts included.

A blog is a nice extra – it gives somewhere for people to go to read about the content of your podcast episode, you can provide links, images etc.

I use WordPress.com – again it is free, and has nice templates. As you can see from this blog!

3. You then need to produce an iTunes compatible feed. So the next step is to take the RSS feed for your podcast posts (which will look something like abc.wordpress.com/category/podcast/feed ) and head over to www.feedburner.com

Feedburner takes your standard RSS feed, and provides an iTunes compatible one. With this address ready to go, head over to iTunes, register, and set up a new podcast – there is a link to do just that. Submit your feedburner feed (or your blip.tv one, if you have skipped step 2), sit back and wait. In 48 hours or so, they will have checked the content of your podcast and approved it, and presto, you will be on iTunes.

Hopefully, that is enough to get you started. However, it has been ages since I set mine up, so I might have missed a few minor points. I spend ages researching all the requirements to find out the above steps. They seem so easy in hindsight.

See you in the blogosphere.