A general interest interview, commentary, and entertainment podcast with a focus on modern topics in the arts and sciences. The topics may range from film to music to physics and even computer science.
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This episode we have an audio play called Babbling to Ourselves, it explores the basic communication needed to function and cooperate in society. The first act is a dramatic interpretation of the events mythologized at the Tower of Babel and a second act takes place in a more contemporary setting that seems to rhyme with the first and sheds a light on our modern interconnected and customized world provided by social media Babbling to Ourselves was written by Don Smith, and directed by Sunshine Lampitoc Smith. Sound design and performance by Wesley Apfel, sound effects provided by the website p
This episode I interview Charles Forsyth about the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems that came out of Bell Labs after the success of the Unix operating system. We discuss the features and advantages of Plan 9 and Inferno as well as some of their history. For more information on Plan 9 you can check out 9 Front as well as the papers Charles mentions in our interview. The discussion gets a little technical but I believe it can also be seen as a story about how innovation and technology develop and how change occurs in our technical systems.
This episode we have a audio play called Through this door, the future. It highlights the promise and perils of techno futurism all set at a town fair through the eyes of a child.
This episode we have a micro audio playlet based on a short story from my collection Tales from the Last Space Age, as a teaser for a longer one we are planning to do soon. The playlet shows us a few moments from some aliens working in a datacenter in a reality both far away and very close. This audio adaptation of RECURSION was directed by Sunshine Lampitoc Smith. Sound design and performance by Wesley Apfel, Sound Effects by freesound_community from Pixabay. The cast featured Kieran Cross playing the role of ZERID. He is on instagram as @thekeerkat. HIGZLY was played by Leon Goertzen who can
This is a short audio essay on the death of the PC and the birth of the Network Computer. I believe both were ushered into existence by Steve Jobs and the essay details what was so special about the Personal Computer and what some of the perils of the Network Computer are.
This episode I interview Eugene Sandulenko long time lead developer of scummvm. Scummvm is a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical adventure and role-playing games, provided you already have the files from the original game. ScummVM replaces the program shipped with the games, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed! Checkout their site at scummvm.org .
This episode is a dramatic presentation of a short play I wrote called 'The Human Problem', featuring a healthy debate on AI, and perhaps even aliens. This recording was Directed by Katy Lim, sound design and performance by Wesley Apfel, sound effects provided by the website pixabay with Dean Williams played by Zack Graham,the host was played by Kelli Dawn Hancock who you can find on imdb at http://www.imdb.me/kellidawnhancock and other social media as @kelli_dawn and William Barstow played by DW McCann his website is www.DWMcCann.com and instagram account is @Bardic_DW Steven Dorvan and time
This episode is a short essay on AI, some of it's drawbacks and pitfalls
This episode I talk to Tom Derose research manager at the Freud Museum London . We discuss the museum in general as well as an upcoming exhibit which relates Freud's antiquity collection to the development and practice of various concepts in psychoanalysis.
I just wanted to share a short essay on why I still use physical media by way of Winston Smith and Marshall McLuhan.
I’ve been spending a lot of time going over visions of the future from the past, specifically those animated by the Disney corporation, this short essay talks about some observations regarding the futuristic worlds they portrayed.
This episode I talk to Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Developer. GNUStep is a development framework that closely follows the one used on Mac OS. It allows people to take the code of programs written for Mac OS and use them on other systems like Windows or Linux with almost no development work. It also allows people to write programs using an environment similar to the one on Mac OS. We’ll talk about the history of Next,OS X, and GNUStep’s history and future. You can learn more about GNUStep here.
I've authored a few new books and in this episode I'll do a reading from one of them. It's a short story from the science fiction short story collection I authored called Tales from the Last Space Age . I've also written a book on economic matters called It's not going to get Better Also be sure to check out my first book Mythologies and their creation As always thanks for listening!
I know I haven't uploaded one of these in a while. I've been very busy with work and the pandemic. I did write this short little essay and wanted to record it and put it up as a way to share something.
This episode I interview two developers recreating historically significant computers so that indivuals can try them out inexpensively and easily. First Oscar Vermeulen who created the Pidp-8 and Pidp-11 projects to recreate the physical appearance as well as the experience of the pdp-8 and pdp-11, computers critical to modern operating system history. Then I interview Josh Dersch about his work recreating the Xerox alto and Xerox star, machines that pioneered graphical user interfaces, WYSIWYG document editing, and the desktop metaphor.
Mike Mason takes care of the Call of Cthulhu line of table top roleplaying games for Chaosium and is the co-writer of the current edition of the game. We discuss the game, how to play, and some discussion of the Cthulhu mythos as well.
In this episode I talk to two projects digitizing and preserving works in the public domain. Musopen.org is an effort to provide zero cost and public domain recordings and resources for classical music. Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders rescues and digitizes texts from book scans and makes them readable for everyone.
An interview with the operator of the DVDBeaver review site which does detailed comparisons of different versions of classic home video releases. Gary talks about a variety of topics related to home video as well as some of his perspective from viewing thousands of home video releases.
