I’ve been fairly silent around these parts for the past while, mainly because I’ve been focussing on preparing myself and my boat for an imminent long sailing adventure. For those who are interested, my sailing blog has all the skinny on that.

However, I’ve been doing a lot of work on board to get the computer stuff all up and running. I’m still maybe only halfway there, but it occurred to me that it might be time to lay out the basics so far.

I recently discovered that a lot of visitors find this site searching for information about how to watch podcasts. Obviously, that’s because the name of my podcast is Tech Watch.

However, I can provide the answer to that question. Most video podcasts have a website where you can watch the episodes online in your web browser. If you want to subscribe, though, you’ll need both a podcast aggregator and a video player. This is where it can get tricky.

If you’re on a Mac (I can’t speak to the Windows version) DO NOT upgrade to the new version of myPodder. It downloads podcasts to a directory that is within the application package (full explanation below for those who are interested). This means it’s very hard to get at your podcast files and any automated system will fail.

I’m one of those people who thinks that in this day and age it’s pretty embarrassing that we’re still interacting with machines using a WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) interface. So I was thrilled to see this video of someone who’s trying a different approach.

(via William Gibson’s blog)

Combining two of my current obsessions (soccer and technology), I am experimenting with an IPTV provider to get access to my beloved Champions League. Last year, we got our CL action through a subscription to a Real service. We had all the games on demand through streaming, and I just fed the signal through my laptop to the TV.

If you’re a power podcast user like me, you’ve probably found that iTunes doesn’t have the feature set you’re looking for in a podcatching client. That’s why I was thrilled to discover that myPodder, the client that goes with the online site Podcast Ready, now supports iPods. I was less than excited, though, when I discovered that “support” means that the application runs, not that you can actually play the stuff you download directly on your iPod.

Where I work, we are not allowed to download anything or install applications on our own (sensibly) and we have to exclusively use Internet Explorer (incomprehensibly). Solving this problem is my new favourite application: Portable Firefox.

This is a fully functional version of Firefox for Windows which runs from a USB drive. My drive is a 64MB baby, and PF takes up only 20MB all tricked out with all the extensions and bookmarks I use at home, so I still have plenty of space on the drive for a bunch of files.