Freedom Fan Rowan Dow has produced a great design. It’s the classic “Baby On Board” diamond shape, but it says “Not On Board” (as in “not on board with statism and collectivism…”) Features the FreedomFeens.com URL in the top left side of the diamond. Printed on demand by CafePress. Get them HERE.

Some cool friends of mine made this, and it’s awesome. Calender for Ron Paul with the lovely ladies of liberty. Get it HERE.

(As seen on the Colbert Report and the Huffington Post!)

FLAC is a freeware audio codec that allows you to make the file size of a WAV much smaller with NO loss of quality. This makes it easier to send huge files over the Internet to collaborate, outsource, or Feensource editing.

When Neema Vedadi and I edit our Freedom Feens podcast, it presents unique challenges. We live in different states, but we produce a podcast that sounds excellent, and sounds like we’re in the same room. We record as a double-ender podcast, each recording our end only, then sewing them together and editing more. I used to do all the editing, but Neema has started helping.

The problem is, we send each other WAV files, not MP3 files, to preserve quality as we edit, and WAV files are huge. See, every time you make an MP3 of an MP3, or edit and save an MP3, it sounds worse and worse each time. So we do all the editing as uncompressed WAV files, and only output to MP3 once, when we’re done. That helps preserve the stunning and stellar Feens quality that is part of what sets us apart from other, lesser casts. (The other thing that sets us apart is our brilliance and humor.)

More on how we record Freedom Feens is here.

WAV files are about ten megs per minute (ten times the size of an MP3). So they can take a long time to send back and forth for editing a 90-minute cast. We record the podcast in four 25-minute chunks, send each other files to mix and pre-edit, then edit. We do it in sections, and using FLAC makes it quicker and easier to send the files across the miles via FTP.

USING FLAC:

Grab the small FLAC utility:

For Windows. For other operating systems.

It converts WAVs to FLAC, and FLAC to WAV. Works quickly, with absolutely no audio loss, and the FLACs are about half the file size of the WAVs.

Install it, then use “FLAC Frontend” to do your encoding/decoding.

I converted a 16-bit 44.1 Hz stereo WAV of a full 51-minute Freedom Feens episode to a FLAC. It was one of the older ones, before we went to 90 minutes. The WAV file was 519 megs. The resulting FLAC file size was 293 megs. Conversion took two minutes.

I converted that FLAC back to a 16-bit 44.1 Hz stereo WAV, file size returned to 519 megs, audio quality was EXACTLY the same as the original. No loss whatsoever. Converting back took about 30 seconds.

The settings I use are in the image below. Set your FLAC Front end settings like this, and set the folder you’re using. Drag your WAV file in and drop.

To convert from WAV to FLAC, click “Encode.” (Bottom right button.)

To convert FLAC to WAV, click “Decode.” (Above the “Encode” button.)

Simple as that.

If you want to test a FLAC file for audio quality, they will play in VLC video player.

–Michael W. Dean

More info on FLAC.

p.s. If any audio editors want to volunteer to help feensource our editing, let us know in a comment below.

DOWNLOAD PDF HERE. This is the foreword and chapter one of Michael W. Dean’s self-help book, A USER’S MANUAL FOR THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE, translated into Portuguese. Tradução para Português por Ana “Kneazle” Ferreiro. The rest of the chapters will be coming later.

Topics: evitar o stress, ser feliz, ser uma boa pessoa, bloquear trolls da internet, lidar com idiotas, Limpar a sua vida de pessoas nocivas, como posso ser feliz, como posso fazer vida da arte, odeio música alta, aprender a ser um trabalhador independente, aprender a ser feliz, auto-ajuda libertária , viver uma vida boa, vida amorosa, vizinhos barulhentos, princípio da não-agressão, recuperação, auto-ajuda, parar o vício sem reuniões.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT THIS BOOK:

“Part intellectual memoir, part self-help book. Michael W. Dean’s Practical Emotional Self-Defense (PESD) techniques flow from a wealth of life experiences, both positive and negative. ‘The Only Two Rules in Life’ have some radical, refreshing implications.”
–Jason Sorens, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo, SUNY), founder of the Free State Project

“You owe yourself the opportunity to step outside your comfort zone and put yourself in the court with this modern-day Socrates.”
–Pastor Kenneth V. Blanchard, Sr., author of Black Man with a Gun

“I knew Michael Dean back in the day, when he was a 19-year-old punk rocker with an appetite for self-destruction. I honestly didn’t think he’d live to be 30. But guess what? It turns out that Michael isn’t just a survivor; he’s a survivor who’s learned how to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness after recovery. For everyone who wants to know how to stay sane, develop a great work ethic, and make a mark on the world, Michael Dean has a great story to tell.”
–Professor Michael Bérubé, Ph.D. (Penn State), author of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? and Life as We Know It

. This is Chapter, 1, FOREWORD and Chapter One, Greetings Eager Seeker

FOREWORD by Pastor Kenneth V. Blanchard, Sr, author of BLACK MAN WITH A GUN. This foreword is read by the good pastor. A hip Baptist preacher tells you why you don’t have to be afraid of Michael Dean, even though Michael doesn’t believe in Christ. And you also needn’t be afraid that Michael believes in SOMETHING if you believe in NOTHING. This ain’t about changing your mind, it’s about improving your life. CHAPTER ONE, Greetings Eager Seeker, read by the author, Michael W. Dean. Michael explains what you’re in for (it’s all good!), how he teaches (more like a friend sitting next to you than like a textbook), and what this book is about (cutting deadwood out of your life, getting rid of bad patterns, habits, and people. Then we teach you how to work smarter once you’ve cleaned house).

Creative Commons Attribution – Licença Não Comercial 3.0.

Get the audio book in English, here.

Get the PDF in English, here.

The Zoom H2 handy recorder is an amazing recording device. As are the other Zoom devices that have come out, the Zoom H4, Zoom H4n, the Zoom Q3HD. All are what I call (and coined the phrase for, in 2008) the “Studio on a stick.” I use a Zoom H2 on a gooseneck stand to get amazing quality sound on my Freedom Feens podcast.

But the Zoom’s recording quality is only as good as the sound in the room. If you’re recording in a room with a lot of bare walls you’re still going to get echoy sound. That’s why I came up with the idea of a quick and cheap sound baffle that slips over the end of the Zoom, and cuts out almost all ambient sound, recording only the person talking directly in front of it.

Construction is easy, and under a dollar. Simply cut some egg crate foam into a rectangle about one foot by six inches, then tie over the Zoom using shoelace material. Here’s how it attaches on the back:

It helps if you have someone else to put their finger on the knot before you pull it tight.

Here’s how easily it slips off:

For even more acoustic isolation, you can jam another wedge of egg crate foam into the top:

You could use this same technique on any recording device or microphone.

–Michael W. Dean

I’ve been helping design the new blog for VaporSmiths electronic cigarettes. (Who sponsor the Freedom Feens podcast.) They’re having a great video contest. Check it out and win cool stuff, here:

VaporSmiths Electronic Cigarettes YouTube Video Review Contest

PayPal, as useful as it is, has a nasty habit of freezing funds of people who seek donations for a worthy project but don’t have a government permission slip to do so. There have been several high-profile examples lately of PayPal freezing the donations of everything from buying toys for sick kids to protecting the U.S. Constitution from abuse by police, just because those people didn’t have a 501(c)(3) official tax-free status from the IRS. I’m assuming this is the government’s fault, but PayPal is complicit too.

One of several big issues I have with this, and why I feel PayPal is complicit, is that the PayPal user agreement says nothing about this PayPal rule. I couldn’t find anything about it on the PayPal site in ten minutes of clicking on likely links. And the “setup button page” says nothing about “you must be a licensed 501(c)(3) to use this feature.”

PayPal recently froze a whopping 40,000 dollars gathered by patriot sheriff Richard Mack for a Constitutional Sheriffs Conference.

I realized long ago that PayPal does this, and here are my workarounds. (Disclaimer: I am not an attorney, am not giving legal or tax advice, merely stating what I personally do.)

1.I would NEVER keep an amount of money anywhere NEAR 40,000 dollars in my PayPal account. First, it would be a quality problem if I ever got that much in donations. I’ve never even seen that much money at one time in my life, from donations or from working. But I never keep more than 200 dollars in my PayPal account. I either spend it through PayPal on expenses with people who take PayPal (like my web host, which I often pay a year in advance) or cash it out to my bank account and get cash. Spending it through PayPal does not incur a fee. Cashing it out does incur a small fee, but I feel it’s worth it for the safety of not having it socked away somewhere that it could be frozen.

2. I do not have PayPal links that say “Donate.” I either use a “subscribe” link like I have here, with the explanation that subscribing is really a contribution and does not grant additional access, or I use the PayPal donate link code, but substitute the “Donate” button for the old style “PayPal” button (shown below, feel free to grab and host on your site, please do not hotlink from my site).

In both cases, I add this text in bold, to make it clear I am not a non-profit entity under US law:

Make a donation (donations are NOT tax-deductible, but they might just make you feel really really good)

I believe these two methods to be good due diligence against the heartache of having your funds seized.

–Michael W. Dean

I’ve tried putting a podcast episode on YouTube before. I figured, “It can’t hurt, and it might get more listeners who stumble across it on there based on keywords.” I’ve seen it done before, and thought “How hard can it be?”

Our Freedom Feens podcast is audio only. You can’t put an audio-only file on YouTube. It has to be a video file. And it can’t be a blank audio-only video file. It has to be a video file with at least a still image throughout the whole thing.

I tried doing this once, using our podcast logo as the image, and Adobe Premiere as the editor. I’ve edited a feature-length high-def movie on Premiere, I’m a pretty decent editor, and a very computer-savvy guy. I’m the guy my computer-smart friends call when they have a computer problem.

So I figured I could do this in my sleep: pull a WAV file of a podcast episode into the Premiere timeline, drag in our logo, stretch it to the length of the audio, set the In and Out points, and render. I tried it a dozen times with a dozen output settings and every time it crashed about halfway through. It was like voodoo.

Tonight I thought of trying something else, using a MUCH simpler program, Windows Live Movie Maker.

Adobe Premiere suite costs thousands of dollars, is incredibly complex, and is used to edit a lot of what you see on TV, Windows Movie Maker comes installed free on every computer running Windows, is so simple a retarded monkey could use it, and it is made for editing video slideshows for your grandma.

To open Movie Maker, type Windows Live Movie Maker Into your RUN bar:

^type Windows Live Movie Maker in your Start Bar

Open the Movie Maker program.

^Windows Live Movie Maker

Click on “Home” near the top left of the program.

Click on “Add Videos and Photos”, and add your still image
.
Click “Add Music” to add your audio (it doesn’t have to be music, ours is talking. It just has to be an audio file.)

Click on “Project” near the middle top of the program, pick Widescreen or Standard. (I picked Standard.)

Click “Fit to Music.” (Important.)

Go to the little down arrow above “Audio Mix” and click it. Click “Save Project As.” Save your movie as what your want your YouTube video to be named.

Go to the little down arrow above “Audio Mix” and click it. Click “Save Movie” and then “Windows Phone Small.” Click “Save” on the box that pops up.

Your movie will render, quickly. It took about ten minutes to render my 106-minute podcast “movie.” The file size was 148 megs, and the audio quality was pretty stunning. Very little loss.

Upload this file to YouTube. Be sure to tag with good, pertinent keywords, and provide a link to your podcast site.

Enjoy!

Michael W. Dean,
Freedom Feens podcast

Check out my final result, here:

Neema Vedadi Interviews Robin Koerner of Blue Republicans [ 50 min 07 s | 114.79 MB ]  Download

Neema Vedadi interviews Robin Koerner of Bluerepublican.org and The Huffington Post about why anyone who loves peace and civil liberties should vote for Ron Paul even if they’re Democrats. We also discuss Classical Liberalism, Watching America, the real divide in American politics, breaking the left-right paradigm, and the difference between American and European political discourse.