Tools – Page 4 – MICHAEL W. DEAN

Putting Your Podcast on YouTube

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:

This mini air compressor is going to extend my lifespan!

electric-duster-600-500x250 — Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster

I used to spend tons of money on canned air. I use it to clean my keyboard, to clean the inside of my computer, to blow out the clinging dust from my bag-less vacuum cleaner, and a lot of other things. Canned air is expensive, it really ads up, and it’s really toxic….People even huff it to get high, and it causes brain damage. Not something I want to use in my home.

When I go to WalMart weekly with my wife (Which we call “hunting”, because we read somewhere that cats think you’re out hunting when you work and shop, because you’re gone all day and you always have lots of treats for them), I usually grab a magazine from the racks, read it while she shops, then put it back before we leave. In some gun magazine I ran across an ad for the Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster (Available on Amazon, HERE.)

At 50 bucks, it will pay for itself in me not buying canned air in about six months. It does seem louder than a jet engine (I wear ear plugs) and does get warm quickly (it even says that in the user’s manual) but it gets the job done, without poisoning you or your kitties. It has a 12-foot AC cable, which is enough for most uses, and I just add an extension cord for more. It’s made in the USA by a company that’s been in business for generations. It’s solid steel and built like a tank.

I love it I love it I love it!

MWD

Darned Optimum

Ever since Optimum Online (a New York City company) took over Bresnen (a local area company here in Wyoming that did a good job), our TV service has been wonkie, our Internet has been intermittent and our phone service scratchy and sometimes not working at all. They’ve also been throttling BitTorrent, which I use to legally share media I create.

But the final straw that I think is going to make me switch to one of their competitors is that it took them FOUR DAYS to come out and fix a downed cable. Friday night, the wild, wooly Wyoming wind blew down the cable that supplies my DSL, land line phone and cable TV. I called them every day for that four days, and every day, after waiting for an interminable period and repeating all my personal information, they said “Someone will be out today.” Sure, one of those days WAS New Years’, but still, they told me they’d come and they didn’t until today.

And it wasn’t just my service, this cable was down in the alley, and provides service to the whole block.

Fortunately, my service was not interpreted, but that’s got nothing to do with Optimum and everything to do with the fact that Casper, Wyoming is not heavily populated and people are alert, respectful and polite. If this had happened when we lived in California, the downed cable would have been destroyed by a speeding car, or harvested by meth heads to sell for the copper. I can tell by the lack of tracks in the snow that no one drove over it in the alley. It looks like one or two cars started down the alley, but saw the wire and turned around.

Optimum5 — Downed optimum cable in the alley

How To Bypass BitTorrent Throttling, step-by-step settings

A lot of ISPs throttle BitTorrent traffic: Charter, AT&T, Qwest, ComCast, CableVision, and many more. There’s a full list HERE. There are lot of tutorials out there on bypassing the evils of throttling. Some work, some don’t, some work for a while then stop working when the ISP figures it out. Below are step-by-step settings that worked for me in uTorrent. I went from being throttled to about three hours a week to being on 24/7. The bandwidth isn’t quite as high as before I was being throttled, but overall my weekly throughput is MUCH higher, because I can now be on 24/7.

NOTE: I do not recommend that you do anything illegal. I use BitTorrent ONLY for seeding my movies and podcasts, things I own, movies like Guns and Weed, the Road To Freedom and the Freedom Feens podcast, things I produced myself that are released Creative Commons. In fact, you can grab my torrents HERE. If you like this article and get something out of it, please do grab those torrents, download and enjoy them, and SEED them. Thanks! But I’ve done a test, and these techniques do work for downloading as well.

Overall, showing bandwidth I’m getting:

Here are the screenshots of my custom settings that are bypassing throttling on my end. (under Options/Preferences):

General settings:

UI settings:

(No screenshot for Directories. Doesn’t matter what you have for Directories.)

Connection settings: (If this port doesn’t work for you, try a different random port, but do not randomize port for each start.)

Bandwidth settings:

BitTorrent settings:

Transfer Cap settings:

Queuing:

Leave the last four, Scheduler, Web UI, Playback and Advanced, as is. You don’t need to change anything on them.

Enjoy. Always obey the law, brush your teeth and do what your parents tell you to. And don’t forget to vote, because your vote counts and politicians are looking out for your best interests. HA HA HA HA!

–Michael W. Dean

How to speed up ANY website, especially WordPress websites

This is a VERY simple webmaster trick to speed up the loading of ANY website you create. It is particularly noticeable in WordPress.

Simply add this line of code anywhere in the .htaccess file:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript application/x-httpd-php application/rss+xml application/atom_xml text/javascript

That will enable compression of data sent to from the server to the browser. Most browsers can uncompress on the fly, and will speed up loading of your website. Browsers that cannot uncompress will simply ignore the command and deal with the uncompressed version.

This is one of several hundred tricks and tips I’ll be discussing in my upcoming series of podcast episodes about SEO on the Freedom Feens Podcast. Go there and subscribe now so you don’t miss them when they come out.

–Michael W. Dean