After using Google Listen exclusively for the last year and a half I decided it was time for a change. Not that I experienced many issues but there were some minor annoyances. Podcasts would not always download automatically, resuming an incomplete download would somehow corrupt the file and not play it back correctly. Random times it would just stop playing the podcast I was listening to, just annoying to have to stop what I was doing to start it again. So I decided that along with my upgrade to the Galaxy Nexus from my Nexus One it was time to upgrade my podcatcher.

I tried all the popular podcast players; Doggcatcher, BeyondPod, Podkicker, etc,… and none of them I felt really at home at. I even purchased the podcast adding to Doubletwist without knowing what it was like just because I like their app so much. Most of the apps there was nothing really major about them that I didn’t like, it was always something small like they way the feeds are organized or the playlist sorting. Some were just not intuitive at all with too many buttons and busy interfaces.

Here is what I want in an app. Simple, clean interface, minimalistic even. An easy way to manage a playlist is a must, easy to re-arrange episodes in a queue. I decide what to listen to next based on my mood really so I move around episodes often. Google reader integration isn’t a must but would be excellent to have.

I will keep looking until I find my perfect podcatcher, until then I will put up with the small annoyances with Google Listen.

Here are all the geek-y events that happened this week

February 13th

2009 – At 23:31:30 today UTC Unix System Time, time in seconds since epoch, reaches 1234567890 seconds.

February 14th

1924 – The C-T-R ( Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company) officially changed it’s name to International Business Machines or IBM feeling the old name to limiting with the growth of the companies activities.

1961 – Element 103 or more commonly Lawrencium was first synthesized at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by a team led by Albert Ghiorso.

February 15th

2001 – The magazine Nature publishes the initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome.

February 16th

1690 – Operation Sandblast commences as the USS Triton sets sail on a mission to circumnavigate the globe while submerged. With an average speed of 18 knots the 26 723 nautical mile trip took 60 days and 21 hours to complete and closely followed the course that Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan used between 1519-1522.

1978 – The first Computer Bulletin Board System (CBBS) went online after weeks of work by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess. In 2003 Chicago’s Mayor Richard M. Daley made February 16th “BBS Day” in honour of this even 25 years earlier.

February 18th

1930 - Clyde Tombaugh while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona discovered the, now re-classified dwarf, plant Pluto using imaged take a few weeks earlier.

1977 – The Space Shuttle Enterprise takes it’s maiden flight on the back of a Boeing 747 to measure structural loads, ground handling and braking.

February 19th

1878 – Thomas A. Edison was issues U.S Patent #200,521 for the Phonograph. Unlike similar devices that could record sounds, Edison’s invention could also reproduce them.

Here are all the geek-y events that happened this week

February 6th

1959 – U.S. Patent 3138743 for ”Miniaturized Electronic Circuits” was filed by Jack Kilby while working at Texas Instruments being one of the two inventor’s of the Integrated Circuit (IC).

February 7th

1984 – Astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart make the first untethered spacewalk during NASA mission STS-41-B operating the Manned Maneuvering Unit for the first time.

February 8th

1996 - 24 Hours in Cyberspace was headed by photographer Rick Smolan to bring a glimpse of online life. You can check out the project courtesy of archive.org

February 9th

1969 – The first flight of Boeing’s 747 “Queen of the Skies,” with pilots Jack Waddell and Brien Wygle and flight engineer Jess Wallick.

February 10th

1996 - Garry Kasparov is defeated by Deep Blue for the first time. He did go on to with the match after three wins and two draws.

February 11th

1938 – The BBC broadcasts the first piece of Science Fiction television, a thirty five minuted adaptation of  Karel Čapek’s ply R.U.R . (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Čapek was the first person to coin the term Robot with this play.

1970 – Japan launches Ōsumi, the first artificial satellite launched by Japan making them the worlds fourth space power after the U.S, USSR and France.

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Here are all the geek-y events that happened this week

January 30th

1826 – The Menai Suspension Bridge connecting the north west coast of Wales and the Isle of Anglesey is the worlds first suspension bridge to open.

1982 – Elk Cloner, the first PC virus code, was written by Rich Skrenta, a 15-year old high school student in Mt. Lebanon, PA. Elk Cloner was a boot sector virus that would display this poem on every 50th boot;

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it’s Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too

Send in the Cloner!

January 31st

1862 – Sirius B, a white dwarf companion of the star Sirius is discovered by Alvan Graham Clark while testing a new 18½ inch refracting telescope design. The Telescope is still is use at the Dearborn Observatory of Northwestern University.

1971 – Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell made up the Apollo 14 mission and took off aboard Saturn V for their destination to the Fra Mauro formation on the moon, the same destination as the failed Apollo 13 mission. 93 lbs of moon rocks were collected and various surface tests were performed during the mission’s two EVA’s. Alan Shepard famously hit two golf balls on the moon’s surface with a club he brought from earth.

February 1st

1893 – Thomas Edison finishes construction of the Black Maria in Edison, New Jersey which is the first movie production studio in the United States. The Black Maria filmed, among others, Fred Ott’s Sneeze, Blacksmith Scene and Dickson Experimental Sound Film.

February 2nd

1964 – With the success of the Barbie doll Hasbro launched a similar 12-inch doll for boys, G.I. Joe. They came in four models, one for each branch of the U.S. Military and could purchase acessory packs with additional equipment and gear for each Joe doll.

February 3rd

1966 – The unmanned Russian Luna 9 spacecraft makes a soft landing in the Oceanus Procellarum of the moon making it the first spacecraft to land on the moon. Three series of television pictures and 8 hours and 5 minutes of audio were transmitted.

2011 – The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority or IANA distributed the last of the IPv4 addresses to regional authorities furthering the push for IPv6 adoption.

February 4th

2004 – Everyone’s favourite internet entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook initially restricted to Harvard Students. As of 2011 Facebook has 800 million active users and revenue of 4.27 billion.

February 5th

1974 – The Mariner 10 probe passes Venus with the closest approach being  5,768 km, it was able to photograph Venus’s cloud structure and performed other atmospheric studies.

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Here are all the geek-y events that happened this week

January 23rd

1970 – OSCAR 5 (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio), Australia’s first amateur radio satellite, is launched.

1993 – The first popular graphical web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was released with version 0.5. Used mostly for browsing the web it also supported FTP, NNTP and gopher. It was not the first graphical web browser, Erwise and ViolaWWW are little known but came earlier, but it was the browser that popularized the web and made way for the browsers of today.

January 24th

1986 – The Space Probe Voyager 2 came within 81 500 kilometers of the planet Uranus discovering the moons Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Perdita and Puck.

January 25th

1978 – The beginning of the Great Blizzard of 1978 which dropped over 12 inches of snow on Chicago and would last for 3 days. Being stuck inside during the snowstorm prompted Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to invent the first Computerized Bulletin Board System, CBBS.

2005 - Opportunity the Mars Exploration Rover – B, lands on the surface of Mars at 0505 UTC in the Meridiani Planum just 3 weeks after the MER-A Spirit landed.

January 27th

1985 – Launch of NASA mission STS-51-C. It was the first dedicated DoD mission therefore it’s payload and many mission details are classified.

2010 – Apple first generation iPad is announced at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco finally succeeding in the failed tablet market

January 28th

1958 – The LEGO Company of Denmark patents it’s interlocking brick design. They are still compatible with modern LEGO bricks.

1986 – A tragic end to NASA mission STS-51-L 73 seconds after launch when the Challenger Space Shuttle broke apart due to a failure in an O-ring seal on one of the Solid Rocket Boosters.

Events and Observances

January 28th – Data Privacy Day is an annual event to promote awareness and education about best privacy practices.

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