Graduation Day! (And Filling My Ears with Sound and Eyes with Light)

Today, my daughter graduates high school! Yay, Class of 2012!!!

So, what’s that mean to you? It means I’ve been scrambling around with not a lot of time (at the moment) to get down into stuff. What should I talk about? Oh, did I tell you my daughter graduates today? Oh, I did? Well, let me drop a little knowledge on you then.

Podcasts are pretty awesome. Yeah, they’ve been around for awhile. I listen to some regularly and I mentioned that to you guys before. However, I am expanding out the ones I’m listening to.

Lately, in games which require no real soundtrack (such as Minecraft), I’ve been listening to some. Or, for example, when I do some light surfing (not necessarily reading) on the web.

Here’s a groovy list of some good ways to manage some of this stuff on your iDevice.

Stitcher is like a radio/podcast streaming thing. Very cool if you’re hanging out in an area with WiFi. I’ve noticed that when you drop it into the background, you lose the sound sometimes (at least on the iPad2). However, if you swipe one screen to the next, the sound stays pretty stable.

If you’re cool with throwing down a couple bucks, you WANT Downcast. It’s a universal app for podcasts. You can stream or download for later consumption. You can send them to your cloud. You can adjust the settings to handle the way you want to process sound in your earholes. I’ve already listened to a lot of podcasts this way. You can also manually add your own podcasts into the list. I’ll note it’s much easier than dealing with iTunes (at least for me). Time is money, blah, blah, blah.

For reading, I use a lot of apps. My favorite for general epub consumption is, hands down, Stanza. Way more customizable than anything else I’ve seen out there and, oh yeah, it’s free. Get it. Try it. Love it.

Finally, I’ll mention something I thought more people were aware of and it’s ipadboardgames.org. People often ask me how I’m able to keep up with all the stuff coming out for the iPad. Well, in addition to copiously scanning the internet, I lean heavily upon this site. I like not only the reviews found there, but the commentary by others, and respect the fact these dudes actually come back and revise their reviews when certain missing features are added. Thorough and cool and points for due diligence.

That’s it. Love to my daughter! Love to the iOS!

Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!

P.S. Add podcasts you think are cool in the comments.

P.P.S. Yes, I know. I usually put links. I’m in a hurry today. Have I told you my daughter’s graduating? (Which means you should totally get in on the buy a book and get RunePunk  for five bucks deal.)