Category: Review

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In Search of the Perfect Android Podcast App

Recently, I subscribed to Club Twit (twit.tv), which includes ad free videos for their tech shows.  I loaded these shows up into Pocket Casts without any problems.  I, however, wanted to watch these on my computer full screen.  I blissfully logged into Pocket Casts on the web to see if I could play my podcasts there, then I was greeted with this message: that will be $40/year.  Are you kidding me?  They have a “deal” where the first year is $20, then year 2 and beyond is $40.

Podcast apps are just aggregators of RSS feeds and there’s no way I’m paying $40/year for the ability to watch videos hosted by a 3rd party.  Researching around, I found Bluestacks which can run Android apps on Windows and indeed, I could load Pocket Casts and have it go full screen without any problems and it would sync my progress of watching the show to my phone.  They even created an icon for Pocket Casts on my desktop, so all I had to do was click on the icon and it would auto-launch Bluestacks and Pocket Casts.

However, this $40 cash grab attempt left a bad taste in my mouth with Pocket Casts. In addition to that, I have issues with their playlist feature.  I can add 3 episodes of a podcast to the queue, but it never plays the last item in the playlist automatically.  So annoying when you are in the shower and not near the phone!

I decided to hunt around for a new podcast app.  Podcast Addict was highly recommended on Reddit, so I loaded it up.  It offered to restore my backup from the year 2011: yes, I had used this app in the past.  Apparently, it saves the app data in a secret backup location on your Google Drive that you can’t see.  Unfortunately, Podcast Addict doesn’t appear to sync between multiple devices, so I uninstalled it.

I then tried Podurama which looked very promising.  They offer syncing between devices and their free tier allows playing of your podcasts on their website.  Unfortunately, I could not get the syncing to work between my computer and phone, so I uninstalled that one as well.

I then stumbled onto Podcast Republic.  While they do not offer playing podcasts from a website, they do offer syncing between devices and right from the get go, they say it’s free.  I loaded it up into Bluestacks and I was able to sync my podcast progress to my phone.  Hooray!  The sync, however, does not seem to be “real-time”, but I was able to do it on demand from Settings>Account & syncing>Sync now.  The app has ads which were not obtrusive at all, just a small banner at the very bottom of the app.   I went ahead and paid the one time fee of $4 to remove the ads.

As an added bonus: I see they support streaming radio stations.  I listen to a radio station on iHeartRadio using their official app.  Unfortunately, they started putting ads on the screen in their app: annoying!   I went to radio-browser.info, found the streaming URL for the station I listen to and added it in Podcast Republic.  No more screen ads!

-Soli Deo Gloria

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Windows 11 Confirmed

I watched the Windows 11 live stream from Microsoft today. There was a few interesting tidbits, such as it will be free upgrade for Windows 10 users (not unexpected), will only come in a 64-bit version (32-bit version is gone) and requires UEFI/Secureboot/TPM 2.0. A lot of people are hyperventilating over the TPM 2.0 requirement, but we are roughly 6 months away from the release of Windows 11 and I have no doubt that this requirement will either be relaxed or a workaround will be found.

Installing the leaked Windows 11 dev build was blocked by Microsoft from installing on bare metal and within days, people figured out how to copy all of the files from the Windows 10 sources folder from the install media and then just overwrite the Windows 10 WIM file with the Windows 11 WIM file and viola, all restrictions were removed. The TPM 2.0 requirement was already bypassed for this build by replacing appraiserres.dll with one from Windows 10. Heck, WinNTSetup will probably have a tick box to just remove the requirement.

The 32-bit version should have been removed a long time ago. If you have something that requires Windows 32-bit (for the 16-bit subsystem support), you should probably be running an emulator for that program or leave it on an older OS. The last time I had to install Windows 32-bit was back in June 2014 for a company we bought from Baldor Generators. There was 1 guy that had to run a MS-DOS program and MS-DOS programs only work on Windows 32-bit (without emulation), so we had to revert his Windows 64-bit back to Windows 32-bit.

However, if I had to do it over again, I would just run winevdm or DOSBOX to run his MS-DOS program and leave him on Windows 64-bit. There’s even more options such as VMWare Workstation, I think it’s finally time to drop MS-DOS support for programs that were created 40 years ago.

  • Soli Deo Gloria