I’m using Free Download Manager with RSS Bandit.

Life is good. It’s the most painless method I’ve found for grabbing file enclosures from my favourite vlogs… RSS Bandit presents the enclosure link nice and clearly. Just right-click > copy link location (shortcut), Free Download Manager pops up, hit OK and the file is saved in my downloads folder.

Windows always seems to offer the wrong file location when I save a file the usual way. The worst is when you are opening from one location and saving to another.

However, for years I’ve been using a little utility called File-Ex, which enhances the file dialog with lists of favourite and recently-used files and folders. A big timesaver.

Newsnight has launched a weekly 25-minute video podcast. It’s a round-up of the best stories from the nightly show.

This seems to be one of the first downloadable files that the BBC has offered in MP4 format, so it’s iPod-compatible. Indeed, the podcast is already number one in the iTunes UK news chart and in the top ten on the worldwide news chart.

Despite the sceptics, I definitely think people are going to watch video on the move. On the train coming here I caught up with some TV I had recorded. It makes the four-hour journey much more bearable.

But the price of portable players needs to come down and the most successful ones in future will be those that play all the popular formats: Windows Media, XVid, DivX, Flash and MPEG as well as Quicktime and they will be based around removable Flash memory cards.

The new high-capacity cards that are coming along, which can deliver the data as fast as a hard drive, will revolutionise the portable player market. Hard-drives are too fragile, cables (for transferring) are annoying and no one wants to be limited by a fixed-capacity internal memory.

For quite a while I’ve been looking around for a good feed reader. I was using the one that is built into Opera, but the slow-down while it updated the feeds every so often bugged me when I was busy looking at web pages at the same time. Sadly this is just one of the problems with Opera lately. I’m using Firefox much more these days.

I tried quite a few RSS programs then, finally, found the humorously named RSS Bandit. It’s open source (free).

I like the way it presents the feeds and file enclosures and it has a nice integrated, tabbed, web browser.

Dear Rocketboom…

Horribly distorted sound (again). Note the flattened-out peaks where the level has exceeded 0dB.

Correct sound recording level…

Why bother producing a ‘high-definition’ version of the show when the audio is painful to listen to?