I’ve tried them before, but always seem to run out of interest/steam after a few episodes. With most, there’s simply too much content and I feel I need to start with episode one, which sometimes immediately puts me several hundred sometimes hour long episodes behind just to get current. That’s a bear that I don’t want to deal with… That changed today (not the bear part, just the “podcasts suck” one).

Facing a six hour drive to visit the family, I spent the previous night planning my attack (yes, I’ve made the trip a million times before, but I wanted to improve upon it this time around). First, I took a serious look into books on tape (err audiobooks… no, I don’t have a tape player and have never even put a CD in my car).

I knew the name Audible, downloaded their app, and couldn’t do a thing. Not intuitive at all. I needed to login, but I didn’t have an account and couldn’t create one! Damn it! Who designed this? It turns out I had to make an account at their website before ever thinking about using the app. Can you say “terrible?” I can. I can also say “strikes one and two.” And then there are the costs… $15/mo to have someone read books to me. That might make sense for a lot of folks, but this is a service I might use for eight books a year (four roundtrip trips to the family)… that’s ridiculously expensive and a subscription-only model is clearly not the one for me.

So then I discovered the app Audiobooks. It’s free/cheap ($.99 for most books, it seems), but it uses readings that are freely licensed. That’s cool and all, but it means the narrators suck. FAIL.

Running out of options, I recalled iTunes having an “audiobooks” tab in it. Fired up the app from the nether regions of my “hide this shit” app group, hit that tab, and bam. BAM I SAID. Audiobooks galore. Except… HUGER BAM!!! A quality book is $20. Eff that noise! Literally and figuratively! I don’t even like being read to (I made it through a single book on CD back when I used to commute so many moons ago and didn’t particularly like it).

NO AUDIOBOOKS.

I gave one final go at having stuff read to me by searching for an app that would read my bookmarked “to read” websites, but drew a blank. Anyone know of anything? I’d be really happy with you and maybe buy you a drink! Or maybe this is my avenue to great fortune? I’m hereby claiming this idea as mine (MJC – February 4, 2013).

Alas, nobody was going to read to me…

So I dropped into the Podcast app (built-in Apple app). First searched for cycling stuff, which would surely put me to sleep. Brilliant! Subscribed to a couple of those, and then made my way through all the top podcasts in each category. When all was said and done, I’d subscribed to a dozen or so titles.

BVVVVVPPPPPPPP! That’s the sound of a record scratching when a show needs to jump backwards in time. I need to do that. Not in a show, but right here… on my blog. Go with it….

You might not know what a podcast is. If you’d like a really good definition, check out the article on Wikipedia and skip the rest of this paragraph. If you’d like my crappier explanation, read on… A podcast is basically a user-generated talk show that is published to the iTunes Store. I *think* they’re all free, but I’m probably very wrong on that. Regardless, most of them are made by people in their homes who have great ideas and apparently a fair amount of time on their hands [says the blogger]. Some are terrible, some are amazing. Some are a guy at a desk, and some are professionally produced in studios. NPR has a handful, 60 Minutes shows up, and… so probably does that weird guy down the street. I digress. Podcasts run the gamut on every possible characteristic, and the cool part is that the shows are 100% archived meaning you can start at episode one of a podcast that is currently hundreds of episodes deep just to get a feel for it and learn the background. You now know what a podcast is if you hadn’t previously.

So I had a dozen or so titles, was a little tired of my Spotify playlists by 4AM (I leave at the buttcrack to avoid traffic, get down there in time to work regular hours, and because the sun rising combats fatigue pretty well), and wanted some talk. Fired up the podcast app, and tuned into Simple Life Together (SLT). The show is a husband/wife duo who each week present some tips on getting ahead via making your life easier and more manageable financially, mentally, organizationally, spiritually, and all the other good things that we could all stand to improve on. They chat on a general subject for about half the time and then go into their “Things” segment where each espouses on a subject of their choosing from things (get it?) that really affected them in the past week, be it a link, a quote, a song, a person, etc. I’m a few episodes in and am loving it (aside from the wife saying “anywhos” far too often). Great ideas, great thought provocation, and really just… great. I’m always amazed at how talented “regular folk” can be. The best part (not really… it’s the content)? They only started late last year so I’ll easily be able to catch up!

So that’s that. Podcasts, which have been around for many, many years, and I’ve even tried before, are apparently now for me and an awesome way to pass the time in the car. If you haven’t considered them or checked out the offerings lately, you may want to; lots of good stuff out there. Heck, maybe you’ll find SLT to be a great fit for you?

Also noteworthy apps for long stretches of road are the following:

• Ted – Amazing talks by amazing people
• NPR – Duh
• Stitcher Radio – A highly configurable podcast-like app on steroids
• A Friend – They’re cool

If you have any suggestions, please share!