For those who haven’t looked into it yet, podcasting is a relatively new form of broadcasting in which anyone can record and transmit audio, distributed over the internet. It is automated by RSS, allowing listeners to subscribe to a web address and receive updates as they are published. Podcasting is not live, however this can be an advantage as the audio files can be stored on an iPod (or other media player) and be enjoyed at a convenient time. Most podcast-enabled applications, such as iPodderX and NetNewsWire, easily integrate with iTunes to support iPod synchronization. If you’re interested but unsure of how it all fits together, Peter Rukavina has a great illustrated tutorial showing how to subscribe to a podcast using NetNewsWire and iTunes. [via]

While podcasting may not seem like a big deal yet, Apple picked up on it and will be adding support for it in the next update to iTunes. It appears that Apple will be hand picking podcasts to feature in iTunes 4.9, and I’m hopeful that they won’t be too heavy handed about it. You can be sure that major news outlets featuring podcasts will be there, but I’d like to see some of my picks as well. A fan of podcasts myself, I subscribe to This Week in Tech, The Wizards of Technology, Make Audio Blog, and the occasional Dawn and Drew. With the release of iTunes 4.9, podcasting should see a huge boost, and I look forward to what Apple can bring to the table — hopefully more people, at the very least.

Just out of geeky curiousity (and since I hadn’t seen anyone do it yet), I carefully disassembled my iSight and took pictures along the way.

The first step in cracking open the camera is to remove the two tiny screws in the bottom of the iSight, at the front and back of the white oval surrounding the pivoting base. To remove that white oval, use a sharp knife or nylon pry tool to gently pull the top and bottom away from the holes where the screws were. There are four tabs on it, but popping off the top and bottom ones is far easier than unhooking the sides first. It unclips and comes free.

Grab the iSight mesh housing and the camera piece in front (the part you twist to open and close the iris), and pull the two away from each other. The housing slides almost all the way off the camera, but gets hung up at the very end. What holds it up is the small translucent piece of plastic used to funnel the small green LED light up to the tip of the camera. Sliding the housing halfway back down the iSight exposes a little window, showing a side view of white plastic back of the iSight. From this point, you can slide the pry tool right between the iSight and the white backing — it pops right off. The mesh iSight housing then slides off easily.

With the cover completely off the iSight, any further disassembly is easy. A thin screen is taped on the black plastic cage around the electronics to stop dust and dirt from getting inside. It peels off easily to expose the microphones and other guts of the iSight. The rest comes apart after removing the obvious screws. If you are doing this disassembly, do be careful with the thin ribbon cables which connect the boards inside, as they tear easily. The connectors require that you pull out the front half before the ribbon will disconnect.

There is also a mysterious ribbon connector at the back of the iSight which isn’t connected. My guess is that Apple uses it to restore the firmware or run diagnostics on hosed iSights. If anyone has some insight into its use, I’d love to know what it’s really for.

For all the pictures, check out my iSight Inside gallery page. I’d love to see some iSight mods!

Recently, I was introduced to del.icio.us, a social bookmarks manager which not only allows you to bookmark your favorite sites, but also combine your recommendations with those of others to create a list of popular sites. Your bookmarks can also be tagged with keywords for easy organization, searching, and grouping. For example, you can browse the del.icio.us site by a tag such as ‘torrent‘, and see what others have recently bookmarked related to that tag (quite often it’s how I discover new BitTorrent TV sites).

Del.icio.us also features a programming interface which allows anyone to interact with the site to provide their own set of tools. From that feature comes a huge list of tools which can do all sorts of things, including updating your bookmarks, mapping related tags, backing up all your posts, integrating your bookmarks into your blog, and plenty more. If you use del.icio.us, check them out. [via]

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