Saturday, November 22, 2008

La Resistance - history podcast review

A new podcast has started that is about the French in World War II , mainly about their resistance, but not just that by the name La Résistance. (feed) Host Kensington addresses the wide American audience and makes sure from the start they leave the romanticized depicting of France in the Second World War they may have gotten from the movies. For those, such as myself, who grew up in Europe and have a depiction of the World War from its civilian survivors, no such deconstruction is needed. Good for us, Kensington doesn't take too much time and dives into the history pretty soon.

Not only that of resistance heroes and the odd soldiers under De Gaulle. She also makes sure we understand the background of the collapse of France and the establishment of the Vichy regime. In addition, she points out there has been resistance of anonymous heroes and how the whole range of French activities under German occupation ran from straightforward collaboration fluidly into commonplace neutral into passive and active resistance, without much in the way of means to draw a line.

After a mere three podcasts into the series, still a lot remains to be seen, but this surely kicked off as a promising new podcast in the wide range of history podcasts we have met.

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Video explaining RSS

Previously I explained about RSS in text (RSS readers and can start following this blog with Google Reader. I just found the video below, more generally and visually explaining about RSS and its use.



Under the label Instructions, I try to compile a set of help posts, giving some guidance to listening to podcasts and more. Here is what we have had so far.
listen on line (beginners 1)
download audio files (beginners 2)
get iTunes (beginners 3)
put feeds in iTunes (beginners 4)
For advanced users I posted my own strategy to manage podcast feeds by the dozens with the combined use of iTunes and Google Reader.
For advanced users is also the tip how to use preferences per podcast in iTunes.

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