Saturday, January 16, 2010

Trade - A Story of India (3)

Michael Wood's video series The Story of India (BBC) is beginning to take me in completely. I tremendously enjoyed the third chapter, which you will find below. As I explained before, the series goes chronologically through the history of India and this chapter covers, roughly the first centuries CE. What is added, again, is a theme and the theme is trade. Trade made foreigners come to India since forever. The examples that receive much attention in part 3 are for one the Romans and the Greeks, who figure out how to use the monsoon winds to cross the Indian ocean and the Kushan, a people from Central Asia that controlled the silk road and planted an empire that stretched from north east China until the Deccan plains, from Bengal to Afghanistan.



This series I compare with Vinay Lal's lecture series at UCLA. The advice is to take the BBC before UCLA - although I got them in the reverse order. The story of the Kushan did not stick so well after I had heard Lal. Now, after seeing Wood, I feel like trying again. However, Lal has just started a new series, a podcast lecture course on the History of British India. (feed)

More Story of India:
The power of ideas - A Story of India (2),
The earliest history - A Story of India (1).

More Vinay Lal's History of India:
History of India - the search goes on,
8 podcasts I listened to,
History of India or Europe?
History of India.

Where are my files?

In my recent post Useful tools for podcast listeners, I introduced to you three tools that allow you to alter your podcast files to your needs and liking. This assumes that you know where to find your files, but this needs not be an easy task.

If you download your podcasts manually, you should be aware where the files end up. If however you use a download client such as iTunes, Juice or gPodder, the files are stuck in a place that the client designates and then it can be worry where they end up. It is useful to know in general how these clients work. Both iTunes and gPodder stick the files in their own directory. Under gPodder you will find a folder downloads and inside, under the podcast names, the files. For iTunes there is a folder iTunes Music, under which is a subfolder podcasts. Juice makes a folder in My Documents named Received Podcasts.

Juice and iTunes also give a quick and individual way to the file. If you right click a podcast, iTunes allows you to choose 'Get Info' and on the bottom of the first tab you will see the path to this podcast file. Juice even offers the option to open the file's folder and you then will be directed to the place where the file sits.

More instructions:
Other podcatchers than iTunes (1),
Useful tools for podcast listeners,
Devising your own podcast feed - Huffduffer,
iTunes 9 - help for the podcast listener,
put feeds in iTunes.