This Saturday, December 3rd, Frank Linhares of techPhile will be down at Hak.5 studios for a LIVE podcast.

Date: Sat. Dec. 3rd, 2005
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm Eastern
Stream: http://sc3.spacialnet.com:13706/listen.pls
Phone Number: (508) 644-TECH
IM and Skype Calls: netsurge
IRC: #techphile on irc.techphile.ca
Email: questions@techphile.ca

Get your questions ready and we’ll see you Saturday!

The past few weeks have been filled with exciting developments and episode 5 production so lets break it down.

I’m very happy to say that the last segment for episode 5 was just shot and edited. The only thing left at this point is the “glue”, which we’re saving for this weekend. We’ll shoot the last bits on Friday the 2nd, finish up the timeline and start up those encoding boxes.

Then Saturday the 3rd we’re hosting the techPhile podcast with Frank Linhares LIVE on the set of Hak.5. Head over to techphile.ca for details.

Of course we release episode 5 on December 5th, so join us in #hak5 on irc.techphile.ca for all the release party shenanigans.

Then we head up to Toronto for the meetup on the 15th. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks let me clarify. Our indefatigable buddy Frank Linhares has organized the TechTV Holiday Meetup. The guest list includes Call for Help, commandN, Security Now, The Lab Rats, techPhile, WASD.tv, Major Geeks, and the PixelCorp’s Alex Lindsay. Registration and more details can be found over at TechTVHolidayMeetup.com.

And now for the screenshots hot off the post production box:

If you look really hard you can see my reflection in the arcade

Harrison is up to no good again…

I’m not sure how either of us kept a straight face through this segment

As you can see the set is really starting to take shape. And for once we’re not squeezed into frame now that we have a nice wide angle lens. And finally, after 5 episodes of complaining we have wireless mics… For half of the segments at least.

–Darren

Hi hacklings. Tonight I was interviewed about Hak.5 on the Computer America radio show with Carey Holzman. It was a lot of fun and as I promised I now have the audio available for download in both MP3 and OGG for you open source fans. I’ve taken the liberty to cut out all of the commercials so the file is about 33 minutes long. I’ll keep these edited files available unless I hear otherwise from CA. I’d love to hear your feedback on the interview so hit up the forums or leave a comment here.

CA_Hak5_1.mp3 (15 MB)
CA_Hak5_1.ogg (14 MB)

Tomorrow starts filming for episode 5 so we’re really excited to get infront of, and behind the camera. I’ll have updates on production throughout the month.

–Darren

Friday night Darren, co-host & producer of Hak.5 will be on the Computer America radio show with Craig Crossman and Carey Holzman for a 1 hour live interview at 10pm EST / 7pm PST. Computer America is “America’s longest-running nationally syndicated radio talk show about computers” (Try saying that 10 times fast). You can tune into the radio broadcast if it’s carried in your area, check here for availability, or listen to the Internet stream. An MP3 copy will be available on this site the next day. I believe it’s a live call in show as well, so if you’d like to bug me about anything Hak.5 related now’s your chance.

–Darren

Production is going well. I’ve got everything on the timeline ready to go, just adding the out-takes and credits now then I’ll render it all up. While waiting for a render yesterday I put together the episode 4 teaser video. Yeah, I know, mute point to release the teaser on the 4th but I just have to split these hairs. Anyway, the teaser is available here. I’ll have it on the episodes page later.

Cheers

I’m sure I’ll say this again tomorrow; big thanks go to Ashley Witt for our new theme music. I think it really captures the fun feeling of Hak.5, anyway you can give your $0.02 in the forums.

See you all tomorrow!
–Darren

The editing marathon continues. With only a small bit left to shoot and almost everything edited we’re very close to having ep4 in the can. Once it’s all chopped up and ready to go I’ll get to play the fun game of encoding. Joy. I’ll try to get an ipod video version out, which I believe is simply a 320×240 h.264 .mov or mpeg4 .m4v. If you’ve got a tutorial handy send me a link, I’ve got Quicktime 7 pro but wasn’t happy with the quality of the h.264 we released for ep3.

More good news: I’ve got the RSS feeds straightened out. I’ll have links on the left for each video codec/download format feed in the next few days. I’ll be moving our torrent tracker to another server in the coming days which will allow us to enable server side sharing, thus providing faster and more reliable downloads. I’ll keep the existing tracker up for those of you still seeding/downloading but the RSS feeds will point to the new tracker.

Not even cheap American beer can quench the thirst of the leet hacker

Shoutouts go to all the cool kids in #hak5 on irc.techphile.ca and over here in the forums.

–Darren

We just finished our second production weekend. With just one more segment to shoot the cast is ready to wrap up while I begin the editing marathon. I’m very pleased with the quality of each and every segment in this episode and have to give a huge thanks to the cast and crew for pulling off two very long production weekends. We didn’t skip a beat, even when the police stopped by the studio at 5 AM. Quick tip on that note: Be polite to the officers if they ever find your late night circuit board soldering and prop M16s suspicious.

In other news Jon and Harrison were recently interviewed by Frank Linhares on the Techphile podcast. Grab a copy while it’s hot, and if you missed out on the interview with Darren and Wess it’s also available.

It looks like Harrison is feeding me lines via telepathy

Thanks go out to the hacklings for the continued support and patience as we wrap up another great show. We’re all psyched about this Saturday’s release!

–Darren

Filming went great yesterday. We turned on the live webcam in the studio, which we may do again. It’ll be on the top left of this page. Unfortunately we were unable to film both the segments we had scheduled, but I’m sure we’ll make up the lost time on Sunday. What we did get however is in my opinion the best 50 second Hak.5 segment we’ve ever produced. And it only took 5 hours to do so.

Jedi Mind Hacking powers won’t help you here Harrison

Back to the grind. Big shout out to all the cool kids in #Hak5 on irc.techphile.ca

So much has happened in the last two weeks since episode 3 release and we’re very happy with where Hak.5 is going. We’ll have some important announcements later this week but first the fun stuff. Hak.5 has a new IRC home over at irc.techphile.ca in #hak5. Big thanks go to Frank Linhares for setting up the IRC server. While your there do a /list as many podcasts and IPTV shows are making a home there.

We’ve just began our episode 4 production weekend. I know, we must be crazy (at least 40% crazy) seeing that episode #1 took almost two months to produce. More updates soon!

Harrison does his security segment without a computer. Three words: Jedi Mind Hacking.

That’s all for now but expect more updates over the weekend.

–Darren

Just one more day ’till Hak.5 comes at you again with more entertaining hacks cracks and laughs. I’m up late the day before release again rendering up my favorite “segment”; the credits. We put a lot of hard work into this episode, and 7 DV tapes later we ended up with around 70 minutes of edited footage. Don’t worry; we’ll keep the release under 40 minutes. It’s a shame the other 30 minutes will never see the light of day… Or will it?

Ali joins us in what we call “glue”, the short bits between segments. Hilarity ensues

Wess gave up on me during the trivia segment. I eventually got it right… eventually

We’ve had a blast shooting (and re-shooting) this episode of Hak.5; the 10 minutes of out-takes in the bloopers file is a testament to that. We’re really excited about releasing and hearing your feedback on the show. We’ve listened to everything so far and I think the changes we have made will really make this episode shine. It’s by far our best work.

Keep the positive energy hacklings,

–Darren

The teaser for episode 3 has been posted to the episodes page! I’ve added some geek-funny from Ep3 to the end. Let us know what you think.

If you haven’t already, head over to the Techphile podcast and listen to the interview Frank did with Wess and I about Hak.5; it was just released last night. Thanks Mike!

Production is going great! We’re just about done with episode 3 with only one more segment to shoot. Saturday we spent about 16 hours programming and shooting the final segment as well as a homebrew hack, but then the sun came up and the crew started to fall over exhausted. We’ll get that segment done this weekend, stitch it all together, and spend a day or two watching the progress bar on the H.264 encode .

Jon joins me in an awesome homebrew hack.

Wess gets really pissed at me in the middle of an additional mod segment

With 9 more days until Episode 3 release we’re all in full gear getting this thing together. Running time is looking a little longer than the previous two, with I believe 12 segments. There’s a lot to be excited about here at Hak.5. Thanks go to Frank for the interview, the cast for putting up with a 16 hour shooting day, and Mike for mentioning us on Command-N, that was uber-leet. We can’t wait to get this thing out the door, party, and start working on an even better Episode 4!

–Darren

Another batch of great news. First, Wess and I will be on the Techphile podcast on September 25th so be sure to check that out. We recorded the interview last Sunday and it was a blast. Frank is an awesome tech podcaster on the same playing field as Leo Laporte. He is also responsible for the Toronto Tech Meetup a few months back that featured much of the old TechTV crew like Leo Laporte, Kevin Rose, Dan Huard, and most of the other people we give //Mad Props to in our episodes. Pictures of that event can be found at Bamcat’s Flickr. Now we’re excited about the recently announced Toronto Tech Meetup 2.0 Second Edition++, or whatever it’ll be called. No dates are final yet, but it should be this December and most of the Hak.5 crew will be there.

Also big news, we’ve finally updated the cast page so if you’re curious about who Hak.5 is you might want to check that out.

As far as production is concerned we’re about 70% done shooting Ep3. There were two segments that were shot and later re-shot and I’m glad we did as the production quality of the second shoots are so much better than anything we’ve ever released. Now for the pictures:

Alli’s new segment is amazing. I’m really happy with the way it turned out. She has so much more life and energy. What were we ever thinking asking her to do Chicks with Tips?

Harrison and I had a great time shooting the on-location portion of this segment.

What’s Black and Blue and operates at 2.4 GHz?

Setting up our RSS feeds with Broadcast Machine is going well. Soon we’ll have 4 feeds to choose from; an xvid direct download, xvid bit torrent, h.264 direct download, and h.264 bit torrent. Unless I’m doing something completely wrong and there is a way to get all of those into one feed and have podcatching applications understand which to download. I’ll have to play with it a little more.

Thanks for all of the feedback and taking the time to answer the polls, it’s really helping us make this show better. And if you haven’t already seen the forums you should take a peak, so drop by and say hello.

–Darren