
How can I keep learning on my 1.5 hr commute? - metaprinter
I drive about 1 to 1.5 hrs to work lately and am bored with my music and the radio.<p>I'm the one driving so no video.  Are there any good audio podcasts out there on web dev, web news, media?
======
edw519
There is a company that makes language CDs _specifically for drivers_. Put
"Behind the Wheel" into the Amazon search box to see what's available.

About 5 years ago, I had a 60 minute commute each way for about 6 months. So I
learned French.

It worked really well. Lots of listening and repeating, both in French and
English. Increasingly difficult levels. And stuff you'd actually use. I went
to Paris and surprised myself. All that repitition in the car actually paid
off.

The best part is that you learn without sacrificing safety or focus on your
driving. Just start the CD and follow the directions. That was the most
impressive part to me.

I'd like to learn Spanish now, but my commute is only 5 minutes. It's just not
important enough to take time away from my other work. But converting lost
time in your commute into a new skill is a no brainer.

~~~
percept
Did you have any problems with only hearing the language and not being able to
see it?

I tried Pimsleur and couldn't stand not seeing the words--I felt like I was
both adding and missing letters.

~~~
edw519
_Did you have any problems with only hearing the language and not being able
to see it?_

No. But I forgot to mention that Behind the Wheel is strictly a
"conversational" program. I seriously doubt if I could read Victor Hugo after
going through it. But in everyday conversational situations, the repetition
and training, like weight lifting, paid off nicely. The conversation flowed,
almost effortlessly. I even surprised myself, finding the right word (except
the time I ordered a sidewalk sandwich) and properly conjugating all the
verbs. Pretty cool.

------
stefanobernardi
Audiobooks dude. Just buy yourself a few and you'll never go back. It's just
learning without the hassle of staying seated and having books in your hand.

While I was commuting I listened to so many that literally changed my life. My
favorite being Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazi

(You can also download a few mixergy interviews).

~~~
jasonlotito
Yes. Very yes. Very, very yes.

I use audible.com. Started with a gold account, and jumped right to platinum.
Been using it for more than a year, and I've been incredibly happy. The only
complaint is that the site sometimes feels slow. But I'm not on it often.
Usually just once a month to get my new books, though I've been buying books
as well recently to fill in gaps.

Couple audiobooks with podcasts and you'll do fine. I like stuff from Twit.TV.
And then the d6Generation does a good podcast, too.

I find the audiobooks and podcasts are great ways to handle not only the
commute, but most mundane activities I need to partake in. Folding laundry,
shopping for groceries, cleaning the house. Anything where I don't need to
think, I'm usually listening to something.

~~~
dwodk
It should be noted that Audible's content is under DRM.

~~~
jasonlotito
Yes, it is.

I had a problem one time, as I'd authorized my iPod one too many times on many
different computers, and forgot to deauthorize the iPod on them. I contact
Audible and they reset the authorizations back to 5 without a problem. At the
same time, they also let me download the audiobooks again if I want, even if
they get a new, higher quality version in.

I look at Audible as Steam for books. Steam is DRM I'm willing to accept. So
is Audible.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not dismissing your comment. It's a valid and
reasonable point.

I should also point out that the cost of books through Audibles subscriptions
are massively lower than if I bought them from a retailer. The cost is
significantly lower that the DRM doesn't feel unreasonable.

------
vinhboy
No one said NPR, so I am going to say NPR. The only bad side effect is that
you will become very cynical about politic. But seriously, sometimes a 1.5hr
hour commute seems like too short when I am listening to NPR. I commute 2
hours each way and NPR is how I roll.

~~~
hdx
Totally love NPR too, except during pledge drive season :P

------
dkarl
The problem with the internet is that you can find endless sources of
interesting new information that would be wonderful to learn. Unfortunately,
unless you have some kind of weird memory talent, you probably forget most of
what you hear and read. If you really want to remember something, you have to
study it at more than one sitting. Your commute is perfect for that. While you
drive to work, you can talk to yourself about whatever you learned last night,
as if you were talking to a different person. Recite foreign language vocab
lists, practice your grammar, summarize the last section of the book you're
reading, or think of ways to learn the new Unix command you just learned.

Unfortunately, I only have a fifteen minute commute, so I can't personally
vouch for what it's like to do this every day, but I've done it a few times
when driving to other cities, and it seemed to help a lot.

------
thisisnotmyname
I have a 40 minute commute (each way) that is mostly a train ride. When I
first started with this commute I was very worried about wasting that much
time every day, so I brought lots of printed material with me and would try to
study on the train. Now that I've been doing it for 3 years I've completely
abandoned that - I just use the commute as a mental break. After a hard day of
work ~40 minutes of daydreaming is just what the doctor ordered before making
the most of my evening.

------
ganley
This is going to seem like both a troll and off-topic - sorry about that - but
I've never understood, why do people tolerate a commute like that? Especially
a driving commute (as opposed to public transport, where at least you could
read or something).

~~~
sad
Many reasons come to mind, such as not wanting to live in the area you work
(maybe you have kids the schools are bad, or the neighborhood isn't real
good). It could be that living close to a family member is more important than
living close to where you work, like maybe your wife is taking care of her
mother or grand mother while you are out working (or the other way around).

There are lots of good reasons. These days you just might be stuck in a
mortgage because the value of your house has fallen below what you owe. Given
the current "economic climate" it's very easy to have gone from a 70% LTV to
110% LTV.

~~~
timwiseman
All good ones. I personally find it not worth moving closer because I am in a
long term mortgage as you mentioned.

I have another friend with a long commute because he lives close to where his
wife works.

Another person I know used to have a commute of over 2 hours. His job
location, like some others, was deliberately located away from population
centers for security and safety reasons. Moving significantly closer would
have been very difficult and meant being a long way away from everything in
his life other than his job.

------
arethuza
The FLOSS Weekly podcast is excellent <http://twit.tv/FLOSS>

This Week in Tech can be good - even if it is often dominated by talk about
Twitter and Facebook.

For non tech podcasts I can also recommend:

\- The History of Rome (<http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/>)

\- 12 Byzantine Rulers (<http://www.12byzantinerulers.com/>)

However, for driving I find that nothing beats unabridged books from Audible -
just finished "The Big Short".

------
JangoSteve
I used to have an hour commute back in the day and encountered the same
situation. I finally ended up getting a "Learn To Speak German" audio series.
Did that for a while and then just started downloading German news podcasts.
Nothing like learning a language for a couple hours every day.

------
georgecmu
Look into webcasted lectures from major universities. MIT, Yale, etc all have
them. My favorite is Berkeley, where all webcasted lectures have an audio-only
option.

<http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php>

Ones I especially recommend:

History 5 The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present
[[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978513)]

Economics 113 - American Economic History by Brad DeLong
[[http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=...](http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2008-D-22585&semesterid=2008-D)]

------
liedra
There are a whole boatload of awesome podcasts available at the Australian ABC
Radio National. They're all extremely accessible and quite thought provoking.

I particularly recommend:

The Philosopher's Zone: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/>

All in the Mind: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/>

The following two are fairly Australian-based, but quite interesting if you're
into this sort of thing:

The Science Show: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/>

Ockham's Razor: <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/>

------
scompt
There's a good list of tech podcasts over at StackOverflow:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1644/what-good-
technology...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1644/what-good-technology-
podcasts-are-out-there)

------
lionhearted
For learning languages, everyone I know who has learned from the
LanguagePod101 Series has enjoyed it.

<http://languagepod101.com/>

I went through maybe 20 of the JapanesePod101 lessons and it helped my grammar
and expanded my vocabulary a bit. A friend liked the ChinesePod101 which he
was listening to in Taipei at the same time as taking formal Mandarin Chinese
lessons.

There's a full access no billing info required seven day trial, and you can
download as many as lessons as you want during that time. They're fun and easy
to listen to, worth checking out if there's a language you'd like to brush up
on or get introduced to.

------
liangzan
WNYC Radiolab <http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/>

------
skurland78704
Digital voice recorder, dragon transcription at work; you can do a lot of
thinking out loud in 90 minutes.

------
kwantam
Not quite the web dev / web news / media that you're requesting (you've had
other suggestions better than I could provide to that effect), but perhaps
you'd consider the Feynman lectures on physics? They're available on CD, and
they're honestly quite entertaining.

------
dantheman
I've found these to be pretty good:

Mises @ itunes u (austrian economics) <http://itunesu.mises.org/>

The teaching company: <http://www.teach12.com/teach12.aspx?ai=16281>

~~~
CWuestefeld
+1 for The Teaching Company. I've spent many hours sitting in traffic while
learning about music, linguistics, economics, philosophy, any many other
topics. These are recordings of lectures for college-level courses, purpose-
made for canned consumption.

Also consider regular audiobooks. I have a subscription to Audible.com (site
is lame, product is good). These aren't limited to the latest thriller novel:
there are plenty of good non-fiction books available.

------
grep
The Startup Success Podcast, ThisWeekIn Startups/VC/Cloud Computing,
Railscasts, Mixergy.

------
aaroneous
This American Life and Radiolab are great podcasts you can find online for
free. No commercials, no pledge drives to interrupt your listening, and
thought-provoking, interesting content that makes long drives go by remarkably
quick.

------
kachhalimbu
I have a 3 hr daily commute to work. I normally just take a nap or listen to
soft music. Occasionally though I listen to Are We Alone
<http://radio.seti.org/> podcast.

------
Raisin
<http://Techzinglive.com> 2 guys with startups and still keeping their real
jobs just talking about almost anything. Once in a while an awesome guest.

------
mindcrime
Stanford University put out a really good podcast series from their
Entrepreneurship Corner program:

<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html>

------
SandB0x
This American Life

Edit: now I read _web_ news. But still this is an excellent show.

------
corysama
6 hours into this question and I'm amazed that
<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/> hasn't been suggested yet. IMHO, its
content seems like it would be pretty relevant/interesting to the HN crowd.

BTW: The only way I've found to browse (not search) through old episodes is
paging through the twitter feed <http://twitter.com/itconversations> Does
anyone know a better way?

------
fluxcapacitor
Pimsleur CDs. They are great for car driving, because the programs are
organized so you listen in a continuous play (as opposed to normal language CD
books that assume that you will be holding the rewind button to repeat the
last sentence). They also leave pauses so you can speak without having to
pause the audio manually. And no workbook to follow, so you can keep your eyes
on the road :)

Of course such course will not make you fluent, but it's excellent to put you
on a good path.

~~~
billyj
agreed fully! Pimsleur is really a terrific program for starters. Blows
Rosetta Stone out of the water.

~~~
nwomack
It's certainly more useful than Rosetta while driving, but that's a pretty
subjective statement.

I am an American native learning Chinese as my first additional language. I
found Pimsleur to be marginally useful, but I am now almost done with Unit 1
of Rosetta and for me, Rosetta is much better than Pimsleur...

It really depends on a combination of things, such as your learning style, and
perhaps which language you are learning.

One thing of note, is that Rosetta is more about the long haul. If you just
want to learn a few conversational pieces it might be better to go for
Pimsleur... Rosetta doesn't give you much you can use conversationally at
first, it spends a lot of time teaching you things like "this is a girl" "this
is a girl and her dog playing" and what not.

Also, if you used Rosetta v2, from what I understand v3 is leagues ahead of
v2. I have no personal proof of this however, since I just use v3.

If you want to get somewhere approaching fluency without going to classes, I
don't think it can get much better than Rosetta Stone + Flash Cards.

------
parka
This is my favourite: Stanford's Entrepreneur Thought Leaders

<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html>

------
tommorris
I've found that decent programming podcasts are few and far between. The ones
that promise to be most useful - as in, actually teaching you how to do X -
suffer from the flaw that they are people talking about code. And, obviously,
if you are driving or running or whatever it is you are doing such that you
are listening to audio podcasts, you can't see the code. If they get into any
level of detail, it all falls down.

Imagine: "well, the code is like this - open brackets defn whatever open
brackets map open brackets list open brackets whatever clsoed bracket closed
bracket" (for Lisp) or "well, we created a class with a method called foo that
iterates through the 'bar' argument, and returns a array of strings" (for
Python/Java etc.)

I tried listening to a podcast like that (about Python IIRC) when I was on the
Eurostar train once. I did have my computer with me, but I just couldn't
follow it without being able to see the code. At the point I realised this, I
was deep under the English Channel, so couldn't exactly log on to the blog and
see the code samples...

The closest things I've found are either things like RailsEnvy - now reborn as
The Ruby Show and not IMHO as good - which provided some useful news each week
about new libraries and plugins for Rails. Or there's some higher level best
practices, software engineering type programmes which often seem to be people
preaching to me about how I need to be more and more test-infected and agile
and (insert methodology buzzword of the week).

It's actually quite difficult to find good, geeky/programming-related podcasts
that don't either just descend into general news chit-chat or end up with
someone trying to sell me a new engineering methodology. It's a very hard
balance between being too technical for audio-only and not being technical
enough. A lot of the newsy podcasts like TWiT are way too damn long and
rambly.

I mostly don't bother with tech podcasts for the reasons I've just described
and stick to things like In Our Time, and quite a few course podcasts on
philosophy and other interesting stuff - quite a lot of universities are now
doing podcasts: Oxford, UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford etc. There are thousands of
people now following along with lecture courses remotely using podcasts - see
[http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-
podclass24nov24,0,7889...](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-
podclass24nov24,0,7889823,full.story?coll=la-home-center?sr=hotnews)

------
drtse4
Try some language course of the Michel Thomas series, each lesson is roughly
60 minutes and audio _only_ , it's aimed at the development of the spoken part
of the language and so there are no books exercises to do. Perfect while
driving. I've listened to a few CDs of the japanese and mandarin courses,
really well done.

------
nickpinkston
I love listening to the current week's "The Economist" podcasts (promptly/free
on TPB) to get high-quality / succinct insight on the world. The format is
great for commutes: you can get through the magazine in a week's driving and
the articles stand by themselves - as opposed to audiobooks which are long-
format.

------
thirdstation
The Moth podcasts are usually really good.

<http://www.themoth.org/podcast>

------
jbeluch
Skeptics Guide to the Universe: <http://www.theskepticsguide.org/>

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History: <http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh>

------
billpg
Software/Techie...

    
    
       HanselMinutes
       Stack Overflow (inactive, but might come back)
       Security Now
    

Just interesting...

    
    
       In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)
       Stuff You Should Know (How Stuff Works)

~~~
michael_dorfman
Definitely "In Our Time". Fascinating stuff, that will likely broaden your
horizons.

------
iampims
You could listen to the pipeline by Dan Benjamin. <http://5by5.tv/pipeline> 30
minutes long interview with interesting folks from the web industry.

------
adamilardi
Take the train! and stare out the window. The time spent on self reflection
will be more valuable than the random facts you can pick up when you're dead
tired and going to work

------
f1gm3nt
[http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_C...](http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/1_Top_10_Universities_With_Free_Courses_Online.php)

Also check out ted.com

------
m_eiman
Public transport + 3g + laptop. Use an hour each way for work and cut down on
the time in the office - more free time in the evening or morning.

------
jonpaul
I listen to business audio books and Mixergy interviews. I love it.

------
jakubjakub
www.econtalk.org

------
metaprinter
Wow, lots of great ideas. Thanks!

------
Koldark
iTunes U is another source.

------
mkramlich
I think it's dangerous for you and the folks around you to be doing something
other than driving your car and paying attention to the driving environment.

So instead I'd recommend to try shortening your drive or switching to a
passive commute like a bus or train.

