Thought I’d try out my new podcasting setup today while walking down the street. This could be almost too easy.

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Yesterday, @roland sent me an audio message on Micro.blog. He then shared his process for recording, encoding, and publishing his audio.

I spent the next several hours working on my response.

I knew in doing so, I needed to make one important improvement to the process: I wanted to do everything – record, encode, and publish – on my mobile device.

Before I dove too deep, I needed to prototype my idea. I had to answer 3 questions:

1. Can I record audio on my iOS device in a way that allows me to then encode it as an MP3?
2. Can I encode that MP3 as a base64 string?
3. Can I write the base64 encoded MP3 into the iOS Git client Working Copy using the base64 encoded string?

I opened up Workflow (which is being rebranded as Siri Shortcuts later this fall) and was pleased to discover the answers to questions 1 & 2 were a resounding “yes!” Workflow has a wonderful audio recording interface. Once I had the recording, I tested the base64 encoding by encoding, then decoding, then previewing the decoded audio file, proving that I was, in fact, able to record and encode an MP3 using Workflow.

Then came my first hurdle: trying to write the MP3 using Working Copy’s x-callback-url scheme.

While I could pass the base64 encoded string to the x-callback-url that would open Working Copy, and I could see a properly-named file sitting in the path I had specified, I could not get the resulting MP3 to actually play.

However, there was a progress bar that moved and a track length displayed, so I knew something was up.

To test my hypothesis that Working Copy was somehow failing to play what appeared to be a properly encoded MP3, I saved the file to Dropbox for iOS and opened the file there.

It worked perfectly.

(Until writing this post, I assumed the issue was that Working Copy had a bug in its media player. Turns out, it’s one of those apps that doesn’t play audio if the silent switch is engaged. Not sure why some media players on iOS respect that switch and others do not, but it’s a real pain in the ass to have to remember that when testing media on an iOS device.)

Once I had determined I would be able record the audio and write it to Working Copy, all that was left was to duplicate a Workflow I had created last year for posting to my Jekyll-powered blog and add the audio capturing, encoding, and writing actions to the top.

The result is the first audio post ever published on patdryburgh.com.

Of course, once I had done that, I knew I had almost everything I needed to publish a podcast from my phone.

So, I spent the next hour or so writing and validating and writing and validating a podcast.xml file that now lives at http://patdryburgh.com/feed/podcast.xml.

This morning, I received a confirmation email that my podcast has been added to the iTunes Podcast directory.

All of which is to say, I can now record and publish podcasts to my Jekyll-powered and Github Pages hosted blog and have it syndicated to Micro.blog, Twitter, and iTunes all from the comfort of my bed.

Now, to find something useful to do with all this magic.

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If you’re a Canadian citizen and plan to leave Canada for more than 183 days of the calendar year, make sure you first file an NR73 form to establish your residency status. I wasn’t aware of this law until a month ago when the Canada Revenue Agency demanded an additional $4,100 in taxes because I was out of the country for two weeks longer than permitted.

I have submitted an NR73 for the 2017 tax year and hope that I can prove I had maintained close ties to the country — all of my personal belongings, my family, and my common law partner were all here while I was away — but there’s no guarantee that they’ll change their determination.

Had I known about this law at the time, I probably would have used a tool like this one from Nomad List, which tracks the number of days you are out of your home country. (via Boris Mann)

Now all I have to worry about is what could happen when I plan to return to Uganda.

If you’re planning to live a nomadic lifestyle, please learn from my mistake.

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