Many years ago, in a previous life, I worked as a part-time radio DJ in small-town radio. It was an interesting experience and I l earned a lot of useful things about recording, editing, and mixing voice and music recordings. The technology has changed a lot since then, gotten a lot simpler and cheaper, but the basics are still the same. Tom Johnson covers a lot of these basics in his post, What’s the Best Microphone for Screencasting, in which his quest for better sound on his screencasts leads him to examine several different pieces of equipment and recording techniques. If you are podcasting or screencasting, this is well worth reading.
Archive for the ‘hardware’ Category
Some tips on equipment for screencasting
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009Asus Eee PC 901 reviewed
Sunday, June 15th, 2008The original Asus Eee PC is a nifty little machine at a very reasonable price. As much as I’d like to have one, I couldn’t use it because the screen is just too small. But Asus has brought out a new model, the 901, with a slightly larger screen and a faster processor. It’s something I might consider buying, as I found when I went to Vancouver, travelling without a computer is immensely frustrating. There’s a review of the 901 here.
DITA Tools from A to Z
Friday, May 16th, 2008Bob Doyle’s overview of DITA editors and other tools, DITA Tools from A to Z is now available from the dita.xml.org site. It was originally published in Intercom.
Subwoofer setup guide
Thursday, May 15th, 2008A subwoofer is an essential part of a good home theatre system, but they can be tricky to set up. Because bass sounds have a long wavelength, it’s easy to get standing waves that can cancel out a lot of the sound. In my case, the bass is quite a bit louder at the back and side of the room, compared to where we sit to watch TV.
CNet has put together a subwoofer setup guide to help you overcome some of these issues. The guide covers placement and positioning, and connectivity and tuning.
Update: And quite coincidentally, here’s an article on how to tweak your surround sound system so that big subwoofer doesn’t blow you out of the room or get you in trouble with your neighbours.
Guess I won’t be buying Creative again
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008There’s a bit of a controversy going with Creative and their users right now, after Creative jumped on a user who was modifying their drivers so users of older sound cards could use them with Windows Vista. Consumerist has a long post about what’s going on.
Creative’s executive team will be coming in to quite a mess Monday morning, thanks to its VP of Screw Ups, Phil O’Shaughnessy. Friday morning, he posted a warning on the Creative customer forums that told programmer Daniel_K to stop writing his own drivers for their X-Fi sound cards. The cards still won’t work on Vista over a year after the OS was released, because Creative hasn’t released drivers for them—but by Mr. O’Shaughnessy’s account, Daniel_K is “stealing” from Creative by making the cards work. Then the weekend happened.Over the weekend, Creative’s forums have exploded with posts from angry customers who have sworn to stop buying their products. There’s already a boycott site up at boycottcreative.com.
I have an original Audigy sound card which I transferred to my new PC, only to find that while Creative has updated XP drivers, most of the original utilities for the card are no longer supported. Guess I’ll be looking for a new sound card manufacturer the next time around.
Update: Wired has an interview with Daniel_K, in which he explains just what modifications he made and why. It definitely looks like Creative was crippling the drivers for its older cards to drive sales of the new ones, to the point of deliberately introducing bugs in the drivers. Shameful behaviour. I won’t be buying Creative again.
A real hardware firewall
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007The RFID Guardian is a real hardware firewall – it’s designed to block the output from any RFID tags you have on your person.
The RFID Guardian project has released the hardware and software schematics for the latest version of its personal RFID firewall. The RFID Guardian is a device that detects all the RFID tags on your person (passport, transit pass, bank-card, toll-card, car keys, etc), and interdicts them so that they can’t answer queries anymore. The Guardian can clone all of these tags, and emit their signal on demand, but unlike a dumb tag, the Guardian only emits when you tell it to, and gives you a central way to set and enforce policy about when you will be identified and by whom.