Sometimes I’ll hear “what is Thunderbolt for”? Well, this is what Thunderbolt is for.
I love hearing about how other people handle huge amounts of data.
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Category: Technology
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My Podcasting Setup | March 2012
My friend Philip Wels and I have been recording This One Podcast for almost two months now and just pushed out Episode 6. We’ve been having a lot of fun, but I thought I’d go ahead and post a little bit about my own podcasting setup that I am using in March 2012.
Microphones
My main microphone is a Blue Snowball with the generic stand and The Ringer as well. The Snowball is a decent USB mic and I simply plug it into my 13″ MacBook Pro and I am good to go right away.
For Episode 6 of TOP I went ahead and tried out a USB headset for recording. I went with the Sennheiser PC 36 USB headset and it worked out … okay I guess. The sound quality was definitely not as good as the Snowball, but that was to be expected. It worked well enough and in a pinch I’ll probably use it. The nice thing about the headset is that I can move around a little bit without losing volume.
The Snowball is definitely the better choice.
Recording Software
Both Philip and I record our own audio so that we have source audio to work from. I use Audio Hijack Pro and he uses Piezo. I also use Piezo to record the Skype call between the two of us.
Recording the Skype call serves two purposes.
- Emergency backup in case either of our audio did not get recorded
- Source material for me to sync our two sources up to in post
The Skype quality is usually quite poor, but it would work as an emergency source. Luckily, since we switched to both grabbing our own local audio, things have worked out really well.
Editing Software
I have a MacBook Pro — I use GarageBand.
We don’t do a ton of editing, but it gets the job done. I have a separate track for Philip and one for myself and that allows me to pull out any terrible sounds or dead parts from our separate audio. Sometimes the longest part is me syncing up our audio to the Skype call.
Closing
There is just the two of us so far, so we are not doing anything crazy. One thing I would like to add to my own setup is a boom mic arm on the desk in my office so that I can keep the Snowball just a little bit closer even if I am sitting back or up or … standing even.
That’s for the future.
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Eight Versions of Windows
File this under “it’s not released yet”, but Engadget pulled apart the Windows 8 Consumer Preview registry and found keys for eight … yes EIGHT … versions of Windows 8.
Eight.
- Windows 8 Starter
- Windows 8 Home Basic
- Windows 8 Home Premium
- Windows 8 Professional
- Windows 8 Professional Plus
- Windows 8 Enterprise
- Windows 8 Enterprise Eval
- Windows 8 Ultimate
- Windows 8 ARM edition
I have to think that Microsoft is just playing with us right now. Granted, I’m guessing that a couple of those will not be available for anyone to purchase, but here are ALL of Apple’s current operating systems bring offered company-wide:
- OS X Lion
- OS X Lion Server (right now, an extra download for OS X Lion)
- iOS
I guess you can add in the iPod OS as well, but you can’t purchase iOS or the iPod OS anywhere. Microsoft’s list doesn’t even include their server or mobile OS lines. For another look, here is what Ubuntu offers:
- Ubuntu
- Ubuntu Server
Not an apple-to-apple comparison in either case but … honestly Microsoft, could you streamline things just a LITTLE bit?
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Relying on Bad
Brad Frost is worried about what an iPad 3 with a “Retina Display” will mean for the web. Here is the opening paragraph:
The iPad3’s Retina display is causing problems for apps who have to deal with Apple’s 20MB limit on app size. You know the web is in trouble when even the native apps are struggling with the gigantic Retina screen.
He has many good points in the rest of the article so go and read it. My first thought, however, was … we’ve been relying on bad technology to keep the web going for too long. Low dpi screens have allowed the web to continue to use low dpi images and now the day of reckoning is upon us.
Things are changing fast in technology and especially the web. I haven’t been able to keep up, but we are going to need to increase the pace of advancement in order to keep things afloat.
Just don’t add more JavaScript.
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Speaking of Readability and Instapaper
Ben Brooks has some thoughts on Readability that I found fascinating. I’m just not sold on “free” services anymore and their net benefit. I found myself nodding along with what he was writing.
However, Marco Arment released an update to the Instapaper bookmarklet today and I stumbled upon it even before he announced it. Much better.