So I looked around for some smaller light bulbs to use in the lamp and I decided to give an LED bulb a shot. So I headed over to Amazon and settled on the EarthLED ZetaLux 2 Pro 7-Watt Warm White LED Light Bulb.

It’s on order and headed to our home here for Wednesday. The big test will be what my wife thinks of the light it gives off. She is a huge fan of the incandescent bulbs, and I tend to agree with her. I’m hoping that it will be close enough that we can slowly start introducing LED bulbs around the house as the price comes down.

I’ll report back later.

Tags Home

Technology

My Podcasting Setup | March 2012

Post author By Bob Martens
Post date March 2, 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.

Tags Apple, Hardware, Podcasting

Technology

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?