Tag: Apple

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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.

  1. Emergency backup in case either of our audio did not get recorded
  2. 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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Technology

Books and Stores

Seth Godin’s latest manifesto was rejected from the iBookstore because he had links to Amazon within the pages of the book.

While I am sympathetic to what he says, I think there are many differences between the “traditional bookstore” and what he is running into at the moment.

  • Traditional bookstores have had a LONG time to get their policies in place
  • Authors did not submit their books to the bookstores … but the publishers
  • The iBookstore acts not just as a store but also a publisher in this case … does every book from every author get published?
  • Traditional books did not link directly to a competitor’s storefront

Also not mentioned is whether a book would get rejected from other e-bookstores if they had explicit links to competitors. Here are some other general thoughts about his entire predicament:

  • He has a generic ePub available online that is easily loaded into iBooks
  • Why are you linking to a 3rd party page that could always change without you knowing?
  • The Domino Project, where he posted his thoughts, is “powered by Amazon” … conflict of interest?

Is Apple wrong here? It’s probably leaning toward probably, but there are always problems in trying to draw direct lines between the physical world and the electronic one. Yes, we would all love it if we could do whatever we want wherever we want and people would just let us do it … and to an extent Apple is! You can load that ePub into iBooks simply by clicking a link on a website, and in many ways it is easier to do that than find something in the iBookstore.

Right now EVERYONE is trying to see how much control they can keep on their independent stores and trying to lessen the number of people you need to interact with in order to get in front of people, but that also means that some traditional roles are being mashed together.

In this case we see bookstore and publisher get smashed into one and it is causing people some headaches. With the App Store Apple mashed together the software publisher and big box retailer. As we consolidate in this way, the method of control (the publishing level) is being moved closer to the customer so we hear about it more.

No one likes seeing sausage being made.

UPDATE: Brian Ford has some thoughts about this whole thing over at Me & Her and I found it enlightening. Sounds like laziness to me.

Messages Beta Redux

I’ve been using Messages Beta since its release and I’ll go ahead and post my thoughts below:

  • Being able to iMessage my friends and especially my wife has been really handy
  • There is no major distinction between people you are chatting with with an IM account or using iMessages
  • The window is large, but I have grown accustomed to it
  • I do not find the moving pictures to be distracting … but I usually have the application minimized
  • It has worked really well for beta software from Apple

Now, I’m not a heavy user of IM and I mainly use it for messaging my wife and a couple of close friends and family members, but I have been really impressed with Messages Beta so far and am looking forward to its final release in Mountain Lion.

Apple’s File System

John Siracusa had an epic “rant” on filesystems on Hypercritical #56 and I greatly recommend that you go and listen to the whole thing. I’ve been using ZFS on my FreeNAS box for the past month, and listening to John sing his praises of the filesystem brought a smile to my face. I agree with everything he said on the podcast, so go and listen to it.

After that, read part of his review of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion on the filesystem for some more background.

I send you to listen and read so that I can say the following without having to worry about people misunderstanding me:

HFS+ is old and broken and Apple needs to get a modern filesystem under the hood of OS X and iOS with all possible speed.

That’s it.

ZFS was supposed to be it back with 10.5 Leopard. Even if they had just rolled it out with OS X Server with 10.6 and 10.7, that would have been fine. Showing some real movement to a new, modern file system would have been all anyone is asking for. That is not what we have received.

Instead, HFS+ keeps getting more and more tacked onto it in order to support more and better functionality in the OS. I shudder to think of what Apple might be able to focus on if they had gone with ZFS and switched it to the default file system for 10.7 or 10.8.

Microsoft is doing just that by beginning their long march with the announcement of ReFS. I applaud Microsoft for taking the plunge. I hope it might force Apple to doing the same.

During This One Podcast Episode 4, Phil and I talked about what we are looking for most from Apple in the coming releases of OS X … and I missed this. I want Apple to finally either develop or pick a modern file system to be the basis for their operating systems and ship it. Don’t tease us. Don’t trick us. Do it.

This is a huge, glaring weakness in Apple’s ecosystem right now. As a former Apple Genius I remember dealing with file system issues and there was really nothing that we nor the person could do about it except hope that Disk Utility could fix the issues or they had a good backup somewhere. ZFS would have, by its very nature, had us deal with less issues with the file system, saving work time and customer frustrations.

This needs to be done.

The poor Mac Pro

It’s easy to look at the Mac Pro as it currently sits and think that it is as good as dead.

I’ve thought that too.

However, I’ve done some digging and I think I’ve come to the actual culprit for the seemingly stagnant workstation: Intel.

While, yes, we’ve seen a lot of movement on the Core i-series of processors, and those processors have been moved into the other Mac lines, we have yet to see much-if-any movement on the multi-processor Xeon line.

I’m not talking about single-processor/multi-core Xeons, but the multi-processor/multi-core  Xeon line, and that is something to keep in mind.

The current Mac Pro tops out at two 6-core Xeon processors at 2.93 Ghz a piece. As far as I can find (using Newegg and Wikipedia), there are only small, incremental steps Apple could release right now if they wanted to keep things the same. Could Apple have done this? Sure. Should they have? Probably, but it would have required them to commit to purchasing quantities of chip they sell very few of.

Currently it looks like the highest-end Mac Pro uses the Intel Xeon X5670 (two of them) with a TDP of 95W. They could use the X5675, which is just a little speed bump, but if they would use anything faster than that they would bump the TDP up to 130W. That’s almost 40% greater, and would probably require some internal changes to the Mac Pro that would differentiate it from the lower-specced models.

So the poor Mac Pro is stuck with old CPUs while we wait for the next version of the multi-processor Xeons to come out. This is what I am imagining as the headline features for the next Mac Pro (if there is one):

  • Newest generation of Xeons (probably bumping the number of total cores higher)
  • USB 3.0 because it is finally brought with the Intel chipset
  • Thunderbolt ports … probably two
  • Newer AMD Radeon graphics … even if the 5770 is still a really good card
  • Same chassis

That’s about it. Most of this is being held up by Intel and I think we will see it when Apple can get its hands on newer Xeons. The Mac Pro is really a single model with multiple configurations and if they need to have special models, I just don’t think they are going to go through with it.

For now, I put a moratorium on Mac hardware purchases for myself until the next refreshes not because of anything Apple has done, but because Intel has been holding some things up.