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.
Categories
Tag: Hardware
Categories
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.
Categories
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.
Categories
One Needed Thing
If I was going to recommend a single piece of hardware for every person to have (who owns a computer system), it would have to be an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) or battery backup.
I don’t really care as far as the manufacturer goes (I have two APC devices in my basement office), but you should really plop down the $50 or so dollars on even the smallest one and hook up your computer and monitor at the very least.
If you are in an older house with poor wiring, it is maybe even more important.
Go out there and get one. There is going to be a time when you will be happy that you did.
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.