A nice FedEx man rang my doorbell today and dropped of my brand new Sony PCM-D50 digital audio recorder. Oh yeah, and I also couldn’t resist giving the recorder a quick sound check. Keep in mind, I haven’t read through the instruction manual yet, and I haven’t tinkered with the settings very much. But my […]
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Global Warming Garden
When you think about global warming, you probably think about the big things like melting polar ice caps, hurricanes, and so on. But climate change also has more subtle impacts. Milder winters and warmer summers in the Northeastern US, for example, means that plants that traditionally grow in warmer climates are thriving in New York […]
Announcing Eee Site
I’ve realized that this blog has become a bit of a mish mosh of news about digital audio recorders, podcasting, radio, and the Eee PC. One of these things is not (much) like the others, so I’ve decided to launch a spinoff site: Eee Site. I’m not sure if I have the energy to update […]
Asus launches $499 Asus Eee PC 8G
Just a month after Asus first released the Eee PC 4G in the US, it looks like the company is ready to start pumping out some new variations, including a black model and the higher end 8G. The 8G is pretty much identical to the 4G, except it has 8GB of solid state memory instead […]
Marantz PMD620 review roundup
The Marantz PMD620 has begun shipping, and the reviews are starting to roll in. As more people write up their thoughts, I’ll update this post. Nature Recordists Oryoki at the Yahoo! Nature Recordists group has written up a detailed review of the PMD620. In a nutshell, the recorder is tiny, almost the size of an […]
Sony PCM-D50 and Marantz PMD620 start shipping
Just in time for the holidays, Sony and Marantz have begun shipping their new digital audio recorders. I’m already starting to hear reports that customers who pre-ordered Marantz PMD620 units have begun to receive them. I pre-ordered a Sony PCM-D50 back in October, and after several delays, retailers are starting to get these units in […]
Transom reviews the Zoom H2 digital audio recorder
Looking for a comprehensive review of the ZoomH2 flash audio recorder? While many people look to O’Reilly Media for their definitive reviews, from a public radio reporter’s standpoint nobody does it better than Transom. And today they put out their review of the Zoom H2. Overall, I didn’t learn too much new. It’s a tiny […]
Fun with operating systems
Last weekend I reinstalled Windows Vista on my Toshiba A135-4527 laptop. Or rather, I used the system restore discs that came with the notebook to restore my PC to its factory default settings. But that didn’t solve the glitches I was hearing when playing and recording audio. So today I decided to install Windows XP. […]
Wii shortage on NPR
More than a year after Nintendo launched the Nintendo Wii, it’s still the hottest selling video game console around. And good luck trying to find it. Stores are selling out of Wiis almost as soon as they get them in stock. NPR called me last week and asked if I’d get to the bottom of […]
Reaper + Wine = easy audio editing on Ubuntu
I took a break today from playing with Linux on my Eee PC to play with Linux on my Toshiba A135-4527 laptop. I don’t know if it was a recent Windows update or what, but for the past few days I’ve been getting horrible glitches whenever I try to play or record audio. At first […]
Eee PC: Running Ubuntu from a flash drive
Well, my foray into the world of Puppy Linux was short and sweet. But since I couldn’t get the audio drivers working, I decided to move on. The folks at Pendrivelinux.com have some incredibly simple tutorials for loading Knoppix, Slax, DSL, Gentoo, and Ubuntu onto USB flash drives. Since I’ve spent some time with Ubuntu […]
Puppy Linux on the Eee PC
With all this talk of people installing Mac OS X, Windows XP, and even Windows Vista on the Eee PC, I figured I had to get in on some of this alternate OS action. But I don’t have a USB DVD drive, and more importantly, I don’t really want to mess with the Xandros operating […]
Restore factory settings Eee PC vs. my Vista laptop
Wow. I’ve forgotten how much work it can be to restore a Windows PC to factory default settings. In the two weeks since I brought home my Eee PC, I’ve done a complete system restore about 3 or 4 times. This is the price you pay for running through a ton of experiments. Sometimes it […]
Adding in-line spell checking to OpenOffice.org on the Eee PC
For some reason the Eee PC ships with OpenOffice 2.3 preloaded instead of the more current OpenOffice.org 2.3. Since I don’t really need to do much more than basic word processing, that doesn’t concern me much. But I have noticed that there’s no in-line spell checking. You know, the thing that underlines spelling errors in […]
Adding power management to the Eee PC
Update: It’s not particularly clear that mucking with the Eee PC’s clock speed actually does anything to improve battery life. So consider everything that comes below to be an intellectual exercise. Original Post: The Asus Eee PC uses a relatively low power 900 MHz Celeron processor to help cut down on costs and to help […]
Zoom H2 and Zoom H4 now OS X Leopard compatible
I’m a Windows/Linux guy myself these days, and my Zoom H4 works great with both operating systems. But apparently Zoom H2 and H4 digital audio recorders didn’t play too nicely with the latest operating system update from Apple. Well, for a few minutes anyway. Zoom has issued updated firmware for both recorders and now all […]