Farrah and I are in Chicago for the week. She had to come for work, so I was able to tag along for just the price of an extra plane ticket, which wasn’t too much. And since I’m light on radio work and heavy on blogging this week, I knew I’d be able to work […]
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What do you want to hear on public radio?
The final round of the Public Radio Talent Quest is underway. There are five candidates left, and they’ve all uploaded snippets of the radio shows they would like to produce. All five are high on concept, and almost all are equally skilled in their execution. By this point each contestant has demonstrated an ability to […]
Tax day
Exactly four times a year I wonder if I made the right choice quitting my full time job to become a full time freelancer. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in paying taxes. There’d be no social security or police without them, whether you think that’s a good thing or bad. Public broadcasting wouldn’t have […]
O’Reilly reviews the Zoom H2
O’Reilly Digital Media has weighed in on the Zoom H2. I usually look forward to their reviews of field recorders because they’re comprehensive and tend to include lots of sound clips. The latest review lived up to my expectations, but I realized something that should have been apparent a long time ago. Podcasters and broadcasters […]
Jelly: Casual coworking in New York
This morning NPR ran my piece on Jelly, a casual coworking group that started in New York. I first read about Jelly a few weeks ago when Silicon Alley Insider mentioned that the group would be meeting at an apartment in Brooklyn about a mile away from where I live. I love things I can […]
Falling for Reaper
Reaper is a handy and affordable digital audio editing workstation from the developers who brought us Winamp. But I would like to say, it was with great effort that I refrained from titling this post “Don’t fear the reaper.” I’ve been using Cool Edit to work with audio for more than 5 years now, and […]
New York City trans fat ban
New York city banned trans fat this summer. Well, mostly. The city won’t begin issuing fines for restaurants that still use trans fat until October 1st. But the law took effect July 1st, meaning any time a health inspector catches a restaurant that’s still using trans fat, the owner gets a very stern talking to. […]
More Zoom H2 reviews: it’s in the way that you use it
There’s an intriguing discussion taking place over at the minidisco forums about the Zoom H2. While many folks have forgotten that minidisc recorders exist, they’re still pretty handy if you’re looking for high quality audio recorders in a tiny package. They have low-cost removable media, and the newer models let you digitally transfer audio from […]
Zoom H2 review roundup: cure for the common minidisc?
The Zoom H2 Handy Recorder has been shipping for a few days now. This unit is a followup to Zoom’s H4 Handy Recorder. It’s smaller, lighter, seems to have a sturdier plastic case, can record 4 channels at once (instead of 2), and costs about $100 less. First off, let me say that I do […]
Getting Things Done for bloggers
Web Worker Daily has published an excellent post on GTD for Bloggers. Essentially GTD (Getting Things Done) is a method for you know… doing stuff. But more than that, it’s a set of guidelines for organizing your work and increasing productivity while reducing the amount of time you spend doing useless time-sucking stuff. At least, […]
When no news is good news
The public editor for the New York Times (ie: ombudsman) has an interesting piece on the negative consequences of search engine optimization. What’s search engine optimization? In a nutshell, it’s a series of techniques web publishers can take to push their articles toward the top of search results from search engines like Google and Yahoo. […]
Anchorwoman Canceled: even T&A doesn’t sell local news
Fox has canceled Anchorwomanafter just one episode. I’m not going to delve into this one too extensively, since the subject’s been covered in depth by my friends at TV Squad. But wow. I have a tendency to watch TV shows and movies about journalism. Sure, it’s navel-gazing stuf for me, but I find it fascinating […]
Zoom H4 firmware update is kind of anticlimactic
I’ve been doing a lot of recording with my Zoom H4 over the last few weeks. The more I use it, the more I learn. Now that I’ve figured out how to eliminate the electronic pulsing tone in recordings, I’ve turned my attention to getting the best use out of the built in mics. In […]
LA Times: Google News isn’t journalism
You know I’m starting to think I should only update this blog on the weekends. Throughout the week the news that dominates tech news tracker Techmeme tends to be about Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other companies developing new products, buying one another, and offering new services. Very few products are launched on the weekends, and […]