The Gadgets Page

My stomach was sick when I watched him put his iPod in the blender and let the machine pulverize it.

These videos are a commercial for The Total Blender, made by BlendTec. You can see their website and the full array of videos here:

• Will It Blend? Presented by BlendTec

The premise is that if the blender will blend your iPod, then it certainly won’t have trouble with the ice cubes in your smoothie. I’m all about a good blender when I’m on a smoothie kick and then it will gather dust when I’m not. Of course, if I was using my blender to dispose of my old gadgets, then maybe it would get more use.

Holy cow! The AIR tested 17 microphones in the studio and YOU can listen to the results here:

• Transom Tools: Transom Mic Shootout – Blindfold Test

Here is their description of the shootout:

AIR: The Association of Independents in Radio helped organize a mic shootout, seeking to compare a wide variety of announce mics in a neutral setting. In the large, quiet room of Studio A at indre Studios in Philadelphia, a few independent producers set up 17 mics side-by-side. The mics ranged in price from less than a hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. We concentrated more on the less-expensive mics, and the mid-range popular standards, rather than pricey esoterica or cult-classic mics, hoping to find some bargains that might be practical for the independent producer, or to confirm that some of the pricier industry standards might be worth the expense.

They also have a handheld microphone shootout:

• Transom Tools: Handheld Microphone Shootout

At the end of the handheld microphone shootout, they also compare the handhelds to lavalier microphones (those small clip-on microphones). You can hear the audio clips of the lavalier compared to the handhelds.

If you have been thinking of buying a microphone, no matter how much you were planning on spending, you should check out this website!

Via: Jen Simmons on Twitter – Awesome job, Jen! Thanks!

Just a moment of reverent quiet for Steve Jobs…

Seriously, be quiet and pretend to pray or somethin’ for a minute, ’cause this is important, foo’…

Years ago, Steve Jobs was a hard bargainer with the record companies. He insisted on 99 cents a song. He’d go no higher. I thought he was pretty smart back then keeping it less than a buck. I wasn’t willing to buy the songs on iTunes (with a few iTunes-exclusive exceptions) because of the DRM. It didn’t let me play the songs on my Treo, so I wasn’t going to shell out the money, however inconsequential, for music that wouldn’t work on my phone.

Fast forward to 2007, iTunes is dominating the industry. Steve is finally willing to let the record companies charge you a little more for each song. What do you get in return? NO DRM. You can play your song on your iPod, your Treo, your Zune, your Zen or any other player you have out there. Now that 99 cent stubbornness seems like perfect and unrelenting genius to me.

You can find out more here:

• Apple, Labels Focus on Copy Protection – washingtonpost.com

You can already buy non-DRM tunes from EMI for thirty cents more than DRM-crippled tunes. I have a stockpile of iTunes cards saved up for when the Beatles finally acquiesce and join the EMI family on iTunes. I’m hoping I don’t have to wait too long.

The end of the school year is looming, which means this is the big final test of the year. How are you going to study? Do you even have to study? When you can carry the breadth and depth of human knowledge in your iPod, should you be required to memorize all those dates and names? Isn’t it more important to know HOW to find information from reliable resources? Isn’t it more important to know WHICH information should be included?

Teachers would respond with a resounding, “NO!” Me, on the other hand, I don’t know. I gave up on the educational system a long time ago and I really feel that learning how to solve problems is more important than the specific names and dates of wars long past. Let’s solve a problem, shall we?

How do I get my most important information onto my iPod, so it will be with me everywhere I go? (Continue Reading…)

There are inventive ways to cheat. It seems that some people are willing to go to great lengths to cheat when studying might actually be easier. Take the iPod, for example. A school in Idaho has banned iPods:

• Schools banning iPods to beat cheaters

Instead of crib notes on tiny pieces of paper and ball point pen on the arm, students are cheating using their iPods:

Some students use iPod-compatible voice recorders to record test answers in advance and them play them back, said 16-year-old Mountain View junior Damir Bazdar.

Others download crib notes onto the music players and hide them in the “lyrics” text files. Even an audio clip of the old “Schoolhouse Rock” take on how a bill makes it through Congress can come in handy during some American government exams.

I can do the same thing with my cell phone. Are they banned as well? What about those Fossil watches that are Palm devices? Data storage is getting smaller and smaller. Can they ban EVERYTHING? In the end, you can’t fight the technology:

“Trying to fight the technology without a dialogue on values and expectations is a losing battle,” Dodd said. “I think there’s kind of a backdoor benefit here. As teachers are thinking about how technology has corrupted, they’re also thinking about ways it can be used productively.”

More and more, we are becoming a society that has mountains of information at our fingertips. I don’t know if teaching children that they have to memorize everything is such a good idea. A more important skill is to know HOW to find information from reliable sources. It’s also important to know WHICH information to take with you when space is limited. Tests that make kids regurgitate dates and concepts are the problem, not the fact that a mere 1GB iPod Nano could store all the information a high school student could ever have on a test.

Stay tuned for Monday’s entry: How To Cheat With Your iPod

Kevin Garrad’s Kevlar body armor stopped a bullet, but not before it destroyed his iPod. You can read the full story here:

• HavanaLion » Blog Archive » iPod tells soldier he was shot – the real story

This reminds me of the bible that I saw in a WWII museum that stopped a bullet for a soldier. As a child, I was told that the bible stopped the bullet because God was protecting the soldier. What does that mean about the iPod?

Thank you, our holiness, Steve Jobs, for protecting our soldier’s life with your abundant and fervent technology. Thank you also for not asking whether I wanted my music folders screwed up by iTunes and for saving the original photo after I drew all over it using iPhoto. I accept your will regarding file management, photo protection and musical armor. Please spare me as you have spared others.

Via: iPod takes one for the team in Iraq by Home of DigitalThom

If you’re interested in Apple TV, here is a video walkthrough of the interface from MacDailyNews.com. It looks like it is really easy to use, but they didn’t cover how they got the stuff on the Apple TV. Is it connected to your home computer? Is it downloading these things from the Internet. I would have liked a little more explanation, but this walkthrough shows you how easy it is to find and play movies, television shows, podcasts and music.

One note, the pictures in the slideshow are Apple pictures, so take this walkthrough with a grain of salt. A walkthrough from someone a little less connected with Apple is here:

• Video: Apple TV menu and interface walkthrough – Engadget

I wonder if Apple TV will change television the way the iPod changed music or if it will just be a strange blip on televisions historical radar.

If you have wanted to put your videos on the Internet, you probably thought that the only way to do it was with YouTube. YouTube does make it extremely easy to broadcast your videos, but what if you want something more personal? What if you don’t want Google to own your video? What if you already have a blog and you just want to add your latest video?

Freevlog has the answers to all those questions and more. They have just updated their videos, so you have the most current way to learn how to put your videos on the web.

• Freevlog

A little over a year ago, I was faced with these problems. I had filmed lots of little videos that I enjoyed and I wanted to share them on my personal weblog, but I didn’t know how to do anything. I had no idea how to put titles on the videos. I didn’t even know how to upload them. Mike Verdi and Ryanne Hodson were pivitol in getting past my fear and just putting my videos up on the Internet.

They have broken the process of starting a video-blog, or vlog, into these easy steps:

• Setup a Video Blog
• Update your PC or Mac
• Compress video for the web (so the video will look good AND load up quickly)
• Take a screenshot of your video
• Get a blog
• Upload and post your video
• Get an RSS Feed

There are step-by-step videos for each of these parts of the process on their Freevlog Tutorial page.

Almost every digital camera made today and a lot of the cell phones, have a movie mode. No matter where you are, you can record the wonderful bits of your life as they are happening and then share them with your friends and family all across the globe. That’s the beauty of starting your own vlog or adding video to your personal weblog. Now, you can do that and more.

A touching and endearing story detailing why you should have a backup of the music on your iPod.

• Shiny Shiny: The day the iPod music died

Just the other day, Mike and I were talking about this issue. I didn’t believe that anyone would have a bunch of music on their iPod that wasn’t backed up to their computer somehow, and then I found out that the Nike+ Drive soundtrack I downloaded from iTunes only existed on my Nano and nowhere else.

Somehow it had slipped through the cracks.

My copy of Nike+ Drive is safe now. Unfortunately, Susi is not so lucky. After leaving her iPod on the plane, she has lost over half of her collection. She has to painstakingly recreate her collection, but you can save yours right now. The best situation to be in is to never have to retrieve music off your iPod, but if you are in that situation right now, there is some software that can do that for you:

• CopyTrans backup iPod Music from iPod to computer, playlists
• Senuti – Download
• iPod Access for Windows
• Tune Transfer for iPod
• xTremSoft.com : xPort : Backup your iPod, copy, recover and transfer all iPod music on Mac or PC.

Be forewarned that Apple could break this software at any time and make it unable to backup the music on your iPod. I haven’t had to use any of these programs, so I can’t recommend any of them. I just thought you might want to know they exist. If you have had experience with any of them, please leave a comment on this entry telling us if they suck or not.

The best thing to do is to make a double copy of your music: one on your computer’s hard drive and one on a backup drive such as a different hard drive or even an online backup system. That will ensure that you will never have to try to get music off your iPod onto a new computer after a drive crash. Sync your iPod regularly and take extra precautions when you get a new computer so that all your music is transferred correctly.

I’ve known about the Hipster PDA for a while. It’s just bunch of index cards held together with a binder clip. It’s light, you can write using an object you are already familiar with (a pen), and there is no plasticy keyboards or stylii (yuck!). The only problem with the Hipster PDA is that there is no music capabilities.

Until now…

THIS is what the iPod Shuffle was made for!

Via: Meriblog: Meri Williams’ Weblog » links for 2007-03-03