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Saturday, February 15, 2003 |
February 14, 2003.
 Due to the poor sound quality of the previous CityDesk online demo, I decided to invest in a real studio quality microphone instead of using one of those cheap computer headset/mike combinations.
It took me a while to figure out what I needed. The mike itself is a Shure SM58, probably one of the most popular professional microphones in use today and generally available for about $100.
I bought the Mic from Sam Ash on 48th street, hoping that they would be able to get me the right combination of cables and adapters I needed to plug this thing into a standard sound card. The stoner DJ sales dude sounded very confident but he didn't tell me that I needed a preamp, and he gave me the wrong kind of cables.
If you're trying to do this yourself, here's exactly what I have:
- the Shure SM58 microphone
- A basic desk stand. The clip part that connects the mike to the stand comes with the mike.
- a 3' mic cable (it only needs to reach the preamp). I bought a CBI LowZ Microphone Cable from Zzounds.
- A preamp. This boosts the level of the microphone to something that is called "Line Level" which is what a computer sound card needs. I got an AudioBuddy from Zzounds.
- To connect the preamp to the sound card, you need a cable with a 1/4" stereo phone jack on one end and a 1/8" stereo "mini" phone jack on the other end. I assembled this out of two cables which I bought at my neighborhood Radio Shack. For some reason the professional music stores like Sam Ash and Zzounds think it is beneath their dignity to stock any parts with 1/8" jacks, but that is what your sound card needs.
The sound quality is really quite a bit better. Here are two MP3s, before (with the computer mike) and after (with the professional mike). [Joel on Software]
2:05:13 PM 
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Interactive fiction archive. The IF Archive is a massive collection of "interactive fiction" -- text-based adventure games in the grand tradition of Zork that have become the avante-garde-retro plaything of narrative experimentalists. There are runtimes for just about every OS imaginable, from the Palm to OS X. Link Discuss (Thanks, h0l!) [Boing Boing Blog]
1:59:59 PM
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The Intelligent Swarm. This is what's known as a self-organizing sensor network, and it's a powerful idea. One obvious application is military: Air-drop a bunch of vibration sensors into the Iraqi desert and they can report vehicle and personnel movement. A similar technique could be used to gather data on seismic activity or monitor highway traffic. In a different vein, a network of heat and light sensor motes in a building would be much less expensive to install than the wired versions. And if a shipping company put motes on all its high-value containers (as well as a few data-collecting nodes in trucks, planes, or ships), it could know where all its boxes were at all times, or at least where a box was until right before it dropped off the network by going out of range of another box. (Dust is in talks with Qualcomm (QCOM), which makes the popular Omnitracs truck fleet management system.)
Naturally, these remote eyes and ears raise a heap of privacy issues. Consider this: What if all cars had motes and somebody wanted to know where yours was? Or all computers? Or watches? Dust CEO Kris Pister says he's in the process of puzzling out solutions. [Smart Mobs]
1:53:59 PM
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Mutants live longer. ...and not just happy mutants. Turns out many people who live past the age of 100 share a specific mitrochondrial mutation that gives them additional resistance to oxidation. I wonder if my entirely self-sufficient grandmother (who lives alone and tends to her garden and bakes a killer Thanksgiving dinner) is a mitochondrial mutant? Link Discuss (Thanks, Scott!) [Boing Boing Blog]
1:53:29 PM
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Cow eyeball found in juice bottle turns out to be mold.  Last year, some guy said he found a severed penis in his juice. This year it's a cow eyeball. Both turned out to be plain old mold.
Ms. Nickel [of Tropicana], who examined a photograph of the object in the grapefruit juice, said, "It did look like an eyeball, but sometimes mold will take on some unusual shapes."
Mr. Hadzovic [who bought the bottle] remains deeply skeptical. "I'm not a rocket scientist," he said, "but I know an eyeball when I see one. I've literally skinned lamb for food."
At a reporter's urging, Mr. Hadzovic asked for his bottle back. On Feb. 1, he received it. By now, the object did not look like much of anything.
"It looked like a muffin wrapper with half a muffin it," he said disgustedly.
After a few days, his mother threw out the bottle.
"She got tired of seeing it in the refrigerator," he said. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
1:45:11 PM
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Emergent Democracy Meeting. Today I participated in a very enjoyable conference call / chat / blogger event arranged by Joi Ito and using infrastructure from the socialtext team. The theme was 'emergent democracy', particular as it relates to blogs. Joi called it a 'happening' which is quite appropriate as it happened in several media at the same time. We were on the phone, 18 people or so, from Japan, U.S., Canada, England, France, and maybe somewhere I'm forgetting. And we were chatting online at the same time. And we used a WIKI as a place to coordinate the information. I really enjoy that kind of conversation that happens in a multi-dimensional way, even if it is sometimes hard to keep up with it all at the same time. But it gives everybody an outlet, even if we work in different ways.Some threads in the discussion were about what emergence really is. Is it like ants who collectively appear more intelligent than they do individually? Are we having conversations or are we creating structure? And we talked about tools. What tools do we have? What tools might we invent that better might allow useful democracy to emerge? And I guess that's mostly what we converged around. An intention to continue working on coming up with better tools and better infrastructure. And to keep talking about what it might be that we ought to do. [Ming the Mechanic]
That sounds really cool!
1:42:11 PM
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Damn, this is impressive - David Weinberger, whose poetic/philosophical descriptions of the Internet are without peer, has written an amazing cybercitizen's rant. I'm posting this mostly so that I preserve the link and can go back to read it again, but the rest of you are free to follow the link too. [Ernie the Attorney]
1:33:16 PM
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War for oil? Well... not exactly.
Who is motivated by Oil?
A senior Pentagon adviser accused France of striking a deal with Saddam Hussein to oppose military action in return for a lucrative oil contract.
Richard Perle, a former US Assistant Defence Secretary, said the French anti-war stance was driven by economic interests. French oil giant TotalFinaElf has exclusive exploration contracts worth $US40-50 billion to develop the massive Majnoon and Bin Umar oilfields in southern Iraq, he said.
"What's distinctive about the Total contract is that it's not favourable to Iraq, it's favourable to Total," Mr Perle, the chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, said during an address in New York. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Here's another choice quote from the piece that I found particularly disturbing:
Mr Perle also said the dispute over whether to invade Iraq had exposed France's determination to shape the European Union as a "counterweight" to the US. Gak! All this is giving me a craving for frog-leg soup.
[The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
12:19:33 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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