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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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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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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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