Thursday, June 26, 2003

Amazon can be amazing. Yesterday I decided to order a cheap headset and went with the Telex H-841 USB headset for $26.59. It qualified for free shipping so I went the cheap route although they quoted a delivery date around July 10. The box arrived today. amazing The product itself is very cheap. A one headphone headset with a boom mike, 3.5mm jacks and a usb converter box. The microphone is much better than the unit that came with my Mac and people on the other end notice an enormous improvement. The headphone is awful ... low volume settings drive it past its distortion level and there is no way to set it - so I'm using the speakers on my Mac which induce a bit of echo (this can be minimized by reorienting the microphone and speakers). It is probably worth the money if you don't intend to do a huge amount of audio chat - if you do it might be wise to look for something better. 4:19:09 PM     David Pogue reviews the new audio/visual instant messaging clients from Apple and Microsoft. I've spent a few hours with the new Apple iChat AV and note that you really need a fast cable connection for a good video signal. Many DSL links (say below 384kbps) simply won't cut it and dialup links are completely hopeless. I tried it a bit using a camcorder (I don't have the Apple cam) and the image quality was as good as I've seen on desktop video conferencing. The audio quality seems reasonable, but you probably need a better microphone and speaker assembly than what is built into your machine ... I have a cheap ($25) usb headset on order from Amazon. Video conferencing has been studied for about five decades and has never taken off for a variety of reasons. It will be interesting to see if video augmented chatting becomes popular. I have no idea where Microsoft is going with their tool other than the direction of adding features. Apple is telling people this is a fairly early beta. I suspect they will tweak it, but the feature set will remain small and focused. Of course there are some intersections with other Apple software products and .Mac that really make sense here (things that are as interesting or more interesting than vanilla video chat) and I suspect that hasn't been lost on the folks who wrote this. 6:11:03 AM     Speaking of Apple Jonathan Ive on the design of the new Mac G5 Tower. 6:10:48 AM     Potentially interesting (although it needs work) -- Shrock is a RSS aggregator that has been combined with the WebKit rendering engine. I'll stick with NetNewsWire (which just works), but this is an interesting thing to watch. What is intereting is that people are beginning to use WebKit and it is likely that other apps will take advantage of the rendering engine. 6:10:07 AM     Some time ago I tired Project Forum, but found other tools more suited to what I needed to do. It has been updated and it now offers an RSS feed for every forum so you can track it with a RSS aggregator. It probably makes sense to play with it again. 6:07:35 AM

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