Update: Apparently Marratech also likes DSP-300: "This table shows hardware that has been tested by Marratech and that works together with the client software Marratech Pro." And the recommended video camera is (no suprise there) Apple iSight.

I searched for a simple application for dictating (or otherwise recording live sound). Previously I used Spark ME, but that application has been discontinued. Perhaps Audio In will suit my modest needs, have to see.

Update 2: I checked Audio In, and it works rather nicely as a simple recording device. With the Plantronics headset the sound quality is fine. I had a moment of panic with the headset, when no sound was received by the program. Then I noticed that the mute button on the headset was lighted red. I had accidentally pressed it without noticing. The button only mutes the microphone, not the speakers.

PS. By the way, I really like the 'party list' functionality of iTunes 4.5 for playing randomly selected tracks from a user-selectable source. While I wrote this I was listening to Maria Callas singing La mamma morta, another suprise from the partly list of iTunes. And later on when I updated this entry I listened to Selena singing I Could Fall in Love.

I is nice to learn something from the history. Now the situation is different, Mac OS X has no viruses. Instead, Windows PC's have something like 60,000-90,000 virii.

Pardon my sloppy thinking. Ssp commented this succintly:

Are you really sure things have been learned? Isn't Apple just lucky to have a relatively small market share and having inherited the relatively secure Unix-style underlying system? I don't see OSX doing anything to prevent or safeguard you from running malicious programs on your machine. While there may be security related vulnerabilities in Windows, most of the current worms seem to not use them but rather take their power from 'social engineering' to spread and be installed. Perhaps Mac users are just smarter than their Windows colleagues ;) But even that wouldn't be a virtue of the OS.

% /bin/ls DE
__init__.py   de.py   de_fun.py   de_rosen.py   de_test.py
% python
Python 2.3 (#1, Sep 13 2003, 00:49:11) 
[GCC 3.3 20030304 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 1495)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import DE
>>> dir(DE)
['__all__', '__builtins__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__name__', 
'__path__', '__version__', 'arange', 'argsort', 'array', 'de', 
'initialize', 'optimize', 'randint', 'random', 'sample', 
'where', 'zeros']
>>> help(DE)
Help on package DE:
NAME
    DE - The Differential Evolution (DE) optimizer.
...
DESCRIPTION
    Written by Juha Haataja (Juha.Haataja@csc.fi).
    Based on a Fortran 90/95 version from the textbook
      http://www.csc.fi/oppaat/f95/
PACKAGE CONTENTS
    de
    de_fun
    de_rosen
    de_test
...
VERSION
    0.3
>>> import DE.de_test 
First test problem...
Initial minimum value:  42.166977660750504
Dimension:  5
Population size:  25
Coefficient:  0.69999999999999996
Crossover probability:  0.10000000000000001
Iteration and minimum:  0 42.166977660750504
Iteration and minimum:  20 2.1721386210526616
...
Iteration and minimum:  500 0.00011160431004997307
Minimization completed!
Minimum element:  array([  99.99823054,   99.98755403,  
  100.0116417 ,   99.98456   ,  100.01369348])
Minimum cost:  0.00011160431004997307
Time for the run:  5.54
Second test problem...
Initial minimum value:  70.872204463296413
Dimension:  4
Population size:  20
Coefficient:  0.40000000000000002
Crossover probability:  0.20000000000000001
Iteration and minimum:  0 70.872204463296413
Iteration and minimum:  20 2.8363178964823685
...
Iteration and minimum:  500 0.069987620807705986
Minimization completed!
Minimum element:  array([ 0.94056405,  0.88459065,  0.78161181,  0.61824012])
Minimum cost:  0.069987620807705986
Time for the run:  4.1099999999999994

I like the coding style of Python, and there certainly are a lot of packages to ease programming. But I have already noticed that Python definetely is not suited for computationally heavy use.