Let's Talk Tech
An oldie, but a goodie.
Let’s take a look back at one of the best USB microphones currently on the market. The Yeti Pro is still chugging along as a great solution for those wanting to improve their home recording or podcasting capabilities.
Time to go hands on with this multi-pattern wunder-mic!
I think we’re at a tech crossroads. I’m not sure which road we’ll travel down.
There’s a problem with how we talk about news in this industry. I’m complicit in that problem to a degree, and around me I’m watching the foundation of this market start to crumble. At its core, we tech journalists are beholden to metrics like views and bounce rates. To satisfy those demands we have to get you, the reader, to actually engage. The most popular sites among us have developed a number of handy tricks to goose interactions from their subscribers. Tactics known so well that we’ve coined terms like “Flame Bait” to describe them. We all know what’s going on when we come across these types of tactics, and we know that the site using them is rolling in traffic.
As with political news delivery, the tech landscape is fragmented into reinforcing a reader’s previously held notions. We don’t strive to challenge anymore, to present the “new” in this industry. If your site starts to find some popularity among a certain niche of readership, that’s what you are. An Apple blog. An Android blog. A Microsoft blog. You’re done. Whatever commentary you can hope to offer beyond that branding, you’ll always be colored by that general perception. Your audience will take those things for granted, as they too are fans of the things you like, and hate the things you hate.
Moving beyond the natural biases an author holds, we all hold a certain bias regardless of our attempts at objectivity, we’re human, but beyond those biases I’m saddened to see once respected organizations catering to blatant agendas. Misrepresenting products for no other benefit than to increase site hits, start flame wars, and satisfy an audience who doesn’t want to see competition, but see their “side” win. Whatever that might mean… Continue reading “Agenda “Journalism” and Waiting for “Perfection””
Fragmentation is a fact of life. As new gear arrives, older gear will stop receiving support. As developers move on to newer operating systems users can become frustrated when some devices get updates and others don’t.
Apple weathers this storm better than most of their competition, but even they aren’t completely immune. They are taking a savvy step towards improving the experience for people using older iOS devices. The iTunes store now allows you to install older versions of apps. That way, if developers are supporting newer version of iOS than what’s on your phone or tablet, you’ll be able to backtrack to versions which do support your iDevice.
This kind of legacy support really improves the experience for people who hold on to their tech for as long as possible. If you’ve got an older phone, tablet, or iPod Touch give it a whirl.
I might have to make this a regular feature. First finding online Physics lectures, now hooking up you up and coming musicians and producers. I’m cool like that.
Anywho, Coursera is working with the Berklee College of Music to offer up three free courses: Intro to Music Production, Intro to Guitar, and Songwriting. Enrolling is as simple as clicking the link and signing up. The semester starts October 16.
Did I mention they were free? Because they are.
Now go get schooled and learn you some music so you can drop some phat beats.
We’re you hoping to be the first cool kid on your block to rock some Dick Tracy style smartphone wrist action?
AT&T is now taking pre-orders for the Galaxy Gear, so you best get while the getting’s good. I don’t know exactly what that last sentence means, but continuing to read this is wasting precious time better spent on setting up your pre-order.
Expect to drop $299 on Galaxy Gear, and it should arrive sometime in October… Probably around the time the Note 3 drops… Because synergy. Yeah!
(via AT&T)
I like rugged!
Being able to use our delicate tech in challenging environments is becoming a very important topic for me. A 5″ screen is a lot of glass to potentially shatter while in the middle of a hike or out on a job site. Body Glove is offering up a new ShockSuit case for Galaxy S4 owners looking to add protection without adding a ton of bulk.
This one almost flew under the radar.
Posted (quietly) today on Bump’s blog:
We’re excited to announce that the Bump team is joining Google!
Our mission at Bump has always been to build the simplest tools for sharing the information you care about with other people and devices. We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms. So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief that the application of computing to difficult problems can fundamentally change the way that we interact with one another and the world.
As of right now, no changes are planned in how Bump works, and the same team will still be working on the app, just under the Google umbrella. Hopefully this will mean some cross-pollination of sharing services, as Google’s built in ANdroid offerings, even for NFC, are pretty lame.
No word yet on how much Goog spent on acquiring this popular service.
Sometimes the cloud isn’t enough.
While I find it fantastically helpful to have a couple gigs up in the cloud, there are still times I need to have access to files locally. I might need files which are too large to wait for a download, or I might need to easily share files with a couple users around me. I might just be in poor coverage without access to WiFi. For as good as our cloud solutions have gotten, I find I often still resort to “sneaker-net” to move files back and forth between different computers.
This gets even more complicated when I want to interact with a file on a mobile device, especially those pesky iOS devices which lack proper file managers. You can’t just load up a movie file on an iPhone while out and about for example. Plugging your iPhone or iPad into a proper computer and dragging a file over without iTunes means that file wont show up in any of the apps on your iDevice. Sure, there are other workarounds, funnily enough using iCloud for instance, but none have the simplicity of a point to point transfer.
Kingston was kind enough to send over a MobileLite Wireless Flash Reader for me to play with. The dream of the MobileLite is to create a local wireless storage solution for multiple devices to utilize. Specifically up to three devices can log in and share the info on either an SDXC Memory Card or USB Flash Memory Drive.
MobileLite is a small grey/black brick about the size of two iPhone 5’s stacked on top of each other. It’s fairly light at 98 grams, and it comes with a USB cable to charge MobileLite using a computer or AC Adapter. Kingston also includes a MicroSD card adapter for those of you which pull Micro cards out of your phones, cameras, tablets, etc…
Continue reading “Review: The Kingston Digital MobileLite Wireless Flash Reader”