Let's Talk Tech
Pretty video isn’t much fun to watch if your audio is terrible. Sennheiser has partnered with Apogee to bring their popular professional ME2 Lav Microphone to iOS devices. How does it sound? Let’s take a listen!
Shop the ClipMic on Amazon.
More info on Sennheiser products.
A new year means new gadgets! Keep those new shiny gadgets charged on the go with iClever’s car charger. As you know by now, we don’t do un boxings. So let’s get right into it!
Right out of the box, you will notice the iClever car charger is very light and is very compact with a nice modern design to it. It measures 1.34″ x 1.34″ x 3.25 which is perfect for storing it in your backpack, purse or pocket. There is a warranty card so make sure you fill it out and send it to the manufacturer just in case something does happen to the charger. A instruction manual is included with the charger for those who may be “tech challenged”. The iClever car charger does not come with a USB cable however I am sure you have an extra USB cable laying around or you could pick one up.
The iClever has not one charging USB port, but two! You should have no problem charging two devices at the same time while you are on your travels. One USB port is a 1A and the other USB is 2A, the latter capable of charging tablets. There is an LED light under the USB ports that let you know your devices are firmly connected and charging. I was able to charge my Lumia and IntoCircuit PC11200 Power Bank with no issues whatsoever.
If you are looking for a well built, inexpensive car charger that performs exceptionally well, I highly suggest picking up iClever’s Car Charger!
Pick up the iClever Car Charger today! Continue reading “Gear Review: iClever Dual USB Car Charger”
From our Facebook page, Robin asks:
Here’s a question relating to Android… When I plug my Moto X into my Windows PC using the supplied USB cable, it shows up as a storage device and I can copy stuff to/from it with no problems. But when I plug it into a USB port on my wife’s MacBook Pro, it’s not even recognized as a device. How can I access my Moto X from Mac OSX?
Hey Robin,
It’s because Apple can be frustrating about supporting standards like MTP. Apple refuses to natively support the USB Media Transfer Protocol. It’s how you can plug your phone into a PC and see files on your phone and computer at the same time.
There are two different ways to share files between a phone and computer, MTP and Mass Storage. If you use Mass Storage, the storage on your phone becomes a standalone drive for your computer, and your phone will no longer be able to see any of those files. That was fine during the Windows Mobile and early Android days. You’d plug in your phone, and it would essentially become a dead lump of a USB drive. Now though, we don’t want to lose access to our precious communication tools, even for a brief file transfer. That’s why Android and Windows Phone now utilize MTP. It comes with some drawbacks like slower file transfers, and you can only move one file at a time, but your phone wont be separated from its storage while connected to a computer. Given the trade off, I’d rather be able to connect my phone to my computer, and still being able to use it as a normal phone with all of my files and apps intact.
The iPhone just doesn’t work that way, so Apple doesn’t feel any great pressure to support other mobile device file management protocols. As far as they’re concerned you should be using iOS and iTunes.
Google did release an Android file manager program for Mac users which might work for you – http://www.android.com/filetransfer/
If that doesn’t work you might need to look at cloud solutions. The nice thing about Android, it’s silly easy to move files on and off via services like Google Drive, Box, and DropBox.
You could also do a local network sync via an app like AirSync –http://www.doubletwist.com/airsync/ or Air Droid – http://www.airdroid.com/ which will use your home WiFi network. It wont be as fast as a cable connection, but it’ll be faster than Bluetooth.
But yeah. Short story long, this is basically Apple’s fault.
Today this little gadget came in, so let me introduce you to the RAVPower Luster Mini 3000mAh Lipstick Charger. The RAVPower weighs in at a mere 3oz so it is very light in your pockets or messenger bag. It even comes with a clip, a very shiny chrome clip so you can put it in your shirt pocket on pants pocket. These little yet very functional gadget measures 4.6 X 0.9 X 0.9 so you can pretty much say it is very compact. The RAVPower Lipstick Charger comes in a few choices of color such as black, pink, silver and a champagne color.
This is what comes in the box:
The RAVPower is going to be one of your best friends when you are out and about and don’t have access to your wall charger. One of the very useful features of this lipstick charger is that it doubles as a flashlight and lights up with an intense 8 lumens! Drop your keys in the dark car? Grab your RAVPower lipstick charger and let the light shine to find your keys amongst those butterfinger wrappers under your seat! When you use the flashlight, the RAVPower has 3 modes: high, low and strobe. This would come in handy if you are a bicyclist and your headlight happens to go out, you could easily use this as a backup light so you will not get a ticket from the local Police. Continue reading “Gadget Review: Ravpower Lipstick Charger and Flashlight”
If what was holding you back from buying a Snowball was the limited number of color options, Blue Microphones might just have the trick for you now.
Available today, the Snowball comes in a variety of colors, now on offer in Black, SIlver, Purple, Green, Pink, White, and Blue. Now while recording your podcasts or voice overs, you’ll have something a little more colorful to look at.
$99.99 out the door for those of you wanting to improve your home recordings, and Blue’s reputation here is pretty much second to none.
I’ve been asked about what Thunderbolt is before, but Redditor Coptician wrote up a terrific explanation of what this tech can do.
Let’s start with the technical aspect of Thunderbolt – what it is and most of all: what it isn’t.
Thunderbolt as people probably know is part Displayport. It has a Displayport signal as part of the base of Thunderbolt, which means you can send audio and video to one or two devices (if one device support sending the Displayport signal from it to another device, which almost no monitors right now do!). The other base part if PCI-Express.
PCI-Express is one of the base layers of computers. Looking at a desktop, it’s the thing you use to add any expansion cards to a computer. In current computers (at least for Intel) PCI-E is a near-direct path from the expansion card to the processor, to such an extent that what processor you have decides how many PCI-E ‘lanes’ (like lanes on a road) you have. This is no longer dependent on motherboards.
PCI-E can be used for almost anything. There are PCI-E cards for USB (3.0), for Firewire, for Ethernet, for graphics cards (most famously), for audio cards, capture cards, and many many other things. It’s the most-used way to expand a computer’s functions on a low level.
To make a quick comparison to USB: USB doesn’t have direct access to the CPU. USB exists on a much higher level (this is a bad thing for expansion devices, usually) than PCI-E, which also means it has less access to lower-level functions and parts. USB has to talk to Windows or OS X to even get anything done. You can make mostly everything you can with PCI-E with USB these days, but you’ll get slower, more processor and memory dependent results. There’s not a single graphics card for USB that’s intended for gaming, mostly due to USB’s extremely high latency compared to PCI-E.Back to Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt feels a lot like USB to most people right now – you hook up your Firewire-converter to it, or an Ethernet connector. Maybe like me you have a nice external hard drive hooked up to it. Those things feel a lot like USB, and since Thunderbolt is so much more expensive, it feels useless.
Well, here’s some examples of why it isn’t.
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpressiii.htmlThis is the Sonnet Echo Express III. What it does is allow you to hook up to your Macbook three (!) PCI-Express cards. These can be audio interfacing cards, they can be capture cards or specialized editing cards. You can even put a limited set of full on graphics cards in there, though this one’s not ideal for it yet. With USB, you’d have high latency and CPU usage, and you’re sharing all your USB bandwidth between those devices, but with PCI-E, you get much more and much more stable bandwidth.
I also own a Thunderbolt Display, and that has multiple different PCI-E devices built into it. A USB controller, a Firewire controller, an Ethernet controller and all the things like webcam, mic, speakers and so on. The aforementioned external hard drives are attached to the Thunderbolt Display, and then I have a Dell monitor hooked up to the hard drives. I’m powering two displays, my Ethernet, Firewire, most of my USB and two hard drives (or SSD’s, it’s full SATA so you get full speed) to one connector. USB can’t do that, even if it’s soon-to-be the ‘same speed’ as Thunderbolt.
The comparision between Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 isn’t about speed but about what you can do with them, and that’s where the comparison becomes pointless. Thunderbolt wasn’t designed as a replacement for USB, even though it can be if you want it to be, it’s designed to replace desktops. Thunderbolt is designed to make a notebook capable of truly replacing a desktop computer in terms of expandability. Thunderbolt was designed to make on-the-go high-performance audio and video devices possible. It isn’t close to cheap, I agree, and it’s not for everyone, but Thunderbolt is amazing.
The technology behind Thunderbolt sets it completely apart from USB, which was never intended to do as much as it does now, and it’s completely and totally different from it. While Thunderbolt isn’t for everyone and not everyone even has a use for it, it serves its purpose extremely well.
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!