I’ve really jumped into recording podcasts, and am also an avid audio and video conference user. Wanting better sound, I upgraded my Logitech microphone to the highly-regarded Blue Microphones Snowball desktop USB microphone. Here are my initial thoughts.
OS X
Apple QuickTime and Front Row Keyboard Shortcuts
One of my favorite features of Apple’s Mac OS X is the clean and simple media players bundled within. But I often find myself wanting to watch a movie without my remote in hand, and was distressed to see that Apple implemented entirely different keyboard shortcuts for the transport controls in QuickTime 7, QuickTime X, and Front Row.
Two Stupidly Cool Terminal Fonts
Two stupidly-cool fonts in action: My normal DEC VT220-like terminal and a super-large terminal with super-tiny Tom Thumb displaying Hamlet. All of Hamlet. No kidding.
Ramdisks: Back From the Brink of Extinction
Using system memory for storage is something of a lost art these days. But many of today’s I/O intensive tasks can still benefit from the untouchable quickness provided by a ramdisk. Happily, most operating systems are still capable of creating and using ramdisks.
Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!
Personal computer hard disk drive access methods have been repeatedly forced to adapt to ever-expanding capacity. But Western Digital is leading the change to larger 4 kilobyte hard disk blocks. Although this new “Advanced Format” includes mechanisms for backwards compatibility, buyers should be wary of these new drives for the time being.
