Posted by Ub3rG33k on Sep 23, 2009 in
IPod Touch As some of you may know, in just over 2 weeks I’ll be heading to the Holiday Inn in Birmingham for Dimension Jump
XV, this year Red Dwarf Convention, and as we do a Red Dwarf podcast (ScutterCast), I thought it might me a good idea to record some footage while I was there.
I’ve been looking at a number of solutions and came up with the idea of using Audioboo from my iPod touch, then picking up the Audioboo feed using WP-o-Matic, which will then post the audio on the Red Dwarf Forum homepage, which will then tweet this out.
One major downside to using the method, was that the iPod Touch doesn’t have a built in microphone, although I do have the “earbud with built in microphone”, which would be find for recording my own voice, but probably a little intrusive if I wanted to record anyone else.
After a couple of days of looking at different mic solutions, I read a review over at iLounge and they did a mic comparison, the audio from the iPill sounded awesome, so decided to go with that. After an evening of trying to buy one, it seemed that these are only available in the states, and they seemed to be out of stock, having heard the quality difference, I was adamant that this was the mic I wanted, in a bid of desperation, I decided eBay it was. Luckily, I found a company in the Republic of Ireland that had these in stock, and instantly bought.
This morning the mic turned up, and I’ve got to say, I’m really impressed. The first thing I noticed was the packaging, and the look of this thing. The plastic container is in the shape of a petri dish, with a small clip holding the pill shaped microphone in place.
The iPill itself pulls in half, to review the 3.5mm jack plug, that plugs into the bottom of the iPods headphone jack, and the other half has a small loop where you could potentially add some string so you don’t lose this thing.
So, the audio quality…what’s it like ?…pretty awesome ! I plugged it into the bottom of my iPod Touch, and it was instantly recognised, and I gave it a quick test in Apples “Voice Memos” software, and attached my recording below
So, the audio quality…what’s it like ?…pretty awesome ! I plugged it into the bottom of my iPod Touch, and it was instantly recognised, and I gave it a quick test in Apples “Voice Memos” software, and attached my recording below.
iPill Test
Final thoughts ?, granted this isn’t the same quality as my M-Audio mixer, and my condenser mic at home, but think it will do an awesome job, of getting some footage at Dimension Jump.
I can highly recommend this microphone to anybody who want to turn their iPod Touch into a decent dictating machine, and for £13 delivered, it’s worth every penny !
Tags: 5mm, Apple, audio, audio quality, Audioboo, Birmingham, bottom, couple of days, desperation, dimension, dimension jump, downside, dwarf, earbud, ebay, footage, forum homepage, half, holiday inn, idea, ilounge, ipill, ipod, ipod touch, ipods, jack, jump, microphone, o matic, ozaki, petri dish, plastic container, quality, quality difference, red, Red Dwarf, Republic of Ireland, stock, test, thing, touch, voice
Posted by Ub3rG33k on Sep 2, 2009 in
PS3 Well, if you’ve got a PS3, and turned it on in the last 24 hours you will be greeted by the happy “Dude…there’s a software update, you know what to do…”
..message.
What do you get I hear you say, well let me tell you.
The first thing I noticed was the new startup screen with the PS3 logo…looks kinda cool, and then was met by the “sparkly” new theme…looks kinda cool.
In the top right hand corner of the desktop you get your icon, number of friends online, date and time (digital and analogue ?)
Each time you start up the PS3, the it defaults to the What’s new icon (which has replaced the Information board), however instead of the feed ticker, you now get 9 rotating images of “What’s new” in the Playstation store.
Being an Xbox live user, I do really like the way your friends list is treated, clear, you know who’s online, and can quickly see which game they were playing last…..so what have Sony done…..well, they’ve but a HUGE border around each one of your friend, which is twice the width of everything else in the column !…not nice ! I wouldn’t mind if it provided you with more information, but it doesn’t it just looks ugly !
For some reason there are now 2 icons for the Playstation Store, one in the games section, and one in the usual Playstation Network “channel”….really? is there any need ? I could understand if there were more than 1% on the PSN Store that wasn’t a game that would be fine, but apart from the sat nav, the Eye Create, and the VidZone everything else in there are games….
1 Addition I did like was the integration of the BBC iPlayer, granted you could goto the website through the browser before and it worked, but now you can do this straight from the XMB. I don’t however like where they’ve positioned it, they’ve given it a channel of it’s own called TV (I’m assuming this is also used for the play TV, but……), I would have personally added it to the Video channel to reduce the size of the bar.
Another addition I do like, is the right thumbstick controller during video playback. If you rotate clockwise or anticlockwise, it will step backwards and forwards with very hight precision.
A “Save Screenshot” option has been added to the web browser, which is pretty cool, but not sure I’d ever use it..
Apart from that, it’s all I’ve noticed, I have read people complaining about the larger fonts…but I’m cool with this, my vision was starting to go anyway 
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