Month: September 2006

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Kevin Kelly on the Olympus VN 960 Voice Recorder

While we’re on the subject of Kevin Kelly and his Cool Tools e-list and website, he has a review of the Olympus VN 960 Digital Voice Recorder on his site. We covered the DM10 recorder in last year’s holiday gift guide. I still use this device almost every day and love nearly everything about it. Here’s some of what Kevin has to say about the VN 960:

“The advantages over the mini-cassette: 1) Ultra-tiny and light, it’s truly pocket size, only as long as your finger, but twice as fat. It’s only weight seems to be the two AA batteries. 2) Digital sound; the built-in mike is fantastically keen and sharp. I usually don’t need the lavaliere mike I used to use with the analog machine. 3) No tapes. I can get up to five hours in this little thing; other versions can get 11 hours. 4) Easy download. After each session I merely plug it into the USB port and it dumps the recording to my hard disk. (Has a nice MacOSX version!). 5) Best part, the files are easily scannable, and bookmarked on my computer. I find I can more readily zip back and forth through an interview to find the parts I want, rather than have the whole affair transcribed. 6) But if I want to, the files are easily transmitted to transcribers via email or the web. No more packaging up tapes. 7) Lastly, the audio files can be easily posted for general archival purposes on the web or elsewhere.”

Read the rest of the review here.

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Awesome Source of Small Parts

In the latest edition of Kevin Kelly’s always informative Cool Tools e-zine, he brings us news of a new Amazon offering:

“In addition to everything else Amazon sells, you can now secure small portions of materials and mechanical parts suitable for building and repair. Amazon has teamed up with the supplier Small Parts (reviewed in Cool Tools previously) to supply a huge variety of metal tubes, springs, raw materials (titanium, nylon, polycarbonate, glass, etc.), gears, plastic parts, fasteners and bins of other stuff that tinkerers and mid-night engineers might need. Of course you can order from Small Parts direct, but Amazon’s option takes advantage of their incredibly handy interface and billing system. Go to their “Industrial & Scientific” tab.”

We’re big fans of the Small Parts catalog here at Street Tech Labs (which Kevin turned us on to in the first place), so we’re psyched to see this new partnership (and a little nervous at the Amazonian ease of purchase that it represents).

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Roomba’s New “Dirt Dog”

From the Make blog:
Roomba adds a new workshop bot to their line up, last week they announced a pet version too… – “The same size and shape as the iRobot Roomba® Vacuuming Robot, iRobot Dirt Dog features an oversized, bagless debris bin that is approximately 40 percent larger than Roomba’s bin. The robot also features two counter-rotating bristle brushes that spin at nearly 1,000 rotations per minute to pick up heavy debris such as nails, wood chips and small shop scraps. With brushes specially designed to sweep up dirt that clings to rough surfaces, the robot is recommended for use on hard floors, shop carpets and industrial surfaces only.” The price is expected to be extremely reasonable US$130.

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Vinyl for the Birds

This picture of Dutch sound artist Jeroen Diepenmaat’s work was found on We Make Money Not Art. It’s a stuffed bird whose beak plays back the music on the vinyl.

Jeroen has some other clever sound pieces on his site. The one below, called “Loop, Loop,” plays music as these devices are rolled around the gallery. Bundles of records are used as the wheels.

Each sound installation page includes an audio clip.

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How-To: Serve Videos to Your TiVo

Apple’s forthcoming iTV (or whatever they end up calling it) is certainly exciting, but it is going to cost you another US$300 on top of the living room media devices you already have. If you already have a networked TiVo, you can start serving Internet TV offerings from your PC to your TiVo/TV now, using an app such as TiVoServer. This Engadget tutorial shows how it’s done. Not for the newbie, but if you’ve done some TiVo hacks already, are comfortable with command-line set-ups and already have your TiVo on your LAN, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting this to work. Versions are available for Linux, Mac and Windows. What you’ll end up with is the ability to stream your DivX, AVI, QT and other popular vid formated files to any TiVo boxes on the net.

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How-To: Share Internet with a Newton via Bluetooth

While we’re thrilled and all with the latest Apple releases of iTunes 7, that matchbook of an MP3 player, the second-gen Shuffle, and the forthcoming iTV (I can hear the commercial TV death knells now), we also like our fruity computing a little on the retro tip. So, we were tickled in rainbow colors to see this how-to on sharing your Internet connection between a Mac and a Newton Message Pad via a Bluetooth connection. Obviously you need to have a Newton Bluetooth solutiion (which the piece links to specifics on that).

We have a Newton that’s kicking around the Labs here. It seems to work on odd days, or otherwise has a mind of its own as to when it wants to power up. But maybe we’ll catch it on a good day and see if we can’t “Hello World” that puppy into cyberspace, just for kicks. Anybody got one of the compatible Bluetooth cards handy?

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Xbox 360: The Laptop

That crazy re-casing bugger Ben Heck has done it AGAIN. This time, he’s built a a water-cooled XBox 360 LAPTOP, with a 17″ screen and an aluminum case.

His site got so much traffic, it was immediately hosed, so here’s a mirror with the full project details.

[Via hack-a-day]

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Mio C710 Digiwalker and other Road Gear

Gizmodo had a list of five recommended Road Trip Gadgets. Most of them I recognize and agree with the recommendations (we should all be so lucky as to have a Dell Precision Mobile Workstation with internal EV-DO mini-card). But one of them I was unfamiliar with and found intriguing:

“Mio C710 Digiwalker – The Mio C710 Digiwalker is more than just a highly accurate GPS device with maps for all of North America inside and natural-sounding voice commands giving you turn-by-turn directions. It’s an excellent multimedia player, with a bright and sharp 3.5-inch display that can play MPEG4 and DivX movies for you, and also handles all the MP3s you can cram onto an SD flash disk. Plus, it works seamlessly with your Bluetooth phone, giving you a hell of a good-sounding speakerphone and showing you caller ID when the phone rings, too. It’s easy on the pocketbook as well, cheaper than most GPS units at $600.”

But with this in your kit, I don’t know why you’d still need a Garmin StreetPilot (item no. 1 on their list). I mean, how lost are you planning to get?

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Graffiti Research Labs at Ars Electronica

Interesting piece on We Make Money Not Art about the talk that James Powderly and Evan Roth of Graffiti Research Labs gave at Ars Electronia. You may know GRL’s work from the LED Throwies pieces in Make Vol. 6, on the Make blog, Instructables, etc. I wasn’t really aware of what was behind these. Powderly is a robotics engineer, Roth a Parsons grad who had a fellowship at the Eyebeam OpenLab. They see themselves as engineers who want to create technologies that aid urban artists (taggers, street artists, protest artists, etc.). They want to provide artists with the technology and tools to create urban art that can compete with the technology employed by corporate advertisers. In the talk, they ran through some of the artists that inspire them. We Make Money has pics and links. There’s also a link to a podcast of the talk.

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Fighting the Spam Robots

I hadn’t realized until Gareth pointed it out to me just HOW many spam comments were lurking in our story archives. I ran a query yesterday that deleted some 4000+ of crap posts selling viagra, cialis, clorapewhatever. And they’re being added at the rate of approximately 1 every 30 seconds. So until we can figure out a good way to nip this in the bud, I’m turning on comment moderation. If you’ve got a legit comment to make, BY ALL MEANS please do so, and we’ll do our best to approve them all. Hopefully we can turn moderation off once the spam problem’s been tackled.

Gareth Adds: I’m on here most of the day and into the night, so legit Comments should get approved almost immediately.

Tim Adds: Well that had exactly zero effect, so I’m turning moderation back off. Grrr.