The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair is underway in our fair city of Atlanta. Today and tomorrow the kids are being judged — judged I tell you! Scrutinized, interrogated, and judged, and lucky for them (and not for us), this part of the fair is not open to the public. So much for my Project Runway spoofery.
But I did drop in Sunday and Monday to check out the setup and meet some of the contestants, of whom there are thousands, it seems. I think the PR agency told me something in the neighborhood of 1,500 exhibits, many of which are partner or team efforts. They’re from all over the flippin’ globe; yesterday I watched some Minnesotans exchange pins with some Saudis.
It’s open to the public on Thursday, the 15th, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. in building B of the Georgia World Congress Center and it’s free, so you really have no excuse. Well, maybe you do, but if you aren’t doing anything, I highly recommend you satisfy your inner nerd and check it out. (The students will be on hand to explain their stuff from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.) Here’s a preview:
This is just one of those things I need to put out there for the Google-bots to find and index for posterity. Despite there being one YouTube video out there that comes really close to getting this right, and despite the immense collection of geekery within the N95 user base, there still arises the constant question from users: how can I hook up an external mic like the Reuters MoJo tookit has? When even a cellphone guru like the author of MobileJones — whose Twittered quest for a decent mic alternative got me to record my first bluetooth trial (see end of this post) — could not reach a satisfactory solution based on what Google had laying around for us, I decided it was time for a weekend trip to Radio Shack. Because this is what my life has become.
The adapter is not something you can buy directly; the resident scientist from Reuters told us at the Journalism3G conference that they had to cobble up their own makeshift connection. But if journalists can do it, hell, anyone can do it! [Correction: According to @mojosd it was Nokia Labs who cobbled it up for Reuters.]
Like I said, there’s already one serious video about this out there, but Bloggerguy leaves out a couple details and gets one critical (but easily correctable, for the persistent) point wrong. Still, we knew it had to be possible, as vlogger Steve Garfield showed that the N95 video recording was definitely taking the audio from the headset mic, but that only gets you so far. N95 user Bitflung also demonstrated the bluetooth connection as a viable alternative, though the quality of bluetooth audio is pretty low.
So, once and for all, here’s your recipe, as I did it:
1/8″ phone plug to phono jack adapter (note that the “S” on either side of the jack indicates it’s looking for a stereo input)
A self-powered — this is vital — external mic that terminates in a 1/8″ stereo plug. If your mic doesn’t have its own AA, AAA, or button-cell battery, the N95 isn’t going to hear it. **
The last item is the important part, because trying to connect a mono mic with a mono plug (note that some mono shotgun mics still have stereo plugs) won’t work. It has to look like this:
If you’ve got a lavalier or shotgun mic that terminates in a mono plug like this (note the single black band instead of two),
then you’re going to need an additional adapter to convert your mono jack into a stereo jack like this one, or you can replace the 1/8″ stereo jack to phono male plug adapter with this one which goes directly from 1/8″ mono female to phono male. Better yet, you could grab this dual 1/8″ mono female jack to 1/8″ male stereo plug and connect two mono lav mics to your getup. Go nuts.
You should end up with a layout like this:
Note that you use the yellow plug on the A/V cable, not the red one that Bloggerguy said in his video. If your phone asks you what you just plugged into it, select “Headset;” if that’s not an option, you screwed something up. In headset mode, the red & white cables represent the stereo output sound that normally goes to your earbuds, and the phone uses the yellow channel, normally for video output, as the microphone input.
I put it all together and demo several different microphones (stereo cardioid, mono shotgun, and lavalier) in this stunning Pulitzer-worthy video, which I’ll embed using Viddler so you can add your own comments:
For those of you inclined to interview serial entrepreneurs at loud VC cocktail receptions, you’ll want to skip to the comment I added at the 6:15 mark, where I demo the noise-cutting advantage of all this claptrap.
**Update: MojoSD raised a point in her post that I hadn’t thought to test: a dynamic mic, like my cheapo AudioTechnica ATR20, ought to work as well even without battery power because it doesn’t require any power from the port (which the N95 doesn’t provide). I just tested that theory, and there’s a catch: if you plug a dynamic mic into the cable, and then plug the cable into the N95, you get “Accessory not supported.” I don’t know why. But, if you plug the cable into the phone first without the microphone attached, you will get the choice to select “Headset” and then you can plug the dynamic mic into the cord/adapters and record successfully from then on. However, the audio has a bit of a buzz to it, so I’d still highly recommend going with a powered mic of some kind.
Last week, all I had to offer was camels on campus. This week, I got to talk to the former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders while she was on campus amidst a veritable storm of prophylactics. Apparently the GT Young Dems teamed up with Trojan’s national Evolve campaign (complete with “Roll Out” flagged mics, get it?) to promote, you know, liberal sexual health and whatnot.
It’s nice to meet someone like the Surgeon General, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the current marketing. From the bizarre misalignment of evolution in the pig-to-man schema, to the magical ability of buying a condom in a bar to make women jump your bones, to the inevitably bad pork-themed puns…it’s just weird. Bring back Trojan Man and lose the oinkers.
Anyway, I asked Ms. Elders if we were on a bit of a venereal downturn over the last, you know, few years, health policy-wise. She said yes, that after some good gains in the 90’s, we are once again headed in the wrong direction — though she blamed our lack of conscious fear of disease rather than anything going on in Washington, D.C. So politic of her. Scroll in to about the 0:55 mark:
In addition to a political celebrity, they had condom races (I dunno, there’s nothing very sexy about trying to best the record of 27 seconds), an inflatable theater shaped kinda like a reservoir tip, and much, much more.
There was some vaguely motion sickness-inducing film about space herpes on the attack featured at Reservoir Tip Theater; you can take a tour in this Qik video, after you watch two very serious faculty-looking types wearing pig-noses pull condoms off bananas.
Definitely cooler than the camels, if you ask me.
Pop quiz: calculate the relative increase in probability of sexual intercourse occurring at Georgia Tech tonight after all these free prophylactics put ideas in their technological heads.
For those of you who might be wondering, no, the honeymoon is not over between the N95 and me. Far from it. It’s more like we just discovered the Kama Sutra.
Yesterday, after a good week of talking crack with some turbine engineers, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get myself back out of Myrtle Beach and on the way home. So I fired up the Google Maps application I downloaded to my phone the day before, asked for a route home, and watched as the little blinking dot that was me joined the route and moved along the blue line home. GPS and Google also helped me find some dinner on Wednesday night.
But once Myrtle Beach started fading behind me, so did the radio station I was listening to. Good thing I had downloaded a couple other applications direct from Nokia: Podcasting and Internet Radio.
Podcasts on your phone? No big deal. We already have pocket-sized devices for listening to such things, and merging the two functions of media and communications is a good step forward but nothing revolutionary.
Mobile broadband, on the other hand, is like year-round Mallomars. When every last NPR station in earshot finished its news programming, and the only music available was the backwoods country and Christian fare, I plugged the phone into the stereo and started surfing. I don’t know how many scores or hundreds of stations I had available to me, but I settled in with some oldies and jazz somewhere between Augusta and Atlanta.
Granted, the oldies station was a good choice at the time because its low-fi music only required 32 or 48 kbps of bandwidth, and I was only covered by AT&T’s EDGE network out in the sticks. EDGE download bandwidth is typically in the barely tolerable 128kbps neighborhood — a number that is likely much higher than it was a year ago, before launch of the iPhone and some reported “network tuning.” But in the 3G network coverage of the city, I can easily enjoy FM- to CD-quality stereo music on the fat 1Mbps-class series of tubes. In the car, in my pocket, music from all over the world.
Sure, you can get an XM or Sirius satellite radio device that detaches from your car or is primarily portable and plugs in to the stereo just like my phone does. But why would I want to be limited to a selection of big radio stations selected by one company, when the low entry barrier of the internet brings at least an order of magnitude more?
And can XM tell you where to find dinner? (Okay, so there are some GPS-devices out there that have XM capability, but boy are they ugly.) Does XM make phone calls?
At this point, the bridge between niche-market devices like the N95 and total dominance of the non-FM radio market is merely a question of network capacity, I think. As the 3G network continues to grow — and Verizon starts opening up its EVDO network to more devices with greater user flexibility — XM radio devices are starting to look like analog television sets to me. Why buy one now?
Of course, lord only knows how long it’ll take to have a US 3G network worth singing about on internet radio. Just to let you know how much my phone misses its native Europe: when I scroll through my Contacts to select someone to call, my right soft-key offers me a very alien option: Video Call.
I don’t even know what to do with that, but somewhere out there some guy named Bjørn Hänssen does.
Well, it’d help if Qik would give me a damn account, anyway. But lucky for the starchild, he can now, as an independent contractor, write this off as a business expense. Hip hip hooray for citizen journalism!
Okay, so it’s really laziness. Or to give myself a little more credit, fatigue. It ain’t easy trying to generate original content on three fronts all the time. Let’s just consider it a little new media experiment, because I do so love playing with new widgets.
Obviously reader-writer collaboration is part of the whole Next-Big-Thing in media, what with viewers becoming participants in live-streamed interviews by suggesting questions via Twitter, Flixwagon, or Qik. And while blogs have always been able to rely on comments, Georgia Tech student Paul Stamatiou kicked it up a notch with the recently launched Skribit, which I heard about at SoCon08 last weekend.
Witness the new sidebar resident, the Skribit widget. Pretty self-explanatory, really; where it says, “Click here to suggest a topic,” you uh, do that. Other people can vote on topic they like. I pretend to heed the trend of votes and puzzle up a blog on said topic. Capisce? Feel free to suggest MTV video pieces, as well. I’m really tired.
We’ll see if this lasts longer than previous sidebar widgets of futility like Veeker and Cellblock.
Just some video niblets to flesh out last week’s OMGNokia woody.
I never officially told the non-blog-reading YouTube subscribers about my new gig, so forgive the intro; but here is a little look at the N95 I get to borrow for the next couple days:
I’ve been messing around with the Flixwagon video streaming application to see what it’s capable of, and I can definitely live with it. There used to be another Symbian handset-based live streaming application floating around out there that I heard of from time to time, but a quick scan of the Googles isn’t refreshing my memory. So for now, it seems my two main choices for video streaming from the N95 are Flixwagon and the more talked about Qik. Neither is perfect, but I think Qik has a slight edge in features for now. Qik will apparently automatically Twitter your friends when you start a live broadcast, and it will also cross-publish the live video to Mogulus, a multi-videographer publishing platform from which you can assemble a whole team of reporters into one video stream.
Both Qik and Flixwagon have a chat window available through which your viewers can send you questions and comments while you are broadcasting. Too bad for MTV News fans, though, the Flixwagon commenting feature is not enabled for our Super Tuesday coverage, but that’ll be a key feature for the future full launch of Flixwagon once they’re out of alpha phase. And both Qik and Flixwagon have audio defects, in addition to being generally thin and tinny due to bandwidth constraints (the standard Ustream settings were the same way, unless you cranked up the sampling to 44 kHz); which additional defect is more annoying is up to the individual’s taste, I guess. All the videos of the WEF I watched on Qik have a crackle in the sound, like the input gain was set too high. Flixwagon, on the other hand, has a slight but frustrating time lag in the audio somewhere between a half and a whole second. As far as post-broadcast editing of footage for use on the network, the time-lag is far less of a nuisance to MTV, and anyone else interested in re-mixing recorded video, than the audible crackle would be: you can fix the delay in the editing, but the crackle is there to stay. Flixwagon has the edge over Qik there.
The N95 itself is capable of sweet video, though, so if quality is a premium over immediacy, it’d be well worth recording a video locally and uploading it over a 3G network to Blip.tv, which sadly isn’t part of the pre-installed upload connections on the phone (Flickr and Vox for starters…seriously, Vox?). The audio is pretty rich for a handset, and the video — well, just have a look for yourself.
MTV’s Street Team ‘08 Has Super Tuesday Covered With Blogs, Video, Photos
Real-time reports will stream live online from citizen journalists representing 23 states holding primaries or caucuses that day.
On Tuesday — the Super-est Tuesday of the year — voters in 23 states will head to the polls to cast their votes, and 23 members of our intrepid Street Team ‘08 will be there.
Our enterprising citizen journalists will be on the ground, at the polling stations, caucus sites and candidate rallies, bringing you up-to-the minute news as it happens. The candidates aren’t going to be stopping on Super Tuesday, and our reporters won’t stop either.
Their real-time reports will be streamed live all day on MTVNews.com and ChooseOrLose.com, and throughout the day, MTV will break into regularly scheduled programming to showcase news featurettes and live reports from our Street Teamers.
Yeah, big deal, more live news, right? Hang on, here comes the OMGNokia part:
Armed with Nokia N95 mobile devices, laptops and video cameras, our embedded reporters will be bringing you the action from the 23 states holding primaries and caucuses on Super Tuesday, and you will be able to follow along with an interactive map on MTV News’ and Choose or Lose’s sites. Each Street Teamer will also be blogging throughout the day on ChooseOrLose.com. An innovative application, provided by Flixwagon, powers the mobile-broadcasting technology by allowing anyone with a capable 3G phone to stream live video to the Internet and store it for later viewing.
That’s right: for a whole, crazy day, I get to fondle and drool all over a Nokia N95. And then, I get to cry all over the return envelope, ’cause it ain’t mine to keep. Alas.
So, what Robert Scoble and others pioneered at the World Economic Forum in Davos (using another company, Qik), MTV will be bringing you 23 times over on Super Tuesday. We will be covering election events all over the country, live, archived, and re-mixed, using nothing but a palm-sized smartphone — no laptop-webcam-backpack assembly required like I took to Iowa.
I will do my damnedest to let any interested parties know when I will start live-streaming (so you don’t have to sit, stare, and hit Refresh or anything) via Twitter, and if you really just don’t want to be my Twitter pal, you can track the hashtag #streetteam08, which I will hopefully remember to auto-add to each tweet. If you want to watch the other 22 Street Teamers, you’re going to have to do that the old fashioned way; I seem to be the only one of us 51 CJ’s that actually uses, or cares to use, Twitter, even though it’s apparently becoming recommended practice for journalists avoiding extinction.
Verdict on Cloverfield: well worth seeing in the theater, at least maybe for a matinee. The entertainment value in this movie, if it’s up your alley at all, is in having the explosions and monster roars blast out your eardrums, and in getting kind of dizzy from watching a first-person camcorder account of running away from said monster on the big screen. Kate and Jay, naturally you can get away with waiting for it on Pay-per-view. Just invite me over, please.
Some people seem to have loved it, some people hated it. I’m surprised the people who wound up hating it were dumb enough to shell out $10 for it in the first place. Cloverfield is what it is: a big freakin’ monster from God-knows-where shows up and starts chomping on New York, and we watch a handful of devastatingly good-looking hipsters try to stay alive. That kind of movie either is or isn’t your bag, and if it is, you should like it just fine. Imagine two parts Godzilla (largely without the cheeky Matthew Broderick humor), one part Blair Witch Project (the cinematography/perspective), and one part Aliens (yes, for reasons you’ll just have to see).
The vertigo induced by seeing it on the big screen is part of the ride; I was definitely holding onto my armrests at times. While the news reported a few cases of actual motion-sickness, I didn’t get too close to that, though the fate of a couple people on the screen tried to tip my stomach in that direction. And if you really let yourself get into the movie, I think there’s something about the first-person perspective that actually makes you a little more nervous about thinking you’re about to see one of the characters die that typical movie framing can’t match.
Yes, there is enough stupidity in the movie to complain about, but it’s hard to make a horror movie if you don’t have at least a few characters who, by some mental defect, are inclined to head towards danger rather than away from it. If you’re inclined to be more angry at stupid characters than wowed by special effects, you probably ought to pass. If one unbelievably, unnecessarily, unforgivably cheesy line between lovers at a time of impending doom is going to stick in your craw and make you wish they had two vials of poison to end it all, again, pass. And if you’re going to get so hung up on the improbable physics of an a biological villain, no matter its size, that seems to laugh off Sidewinder missile impacts, well, you should’ve stopped reading at “monster.” But the cringing-at-stupidity scenes amount to about 90 seconds total in over an hour of rollercoaster death and destruction, so it’s a small tax to pay to uninspired script writers.
The final caveat is that you’re not going to leave with any answers. We can only hope that the producers are smart enough to turn this into a long-term money-milking website where obsessive fans go for weeks after the movie’s made its sums, trying to piece together what the hell happened beyond the limited observations of one recovered camcorder. Apart from that, though, prepare to walk out with a sizable WTF? hanging over your head — again, see “one part Blair Witch Project.”
We have a couple of long-focal-distance microscopes in our lab that I used on my master’s research; they’re handy for taking hi-mag images and measurements of test specimens that you can’t get up close and personal with using the standard traveling microscopes. The specimens I was testing were being inductively heated with basically a big magnetic coil up to a temperature of 1400F. Not only could you not lean over and stare at them without baking your face nicely, but the rapidly oscillating magnetic field that was heating up the metallic specimen by exciting its electrons would also do the same to, you know, your blood. And that’s just freaky. The tingle means you’re dying!
But that’s not important right now. What is important is that after a few years of sitting idle in dark corners of our lab, someone wants to use them again, and I’m the only person that remembers how to get them working again. I had to go around the corner to a part of the lab we use even less than these microscopes to find the little computer stand that has the control system for the microscopes on it. When I was piling all the cables back onto the various shelves so I could push the little castor-wheeled contraption down the hall, I managed to knock a CD-ROM out of some crevice somewhere.
I opened it up to discover the CD of personal effects I had burned off my old work computer before I left Honeywell in Phoenix, and that I hadn’t seen in about six years.
Among those personal effects are a bunch of photographs that I had made color photocopies of, and then scanned onto the computer prior to cutting the copies up for a scrapbook I made my grandfather one Christmas. You know, old photographs. Some really old photographs, dating back into the 1900s, I think. Yes, the photocopies live on in that scrapbook somewhere, but I had always wanted to compile them digitally someday. Now I have another distraction on my plate.
That’s li’l ol’ me and my Granny back in ‘74. Dig those cabinets. Dig that dress.
There’s Granny and Grandpa in Spain the year before, and I’m pretty sure my cousin Darcy. (If it’s one of my cousins, that’s her, she’s our only girl. And technically, I think that’s either as they were leaving for Spain or just getting back from there; that sure looks an awful lot like their old front door on 53rd Court, which would also explain the presence of my cousin.) Grandpa was always kinda goofy like that, at least, once he was a grandpa. I hear he could be a pretty stern father on occasion, but being a grandpa seems to soften people up a lot, don’t ya think?
I really miss them sometimes. I’m really glad I had to dig through that hole of a lab.
Obligatory Cloverfield post Cloverfield is what it is: a big, indestructible monster shows up out of nowhere, attacks Manhattan, and lots of people die. You should know already if this is your kind of movie or not, but if it is, definitely see it in the theaters!
Obviously reader-writer collaboration is part of the whole Next-Big-Thing in media, what with viewers becoming participants in live-streamed interviews by suggesting questions via Twitter, Flixwagon, or Qik. And while blogs have always been able to rely on comments, Georgia Tech student 
