The ISEF08 winners have been announced, and the recipients of the grand prize scholarships are these fine young ladies (left to right, below): Natalie Omattage of Cleveland, MS; Yi-Han Su of Taipei, Taiwan (I’m politically incorrect like that); and Sana Raoof of Muttontown, NY. While they were being put through the wringer for publicity photos, I asked them to do one more silly pose. Eat this, “Math is Hard” Barbie!
So um, someday your laptop computer won’t roast the tops of your thighs, and it has something to do with nano light waveguide things. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go light my master’s degree on fire and hide under my desk while I try to process all that I heard in my brief visit to the Intel science & engineering fair today.
Next time you think of stereotyping teenage girls as omg lol txt American Idol w my bff, just say the phrase “quantum computing” to yourself and then realize that this girl will totally drink your milkshake.
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.
Update: threw this particular video over to MTV for this week’s story.
As I watched the continuing “disaster porn,” as one local blogger put it, on the TV, Twitter filled another gap and alerted me to the distinct lack of coverage of the neighborhood where the destruction began. “No [mainstream media] in Vine City yet. It’s bad there I hear,” reported local new media adventurer Grayson Daughters. Weather services determined that the tornado first touched down in Vine City, just west of downtown, before moving east across the city and into Cabbagetown.
Newly armed with my own personal Nokia N95 — the pocket-sized powerhouse that enabled our Choose or Lose coverage of Super Tuesday — I headed west. And sure enough, I was the only relatively journalistic-looking person there by lunchtime.
…
So perhaps Vine City just wasn’t as interesting as Cabbagetown for on-the-scene news standups because there wasn’t much of interest there to be destroyed, unless it happened to be your home that lost its roof or found a tree laying across it.
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.
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!
