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.
Since everyone’s whining about gas prices on the MSM, I figured showing fit and attractive young cyclists out enjoying the fresh air would be a better way to report on the “crisis” than just a bunch of predictable stock footage at the gas station. You want biofuels? We gotcher biofuels: PBR in a can, man!
Personally, I think it’s about time we started paying what gas is worth — or more accurately, what gas costs us in the long run. We’ve got a pollution problem, an energy problem, a war-in-sucky-deserts-for-crap-reasons problem, and a national obesity problem. How hard is it to put two and two together to make get-on-a-bike-ya-softy?
For the record, filming while biking is not a simple task. Thanks to Rachael of SoPo Bike Collective for giving me a sound bite, so it looks like I actually did my job.
If you’ve got some kind of political addiction or think you need to be punished for having too much fun last night, I’ll be providing live video as opportunities arise (cat fight!) at the 5th district DNC delegate caucus starting around 11.
You can access archived recordings and chat with me live at my Qik page.
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.
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!
It really was information overload for a day and a half at the Computation + Journalism Symposium at Georgia Tech. I think everybody left with something to chew on and quite a bit of excitement for the uncertain and promising future of the field. Here’s Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation, Lila King of CNN and iReport.com, and Leonard Witt of Kennesaw State University, with a quick closing from an undoubtedly exhausted conference chair, Irfan Essa.
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.
Just some vignettes from the first part of last week’s New York City trip, including the luscious “intimacy kit” in the hotel minibar. A look at what training to be a Citizen Journalist is like may follow.
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!
