Talking about technology and other bits and pieces
Audioboo for Thursday, 11 July
I have a subscription to the Gizmag Emerging Technology magazine and I am always fascinated by the new items of technology that are coming up. The emails are always quite varied in terms of content, there will be things like bicycle electrics being integrated into the front fork of the bicycle and there are also architectural-based ideas. Today there was a throwable camera in the shape of a ball that you can throw up into the air to capture panoramic views and is a great idea to save you from throwing your expensive camera Kit into the air. I was really impressed with the Ghost Camera Stabiliser which is there to do the job of a Steadycam and it uses motors to keep the equilibrium of the camera just right. As is quite usual when I am following a link from the email that I get on a regular basis from GizMag, I will often be clicking on other equally interesting items. The only problem with this, is that quite often I will lose an hour while reading, which is a problem even though I’m slightly more educated at the end of that period.
I just love technology
I am really looking forward to the technological advantages that are coming to us over the next few years, there is always someone who is looking to create something special that will quite possibly make our lives better in some way or other. I saw today that there is a plan to build the world’s largest network of electric vehicle charging stations in Holland so that in that country you will never be more than 50 km away from a place to charge your electric car or motorbike. They reckon that there will be at least two hundred of these fast charging stations by 2015. I think it is great that we are seeing the advances in this electric vehicle technology and it is not going to be long before we are all driving an electric vehicles.
The Giant Squid and the Galaxy S3
I got my adapter for plugging the Giant Squid microphone into the S3 and now I can use this super lapel microphone to get better audio when I am making videos with my smart phone. Up until now to be able to use this microphone I have had to plug it into my Zoom H2 recorder which is a great audio recording device, but is one more thing to carry. I have already been testing the Giant Squid mic and following a recipe from another user of this microphone to enhance the sound recorded with it using Amadeus Pro Mac digital audio editor. The first step is to convert it to a mono track, then to use the normalisation filter, do some tweaking with a parametric equaliser and finally finishing off with the peak limiter. I do have presets for each of these stages, but I might see if I can do some automation of the process. It might be possible for me to create a stack of audio units which layer these filters in the right order and if not, then I might be able to do something with Keyboard Maestro. Keyboard Maestro for the Mac is an excellent way to automate all sorts of things which can be triggered by various actions or keystrokes. I’m sure that using it has saved me an awful lot of time since I have started automating my Mac computing with the software.
Summertime blues
As I don’t make quite enough money yet from my video making or my writing, during the summertime I work at a campsite. So in the summertime especially during July and the beginning of August I am either working, sleeping or just tired. It is quite difficult to push myself to create new videos and new articles as I would like to. I have been listening to the Twit network This Week in YouTube and now I feel the need to push a little bit harder to keep on making new videos. In the same way that I have been quite diligent in creating my Audioboo chats on almost a daily basis, I would like to do something similar with video. The videos only have to be short, in fact they are best if they are short and there is always something that can be talked about
