At the University of Illinois the old equipment graveyard is called Surplus. It's not exactly a graveyard, because a lot of the stuff still works -- it's just old. Of course, "old" is a relative concept. If you're an English grad student looking to score a working PC for free for your office, you have a good chance of finding a working Pentium 4 machine that a scientist or computer science prof thought was underpowered.

At work I just gathered together a pile of old video and audio equipment that isn't being used. I hate to send a lot of it off, since it's cool vintage stuff, but it's also not useful and it's all taking up valuable space in our growing production area.

I hope that somebody at the U of I or some other university in Illinois happens upon a working piece of gear and decides to put it to good use. The working stuff, at least, isn't getting scrapped or dumpstered.

I took some pics of it piled up in a corner of our TV studio in order to memorialize it. Take a peek if that's yer thing.

The NY Times has an article (bug me not) today on how printing digital photos at home isn't necessarily a good deal compared to using an on-line service or a local retailer. Printer manufacturers like HP and Canon say their 4x6 printers make prints at a cost of around 30 cents, while folks like Consumers Union says it works out to more like 50.

I've done some home printing of photos on my inkjet, and I have to agree that the time and materials aren't generally worth it, unless I just want to print out one or two pics without leaving the house. The Times article notes that larger pics, like 8x10, can be more economical to do at home (especially if you pick up your paper on clearance).

What I print at home tends to be draft versions of pics that I've doctored up in Photoshop, or pics in odd sizes.

But I really don't print out so many pictures since I share photos online at Flickr. I save printing for the very best ones, or when I want to give photos away.

That said, until recently, I've done my photo printing at local stores which tend to charge more like 29 cents a print (I won't have a Sam's Club membership, especially not just to get 13 cent prints). So price is often a deterrent.

But recently Walgreen's started offering 19 cent prints if you upload your pics online then pick them up in a local store.

(Yes, I would prefer use a locally owned shop, but here in Champaign-Urbana there's almost nobody left. The last true pro photo processor is closing up shop any day now, and that's where I took my good film, especially black and white.)

I really like this Walgreen's upload option because it's cheap, there's no waiting for snail mail delivery and it saves me a trip, since I don't have to travel to drop them off.

I do this for film, now, too. Instead of getting prints I just get developing, sometimes along with a CD. Then I can photoshop just the photos that turned out OK and have them printed. The scans I get from the likes of Walgreen's from film range from decent to poor, apparently depending on who's working the machine. I just bought an inexpensive film scanner (I only paid $79) that does 1800x1800 scans -- about 3 megapixels -- and actually turns out better results than what I typically get from Walgreen's.

Even if you just use the Walgreen's scans, it costs around $5 to get developing with a CD ($3 for developing alone), whereas it costs closer to $8 for developing and prints, and $10 for prints with a CD. Usually only a percentage of photos turn out well enough to want a lasting print, so you can really save some money over the course of a few rolls by only printing out the ones that you really like -- not to mention cutting back on wasted prints that will only end up in a closet or trashcan somewhere.

A week or two ago the geek-oriented blogosphere was abuzz with a little $30 battery-powered audio amplifier that was blowing people away with its sound quality. Some were even comparing it favorably to near-thousand dollar tube amplifiers.

I'm normally pretty skeptical about snowball effect of the blogosphere and the geek-obsession of the moment. But I'm also a push-over for a crazy tech bargain. In particular, the review by TNT-Audio convinced me that I should give the Sonic Impact T-Amp a shot. I've read TNT for years and generally found their reviews to be very critical and not particularly susceptible to hype.

More importantly, what convinced me was that the heart of the amp is a digital switching amplifier chip. This is a technology I've been convinced offers very high quality sound, with great efficiency with regard to size, energy consumption and heat production.

My main two-channel stereo is actually driven by a digital amp in a Sharp mini-system that you'd never otherwise believe is a Sharp or a mini-system once you hear it. (For more details on it, read my review over at Epinions).

Unfortunately, I waited a few too many hours (?!?) after first reading about the damn things on boingboing such that the supply dried up at most major on-line retailers. So I turned to our old friend eBay. Luckily, dealers hadn't quite yet gotten wind of the shortage, so I could get a new one for a buy-it-now price no more than what the average retailer had been asking.

I got the amp last week, but only finally got a chance to plug it in today. I have to admit that he hype is not misplaced.

Now, first off, when you open up the box, what you have in your had definitely looks like a $30 piece of plastic. There is nothing about the unit that screams quality whatsoever. It's battery powered (or you can use an AC adaptor), but the 8 AA batteries are a royal pain to put in -- very poor design.

After the five minutes it took to get the batteries in, I plugged in the preamp out of my Sharp minisystem and my Polk RT600I main speakers, then put on a CD. I would not say I was blown away -- there is simply not enough power to do that. But I was pleasantly surprised. The sound was clean, detailed, without a hint of distortion or added noise -- all the hallmarks of good digital amplification.

Then I connected the amp's inputs directly to my Pro-Ject Phonobox to get audio direct from my turntable. I slapped on Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come and it sounded like it's supposed to. Again, good separation of instruments, decent detail, and no overemphasis of any frequency. Very smooth response, if a bit lacking in bass capability.

The T-Amp is rated for 15 watts, and most accounts put the real-world output at more like half that. And yet, it's enough to power some decently sensitive speakers to fill a room with fine sound. Wattage can be very overrated, and many tube amp enthusiasts pay lots of money for amps that don't put out much more power than the T-Amp.

Bass is certainly present with the T-Amp, it just isn't there with any authority or magnificence. But, at least it isn't muddy, nor does the T-Amp commit the sins of many cheaper amps, which is to unnaturally emphasize the mid-bass frequencies to make up for lack of true low-bass.

It's kind of funny, but right now I really don't need an extra audio amp. I've got a stereo in nearly every room (except the bathrooms, which just have radios). But the T-Amp makes me want to assemble a bargain stereo.

With judicious selection of used or clearance gear, you could make the T-Amp the center of a very nice system for a hundred or two that would blow away most mini-systems you could buy for up to double that.

If you plan to run the T-Amp off wall power, I'd encourage you to get a decent AC adaptor -- you might have to spend more than the amp costs. The reason I give this advice is because AC adaptors often pass a 60 Hz hum right on up to the equipment due to poor shielding. This hum can wreak havoc with amplifiers and preamps if not effectively isolated or filtered out.

I currently have a little hum problem with my turntable and preamp combo, which, incidentally, utterly disappeared with the T-Amp running off batteries, since that gets rid of the possibility for a ground loop.

I think the only place you can find T-Amps right now is eBay, and a quick search shows them still going for about $30, though a lot of sellers are jacking up the shipping costs. If you can find one for not much more than $30 it's definitely worth it -- you really can't go wrong.

If you can't lay your hands on one now, they might step up production soon. Or you can wait a little bit and get the T-Amps new big brother, the forthcoming T-Amp2. The updated version will cost you more like $139, but according to early reviews, the improvements to build quality and connectors are worth it. We shall see.

Sometimes, there is still a bargain to be had in audio if you don't buy into the equation that good sound must cost an arm and a leg.

Following up a bit on my last post, the photography website, Luminous Landscape, has a brief user review of the new JVC MC500 camcorder that records direct to compact-flash card, rather than DV tape. Now, before I get branded a luddite, I believe that this is the direction which digital video is going and should go. However, I also have to say that it's just a bit early yet.

This particular camcorder is more of a proof-of-concept for early adopters rather than something useful for the avid amateur or pro videographer. The main problem is that it records in MPEG2, the same format used on DVDs. Now, MPEG2 is a great delivery format, it allows you to cram a lot of high quality video into just a few gigabytes. But to do so, you sacrifice a lot of flexibility.

One thing you sacrifice, which is very important to videographers, is good frame access. That is, unlike conventional film, and even higher-level digital video formats like DV, MPEG2 doesn't record full frames. Instead it records a full frame, a "key frame," every so often -- typically anywhere from every 5 frames to every second. Now, there are 30 frames of video per second in the US NTSC standard.

After the key frame, every additional frame of video isn't full. A bunch of data is left out. The goal is to record only data that has changed. So, in theory, if the video is of a ball that doesn't move, the key frame is picture of the ball, and each subsequent frame has no information, since nothing changed. If the video was of a ball rolling against a solid black backgroud, the key frame would show the whole initial scene and the subsequent frames would only have the parts that changed -- the ball and what was formerly behind the ball.

Making this work in the real world is somewhat imperfect, but can yield good results. But, when it comes to editing, you might want to cut at a frame that isn't a keyframe, so your editing computer has to go back and fill in all the information that isn't recorded. It can work, but a lot of data can be lost.

DV format, used in miniDV camcorders, records 30 full frames a second. So you can choose a cut anywhere and get a full frame. This is a very important point. But it also means that you're dealing with a lot more data.

The JVC camcorder gets an hour of MPEG2 video on a 4 GB CF card. That same card would only hold about 20 minutes of DV video. That miniDV videocassette you buy for $4.00 actually holds 13 GB of data. They don't even make 13 GB compact-flash cards yet, and the 4 GB cards still cost more than $100 each.

So, you can see why tape is still very efficient with regard to gigabytes per dollar. But the downside is that tape can get jammed, and it'd difficult to make it run faster than real-time. Typically, it takes an hour to upload an hour of video from your camcorder to your computer.

In my day job of video production, we've begun using portable 60 GB hard drives that are designed to interface with DV camcorders to store video as we shoot. It often saves us several hours of uploading times, since we can just hook up the drive to our editing PCs by firewire and transfer the files.

Yet, we still run tapes even when we're running the hard drive. Why? Well, have you ever dropped a hard drive six feed onto a tile floor? Your chances of data survival are pretty slim. But I've dropped a DV videocassette many times, and haven't yet totally lost the data, even if I had to perform a bit of surgery.

Also, one 60 GB DV video hard drive costs about $750. So we can't afford to record 4 hours of video and just put it on the shelf. So how can we archive all that video we shot once we've edited the final project? Ah ha, just keep that $4 videotape we used during the shoot.

For the moment, tape still rules, even though hard drives are helping to speed up and smooth our our workflow. But until there is a good reliable removeable media that stores at least 13 GB cheaply, tape is going to rule the roost.

And, I will admit, I do look forward to that day when tape takes a back seat.

Yesterday was Home Movie Day, and I missed it. I was catching up on some blog reading today and found this post about it at Stay Free! Daily, which directed me to a longer article that appeared in the last issue of Stay Free! magazine.

The idea behind Home Movie Day is to embrace the value of home movies, as emphemeral pieces of history and cultural artifacts. On the day itself, film archivists facilitate the delicate showing of home movies so that the films themselves are not damaged by the projector.

Archivists also want to encourage owners of home movies to take good care of and protect their film orginals, while making video copies for viewing. They also want owners to realize that the video copies are not forever, and may not even last as long as the original film.

At work I have small, but sizeable, archive of vintage videotape that was shot for foreign language courses in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of it is on the Umatic format, a professional precursor to Betamax, but still in production. Some of the rest is on VHS.

Depending on the age and birthdate of the tape, some of it is degrading fast. ... Strangely, some older tapes play better than more recent tapes. One reason is that in the 1980s a lot of tape manufacturers used a new kind of binder which holds the magnetic oxide particles to the tape. This binder proved to be less robust and long-lasting than prior or subsequent formulations, and so those tapes have degraded more dramatically.

Since I didn't produce most of these tapes, and because the folks who did didn't leave behind any documentation I'm aware of, I really don't know what is valuable and what isn't.

I'm making the general assumption that nearly everything has some value, and then trying to prioritize what gets preserved and archived.

There are not a lot of cost-effective preservation options available to us. Most people assume that DVD is the most obvious option. Now, it's true that archiving to DVD is now inexpensive, since we can use DVD recorders with media that costs less than $1.00. However, nobody is sure how long DVD-R media will really last, and DVD-R is not a good media to use if you ever want to reuse or edit the video. Yes, you can do it, but there is quality loss that you may not want to suffer.

So, what we've doing is dubbing over these old tapes to archive-quality digital videotape, DVCam, to be specific. There are higher-quality digital video formats out there, but as a small educational video facility we can't afford the equipment, nor can we afford the tape.

As it is, we can only afford so much DVCam tape, since it runs about $18 per hour. That's much more expensive than camcorder miniDV tapes, which cost about $4 per hour, but they're also more fragile and not designed for archive purposes.

Because we can dub to muliple recorders at once, we do make DVD-Rs along with the DVCams, since they're easy to duplicate and also it's much easier to find a DVD player than a professional DVCam VCR.

At $18 we have to spread our archiving out over time, so that we can afford the tape. And in the process we're also tapping faculty from various departments to help us determine what the content is, and what priority it should have in being archived, since, ostensible, it's slowly degrading while it waits.

This all just highlights the fragility of our media records. Magnetic tape is very fragile, and yet has been the medium of choice for video for the last thirty years, becoming the most prevalent during the 90s when video went digital. Much of our audio record is also on tape, especially master tapes from musical recordings.

Digitizing these recordings buys us some years, but nobody knows how many. Digital means that exact duplicates are easier to make -- nevertheless, somebody has to make them. A digital tape stored away in a closet or warehouse will degrade, just like the old Umatic tapes are doing today.

And the choice of archive format makes difference, too. CDs are pretty good, but now acknowledged to be sonically inferior to the analog master tapes they're made from. And DVDs are not even close to the quality of 35mm film.

Today's multi-track digital recordings and high-definition video recordings rival those analog formats for quality, but the question remains: will the stuff they're on be around 50 years from now? And if so, will we still be able to retrieve it?

In the last few years I've really come to enjoy still photography. I've been doing video for close to twenty years, and professionally for almost twelve, and yet until a few years ago never really messed with still cameras, much to many people's suprise. I took up photography to some extent to help improve my video work, by putting more emphasis on composition and technical aspects like exposure, which is relatively easy to control in digital video, but just as difficult to master for artistic results.

I own a couple of film SLR cameras (which can be had really cheap these days) but just a decent compact point-and-shoot digital camera -- nothing professional or fancy. I like my digicam because it's sturdy and is small enough to carry around with me. While it's great to have a full-featured camera, it's not worth anything if it's in a drawer instead of your pocket when a photo-op happens.

I've managed to be mostly immune to camera upgrade fever as more sophisticated and higher-resolution digital cams have become available in the last two years. My little pocket digicam does a fine job most of the time with nice results on 4x6 prints and on the web.

But one thing I don't like about my digicam is its low light performance. I'm not a fan of flash photography, and on top of that the flashes on little digicam are weak and too close to the lens, resulting in rampant red-eye. But if you're indoors with artificial light, you really can't get a crisp, sharp picture without the flash.

With mine and most digicams, the sensors just aren't very sensitive and produce very noisy pics at their highest sensitivities. For instance, most digicams aren't more sensitive than 400 speed print film, and at that setting typically produce very noisy, grainy pics -- much more grainy than you get with cheap 400 speed color film in a cheap film point-and-shoot camera, in fact.

Most digital SLRs do really well at ASA film speed equivalents of 800, or even 1600 up to 3200 -- better than most film at that point. But they're big, bulky and relatively expensive.

The other day, however, I was reading the new issue of Popular Photography, and they had a review for a new Fuji camera, the Finepix F10, whose claim to fame is that it's optimize to work well in low light. And, according to the review (not yet online) and other reviews I've read, it actually works, and is nearly as good as digital SLRs as far as that feature is concerned.

Oh, and how camera lust was sparked. That's the one feature I've been looking for, and it's finally here, I thought.

At $400 retail, it's not cheap, but about the same as what I paid for my first digicam when it was new. I also wondered if this was a feature that would take hold, or if the F10 would end up being a one-off anomaly. A camera with one killer feature that didn't end up sparking demand, and so was never seen again.

And then I stumbled upon Olympus' new Stylus 800 digital, which also features the ability to take low-light photos (my current cam is the Stylus 300). Maybe this is something that will catch on. There's only one review so far, but it's also positive.

If this low-light capability is going to catch on, then I think I can hold out a little while before upgrading, since I won't have to catch a model before it goes away. It's good to resist upgrade fever, but a geek can still dream.

SonicStage is the software that Sony provides for downloading and uploading audio from its Hi-MD minidisc recorders (and just download to its MDLP recorders). SonicStage has been much maligned for being clunky, slow, and for the digital rights management which limited how many times an MP3 could be downloaded to minidiscs and how many times audio files could be uploaded from a user-recorded Hi-MD.

Surprisingly, it seems that Sony is actually listening to its loyal minidisc users. The new version of SonicStage, 3.2, addresses some of these problems and adds an appreciated new feature.

Gone are the restrictions on recording MP3s to minidisc and the upload restrictions. However, there are still restrictions on how many times you can burn or record songs purchased from Sony's Connect music store, but that's in line with other music stores, like iTunes. And, really, how many people actually use Connect anyway?

The best new feature is that SonicStage now takes care of automatically converting to WAV files audio you recorded yourself. Up to now this was a two-step process, requiring you to first upload the audio from your MD recorder, then convert it to WAV. This was because Sony had promised to offer uploaded audio when it debuted Hi-MD in 2004, but didn't have the software support it until it had been out for many months, and only then by using a separate application called WAV Converter.

If you've already got a Hi-MD or MDLP recorder it's worth a download (and it's free). I've just started using it and there seem to be no glitches of the sort that often haunt software upgrades -- my library of uploaded material is intact and none of the drivers were messed up.

Unfortunately, Hi-MD support is still Windows only, although there are rumors of Mac support.

It's not that hard and you can make ones that rival the $30 ones at your big box electronic store. I have to admit that I don't do it so much, but being reminded of the basic steps gives me inspiration to quit paying $10 a pop everytime I need new A/V cables (which is all the damn time).

Go to Revolution3 for text and video how-to.

Steev points out two good open source web applications--Broadcast Machine and Osprey--for easily uploading and sharing video, either by downloading directly from a server or with BitTorrent.

I'm interested in this not just because of its obvious use for independent media, but also because I'm trying to set up a video portal at work, so that anyone at the university (or even on the internet) can see what video we have available for streaming in all subject areas we produce video for. Due to copyright and other restrictions (like privacy concerns), we can't make every video available to everyone. But I still think it would be very good for people to see what is potentially available for instructors and students.

We have a very simple pilot database already in development, but it seems to me that it would be nice not to have to re-invent the wheel. Further, one of the applications, Osprey, uses a standard metadata scheme based on Dublin Core.

The value in using a standards-based metadata scheme is that we could more easily integrate our database of materials with others, inside our outside our university.

I think we may do a test install of Broadcast Machine, and may try out Osprey, too.

Phrack, "a Hacker magazine by the community, for the community," has been published via textfile since 1985, and is calling it quits four months shy of its 20th birthday.

I've read Phrack periodically since I don't even remember when. I don't think I ever read it during my BBS days, which ran about 1985-1988, though I do remember it from my early pre-web internet days, starting around 1993. Then I'd catch it on Gopher sites and Usenet.

Much of the content is way over my head, since I'm not a real computer hacker. But the fact that this resource exists fascinates me, since I do subscribe to the hacker ethic of exploring technologies to discover how they work.

Not all of the articles are about computers, per se. For instance, the last issue contains an article on radio hacking, including theory and circuit design.

It seems like publishing has been pretty slow for the last few years, down to only about one issue a year. I don't know if that's why they're calling it quits -- textfile e-zines are a bit of an antiquity at this time, given that blogs and other content management systems allow a website to be updated quickly and easily. The issue-based or monthly electronic zine seems to be falling out favor, since the need to have a full issue released on a regular basis is kind of a holdover from the print world and the pre-web internet where servers were fewer in number, and dynamic publishing not as easy to accomplish.

Nevertheless, the nicely self-contained package of a single-issue textfile is much easier to archive and keep than an ever-changing dynamic website. It may be that these discrete textfiles will live on much longer than long-abandoned websites.

I know I'm a few days late on this, but I want to send congratulations to Textfiles.com guy Jason Scott because his enormous BBS Documentary DVD project has just started shipping.

I haven't yet seen it (guess I'd better get my order in), but I can only guess that this is an important historical documentation of a phenomenon that laid the groundwork for the modern internet and many of the principles of free communication that we're trying to preserve today.

I spoke to Jason about his archiving activities and the documentary on the Feb. 4 edition of the radioshow.

The always informative WFMU's Beware of the Blog led me to Project C-90, a Russian on-line museum of blank audiocassettes. FMU's Kenzo says:

I didn't THINK this would get me so excited, until I stumbled onto images like the one at the right, sending me back to forgotten early childhood memories of making little home radio shows on my portable tape recorder, taking apart and unravelling the cassettes, and marvelling over how quickly the audio quality deteriorated in such a distinct way.

I still have a closet full of cassettes that I've winnowed down from an even larger stash. The pared down collection contains lots of stuff that's hard to replace (like live shows, mix tapes, gift tapes, bootlegs and airchecks) and original pre-recorded cassettes of material that either isn't easily obtainable in other formats or I don't care to try and replace because the tape is good enough for me.

The 3M brand tape at right brings back memories because it's the brand of tape we used at the university A/V facility where I've worked for the last 11 years. Until about 2000 when I took over the audio production area, our language lab only used analog equipment and distributed all programs on these 3M cassette tapes.

Every semester or so we would cycle through the tapes used in the old-school language lab and bulk-erase them. The old woman who had run the lab for the last twenty-plus years then just stashed them away, but eventually ran out of room. So I kindly offered to take them off her hands.

Then I became the tape-fairy with hundreds of used blank cassette tapes to bestow unto friends and colleagues. I used to dump 50 or so at a time at our community radio station's production room for anyone to take or use and they would all disappear within a week's time.

I made many a mix tape or tape for the car with the trusty old 3Ms. Many a lucky pal got albums taped onto them.

Unlike the Walgreen's 3-for-a-dollar tapes these 3M wonders were built to last with reasonable fidelity, provided you weren't expecting top-of-the-line TDK metal-tape performance.

I never recorded anything too critical on them, but often used them to record random audio bits for background and insertion into my late-night radio show. Those are the specimens that still remain in my archives.

Like many folks around my vintage, the lowly cassette retains some charm in the face of obsolescence and degradation. I do dust them off every so often and maintain several working cassette decks so that I can still listen. I even chose my most recently purchased mini-system, located in the kitchen, because it has a pretty decent cassette deck for this type of stereo.

Now that I've seen Project C-90, I'm kind of surprised that I've never seen a cassette gallery on the 'net before. Deadhead tape collectors could be fanatical about tape types and brands, and debates about cassette quality and fidelity filled countless threads on Usenet.

Minidisc is a much newer and less profligate technology, and there are numerous galleries of blank MD media to be found.

Ah, but the MD-heads are children of the internet. How many of the diehard cassette enthusiasts do you reckon still refuse to let the internet infect and destroy their lives?

Despite the fact that I write about such potentially ire-raising counter-cultural things as pirate radio and express an anarchist attitude about media and politics, the thing I get more e-mail about is actually minidisc. Within the last few months I've gotten more than a dozen questions about the new Hi-MDs asking for advice on buying and using them. A good portion apperently come from people who've read my review of the MZ-NH1 2004 flagship model over at Epinions.

So I thought I'd alert everyone that the new and somewhat-improved 2005 models are starting to ship. The new ones have native MP3 support, which I reckon is their biggest improvement. My favorite on-line MD retailer, Minidisco, has in stock the MZ-RH910, the least expensive model with a microphone input. Apparently, they've already sold out of the next model up.

The new MD recorder with the built-in camera and full-color LCD, the MZ-DH10P, is reported to be shipping in May.

The MZ-DH10P only has a 1.3 MP camera, which I said earlier seems pretty paltry by todays mutli-megapixel standards. Minidisc.org has a translation of an interview with three Sony minidisc engineers and designers who explain why only 1.3 mega-pixels:

There is a prevalent prejudice in maintaining existing size of the MD Walkman due to standards set by its predecessors. The MZDH10P unit that I could show at the end of 2003 was still a prototype with a 3 mega pixels camera then considered as a prerequisite. When you employ a higher mega pixels camera module, the size of the unit inevitably increases - thus, the tremendous size in comparison to existing MD Walkman. Although the concept of this new MD Walkman has the ability to take pictures it is not a digital camera, so to speak.

If you're looking to move up to Hi-MD and also looking for a bargain, I would keep an eye on Ubid.com, which seems to get a lot of just-discontinued minidisc recorders these days. I've bought at least 3 from them in the last few years and been pretty satisfied with price and service, though service is not the best around. It's an auction site, so all the usual caveats about auctions apply -- don't get bid up too close to what regular on-line sellers are pricing your item at. They also have a "buy it now" price which is sometimes pretty reasonable.

This isn't a ringing endorsement or advertisement for Ubid -- just a recommendation based upon bargain-hunting experience.

Looks like Sony's trying to keep it's loyal minidisc users from jumping over to iPod land. Yesterday Sony announced some new MD units, including the Hi-MD Photo, which seems pretty much like the MD equivalent of the iPod Photo, except that it includes a 1.3 megapixel camera. However, I think 1.3 MP is pretty meager for a $500 MD unit, since you can get cameraphones with that sort of resolution these days. With 1 GB of Hi-MD storage available per disc, why not bump it up to 3.2 MP, which seems to be the point-and-shoot digicam entry level these days.

Sony does offer a memory card reader for Hi-MD that doesn't require a computer so you can transfer your digital pics to a Hi-MD disc for storage and backup--and viewing on the Hi-MD Photo. And, refreshingly for Sony, it reads pretty much every major kind of memory card, even xD, which is only supported by Olympus and Fuji (and the kind of card my digicam uses).

The other big bombshell is that Sony's next line-up of Hi-MD models will support MP3 natively. There's no further details as of yet, so we're left to assume that this support means you should be able to just dump MP3s on the Hi-MD like you would a flash drive or similar dedicated MP3 player, without transcoding.

The reason this is significant is that since Sony started supporting USB audio downloads to MD, it's required that MP3s be transcoded to Sony's ATRAC format on the fly by the PC, and then uploaded to the Hi-MD. This results in some minor sound degredation and a slowdown in transfer times, depending on your PC's proc speed. Direct MP3 support should eliminate these minor problems.

I've never particularly minded the MP3 to ATRAC transcode, primarily because ATRAC is a more advanced and efficient codec, which is how you can get hours and hours of decent stereo audio on a MD or Hi-MD at a bitrate of about 64kbps, which sounds much crappier in MP3. Nevertheless direct MP3 support has its advantages and certainly makes Hi-MD a more flexible format.

Now I'm just wishing Sony would provide a firmware MP3 support upgrade for my MZ-NH1.

Jason Scott, of Textfiles.com fame, has announced that he is currently archiving all of the podcasts that he can find, currently storing them in 75 GB of hard drive space. He figures hard drive space is cheap enough to make the prospect of continuing the project tenable.

I have no doubt that this project is worthwhile, and it's all the better than the automated nature of podcast downloading makes Jason's task an easy one.

Of course, putting all this on-line is another story, since bandwidth is much more expensive than drive space. But the time may yet come when that is feasible, too.

Big thanks have to go to Jason and other folks prescient enough to preserve documents, items and data that seem emphemeral now, but are likely to provide insight for the future. That includes such archives as zine libraries archive.org, and, yes, textfiles.com, to name just a few.

Indeed, many of the first libraries started out simply as personal collections of books and magazines. In fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was very common for a newspaper subscriber to bind his newspapers for preservation and future reference.

I interviewed Jason on the Feb. 4 edition of the radioshow (I hope he's archived that podcast), where the topic was ostensibly his BBS documentary, which is another example of vital documentation of the recent past.

Apropos last Friday's radioshow with guest Jason Scott of Textfiles.com, Cory at boingboing posts about a web BBS to FidoNet BBS interface that's been built.

FidoNET was popular in the pre-Internet days as a way for individual electronic bulletin boards to hook up and exchange messages. If I remember correctly, it works by having computers in the network that are geographically local to each other call each other and exchange data. There is order to the system, in that a system only calls certain other systems, so that data can be sent over long distances, and doesn't just move around randomly. Prior to the public accessibility of the Internet, FidoNET provided a way to send e-mail and other messages without making expensive long distance calls to faraway computers.

Apparently FidoNET is still in use in places where Internet access isn't very good and local phone calls are still more reliable. FidoNET has been connected with Internet e-mail for quite some time -- when I first got on the 'net in the pre-WWW days of 1993, I can recall fidonet.org addresses being somewhat common.

It's cool, still, to see FidoNET hook up with other web-based messaging systems that would otherwise be out of reach for the system. The web, as a whole, is largely out of reach, primarily because a FidoNET user connects to only one other computer--a FidoNET BBS--which is not connected to a live network, and so can only store cached information and data.

As should be obvious, it would be nearly impossible for most BBSs, run on basic commodity PCs, to cache the entirety of the web, never mind the fact that a lot of the cached info would go stale really quickly.

These sorts of applications force us to question the notion of obsolescence, and refocus on the notion of utility rather than cutting edge fashion.

Lomo says: "Don't think, just shoot."

Apple says: "Random is the New Order."

With the Lomo camera you get: Soviet-era camera with iffy quality control that takes often-blurry pictures with oversaturated color and inaccurate exposure. Lomo calls it: Lomography

With the iPod Shuffle you get: a display-less mp3 player that emphasizes playing things at random because you can't easily track through the songs on the device since you'll only know what you're going to hear when you hear it. Apple calls it: Autofill

With both: we have engineering and design limitations/flaws turned into marketing genius.

Discuss...

Gerd Stodiek posts a how-to on minidiscasting which focuses on using a Hi-MD recorder for production, rather than simply a device for downloading and listening to 'casts. He makes a suggestion to use Hi-MD on a podcasting thread at Cyberjournalist, too.

Minidisc recorders in general, and Hi-MD recorders in particular, have an advantage for creating 'casts since they have good microphone preamps, recording at a higher quality level than most MP3 players and stock PC soundcards. The podcasting phenomenon is very young, so I think listeners may be more willing to accept middling to poor sound quality now. But fidelity will probably become more desireable in the near future.

Being able to record in a room away from a noisy PC is an additional advantage of using a MD recorder. If you're using a Hi-MD recorder, you have the added benefit of being able to bypass your PC's soundcard, which would only introduce more noise.

Although, it's important to note that the line input of most stock soundcards is superior in quality to the microphone input, since the required microphone preamplifiers built in to them are generally very poor. Indeed, even the mic preamp in my otherwise very high quality Creative Extigy USB soundcard is quite inferior to any of my minidisc recorders.

With this in mind, one might even say that the mediageek radioshow is actually a MDcast, since I record the program directly off the broadcast board onto my Hi-MD recorder in uncompressed CD-quality PCM. Then I upload it directly onto my PC at home via USB, where I compress it into MP3 and ogg vorbis.

Gerd Stodiek has put out the first minidiscast, or MDcast if you will. Of course, in essence, there's no difference between an MDcast and a podcast -- it's just more of an assertion that you can download podcasts to your NetMD enabled minidisc recorder (connecting to PC by USB) about as easily as you can to your iPod or other MP3 player.

Thus, any podcast can be an MDcast, if that's where you choose to download to. Nevertheless, it's nice to see someone playing with the iPodcentricity of the term podcast.

Doom9.net has recently completed another in its ongoing series of video compression codec comparisons. Doom9's primary focus is on backing up video DVDs, whether that means copying them to DVD-R, or further compressing them so that a full movie will fit on one or more CD-Rs.

Because of this focus, the primary concern is with overall video quality at a particular data rate or file size. Thus, the winners are implementations of MPEG4, which is an open standard. Since some standalone DVD players are now also supporting MPEG4, this makes sense.

However, this sort of evaluation should not necessarily be generalized to how particular codecs perform in streaming implementations. The conditions that face streaming--packet loss, network congestion, etc--aren't present with a video file burned to a disc. Therefore, data that in a streamed video would have to be dedicated to transport information can be put to use to carry more video information with a non-streamed file.

I think that's one reason why Real Video codecs tend to come out lower in the pack in these comparisons--it's primarily a streaming codec, and in my experience performs very well in that regard. However, while I do recommend Real for streaming applications where simplicity is valued over other priorities like open standards, I would not recommend it as a good codec for archiving video or backing up DVDs.

The advantage to MPEG4 implementations is that videos encoded in this format can be transcoded fairly easily to be used in other applications. Real Video cannot.

This isn't such a problem for Real when you are focused on streaming, since your streaming file should not be the one you archive -- you should always archive the highest quality file you have so that you can transcode or re-encode to new, more advanced codecs as they become available.

As a real-world example, I've been working on making videos from this past August's Community Wireless Summit available both for streaming and download. For the streamed videos, I'm using Real Video 9 streamed off a Real Helix server. The quality is decent on broadband, scales to lower bandwidths, and adapts smoothly to network conditions.

For the downloadable videos, I've used the Quicktime implementation of MPEG4, since this will give a nice quality file for those who want to keep a copy of the video. That file can easily be played on MPEG4 capable DVD players, or transcoded to VCD or even DVD.

I just posted to Epinions a pretty long review of my MZ-NH1 Hi-MD recorder that I've mentioned here recently. I like this recorder a lot, especially for its ability to upload audio you've recorded directly to your PC. At $329, it's pretty pricey, but there also isn't any other device out there that is as functional and capable at digital recording and playback in its price range.

I post electronics reviews to Epinions on an occasional basis. I do it because I've found other Epinions user reviews to be helpful in the past and I want to contribute to this store of knowledge. Even though it's a dot-com profiting from user's reviews, they do pay you based upon how many views your reviews get.

If you post a popular review, which means it's a review of a popular item, you can easily make at least $25 for just one review. Although this may sound like pennies, you'd be lucky making any more than that writing freelance for a small print or web publication. The only way you'd make more than that is as a staff writer somewhere.

The other reason why I post reviews there is because they have a greater likelihood of being read by potential buyer than if I posted them here. I think user reviews can be useful when you're contemplating a purchase since professional reviewers typically only have an item for a week or so, whereas someone who owns the item knows it much more thoroughly due to constant use. That doesn't mean that every Epinions review is a gem, but it's easy to pick out the thoughtful reviews, and Epinion's own review rating system is a helpful guide.

I haven't written much of my little cheap camera "hobby" here on the 'geek, though I made a little mention of it on the now-abandoned mediageeeklife blog, and wrote about it in mediageeek zine #2. I've amassed a nice little pile of cheap "vintage" cameras that I enjoy taking weird pics with. One of them is a plastic brick-like box called the Holga 35.

By manufacturing heritage it's a cousin of the just-plain Holga camera, a favorite of art photographers and plastic camera aficionados for its plastic lens and unpredictable nature.

The Holga 35 is much more modern by comparison, sporting early 80s type autofocus and exposure, combined with the aesthetics of a cheap knock-off brand walkman bought at Walgreen's in 1983.

I got mine for $15 on Ebay, brand new, shipped from Hong Kong, just to mess around with (although now I see the price has gone up to $20 - $30 -- hmmmm). It's big sister, the regular Holga is about $20, but takes medium-format film which is much more expensive to buy, process and print. And, honestly, I really haven't shot too many pics with it yet.

But the reason I'm blogging this is because I was clicking around the lomography website this evening to find instructions for my eBay'd colorsplash flash when I noticed that the Lomo people are now selling the lowly Holga 35 camera... for $55 - $65 dollars (plus shipping)!

Now, we have to acknowledge that the whole "cult" behind a sloppily-assembled, slightly obsolete Soviet-engineered camera is a clever bit of viral marketing. I won't be the first to say this, but selling it for $180 is a bit of crookery, and just goes to show how effective marketing can be, especially when it poses as something more arty and bohemian.

It is just as much of a ripoff selling a $15 Chinese plastic camera for $65, justified by dressing it up in ironic hipness.

But of course, you knew this. I was just kind of blown away, thinking that when I bought it that this $15 pile of plastic would never be cool enough for Lomo. Either that, or I'm a trendsetter.

Driven by necessity, this week was the first time I brought my Hi-MD recorder to the radio station to record the radioshow and it worked out pretty well, as I'll detail in a moment.

Typically I just record the show with the aircheck MD deck that's in the studio, but the input to that deck has been screwed up for the last few weeks. To make up for this I've been recording off the air at home, but last week I wasn't able to make it home before the show and got caught at the station finding the studio deck to be unuseable. Luckily, some kind soul left cables that will patch an 1/8" plug into our studio patch bay so I tried it out with my cheap-o portable MD that I use as a walkman and I was able to patch it directly into the broadcast board output and record to regular MD.

So I was thus emboldened to give it a shot with the Hi-MD yesterday, which allows me to record in full uncompressed CD quality PCM to a Hi-MD disc, and then upload it directly to my PC in faster than real time. Then I use the Sony WAV Converter program to make it editable in any audio application.

Aside from some slight clipping due to my not setting levels correctly, this first experiment went flawlessly. The feed to the MD deck in our studio actually comes off our air monitors, so the direct board feed I found yields bettter sound quality, too.

Being able to work with pure uncompressed PCM and upload directly to PC saves some time and effort in getting the show ready to be uploaded to the website. It's nice to finally have some recording technology work as promised.

I don't know anybody else who also took the plunge into trying Hi-MD, and at least a couple of other radio folks I know were waiting to hear what my experiences would be like. I can say now that I'm pretty confident that Hi-MD makes recording and editing digital audio easier than any other piece of equipment in its price range, and can recommend Hi-MD to anyone who is already familiar with MD equipment.

According to an article in the NY Times Circuits, 3-chip DV camcorders are dropping in price. Most inexpensive camcorders have a single pick-up chip for recording images. While efficient, a single chip is more prone to noise and color aberrations. A 3-chip camcorder dedicates one pickup chip for each of the primary colors in video: red, green and blue.

In my professional work we use 3-chip camcorders exclusively because the picture quality looks more like broadcast TV and stands up to editing, processing and compression for streaming and DVDs better.

The Times article specifically mentions a pretty inexpensive Panasonic model I've come across and been curious about, PV-GS120. With a street price of $500 - $600 it's cheaper than many single-chip models from Sony and Canon. According to some informed-sounding user reviews at Epinions, it sounds like this cam has just enough pro-level features to be a satisfactory for someone who wants something more than a basic "point-and-shoot" camcorder.

I may decide to replace my current camcorder, also an inexpensive Panasonic, in the near future because it's got a flaky LCD screen. I will probably consider this model as a good compromise between price, size and picture quality. Though I haven't yet used it, I reckon this kind of cam is ideally suited to indy video work, especially for actions and other citizen journalism, where you want good quality, but also don't want to risk multi-thousand dollar equipment getting smashed by riot cops.