Well I always through that the whole techno babble in podcasts are bullshit. But I understand it now.
I was thinking about starting my own Podcast project for while. And the first recording trial with my macbook have been promising. But as you can imagine after five minutes my inner geek arose. You can here the fan and even the hard disk. That is a no go. So I need a new mic.
No problem, your not evil friend will help you. And he tells me that I want to buy a Snowball from Blue. So and now I need reviews. Well a couple of blog entries and youtube convince me that it is what I was looking for. USB, three different recording modes and it nice looking as well.

An impulse trigger by a Pavlov reflex build up during the ancient days of the dot com era I fire up ebay. £100, fuck, I am not going to pay that. So what are the alternatives? My unimaginable creativity assures me that amazon will come to my rescue. And £79 that’s fair. Rethink, no that is not helpful in this stage.

Fuck, what normal shop has four weeks delivering time. Whatever!

And as I am asking after the four weeks where my mic is. I get the reply that “the dog eat my mic”(almost).

The whole thing with the single mic was a poor idea anyways. So get yourself a mixer. Ah there is my inner geek again. Ok, you might want to buy a condenser mic so you need 48V-phantom voltage. But at least four.

Oh I think four is too much. At least the £300 just for the mixer are. But after another 20 min I found what I need, a belkin (BELKIN! was always known for brilliant audio equipment ) mixer. Ipod dock, USB, 2 channel phantom power compressor sounds pretty nice. And the £129 also.

So I hop into the local maplin and orbit the audio department. There it is. Ok, I am buying it but what’s with the mic. Hm, this is £100, to much. I am willing to spend the money for one of those at the moment. I am not going to need that anyway. So this is £40 there is one for £20 and there, yes , £10, perfect. I am taking two. They are dynamic, not that every second blog post I read said don’t dynamic mic they are noisy and too quiet. Again they are perfect.

So of corse the noise level of the mic was so high that I did not get anything usable out of it. So I was stuck

Now after about a month I decided to get an proper mic. I bought myself a proper mic, a condenser mic from a small chinese company called sE electronics for about £90. And I have to say the sE100 is well worth the money. It is crisp, it is not noisy, it is just a good mic.

If you want to do some audio recordings, do yourself a favor and don’t try saving on the mics.

J

(viamediengestalter.cc)

Ich wollte eigentlich nur Johnny Haeuslers Post kommentieren, aber mittendrin fiel mir auf dass es mir wirklich stinkt also kann ich es auch selber posten.

Wo fang ich an. Ich bin ein Linker, schon immer gewesen und so schnell wird sich das auch nicht ändern. Mein Vater ist SPD Mitglied solange ich denken kann. Ich habe zusammen mit Michael Clivot und Christine Streichert ich glaube in 1996 den ersten JUSO Gemeindeverband in einem Ort gegründet, der immernoch von Saarsozis als “Schwarzafrika” (for real) bezeichnet wird. War dann jahrelang aktive auf Landesebene aktiv und war regelmäßig auf Bundeskongressen als Deligierter. Ich habe die Jahre mitgemacht indenen der Saarsozi zu dem jeder aufgeschaut hat zur dunkeln Seite gewechselt ist, da sein Ego nicht genug beachtung bekamm. Ich habe mitansehen müssen wie Schröder der Sozialdemokratie einen Rechtsruck verpasst hat. Um mir dann auf dem BuKo von Müntefering anhören zu müssen, dass wir es uns jetzt gerade nicht erlauben können, dass es Zweifel an der Geschlossenheit gibt (Maulkorbpolitik). Dann wurden wir alle Zeugen wie ein fragwürdiges Gesetz nach dem andern implimentiert wurde. Die einzige Hoffung die du als freiheitsliebender Sozi noch hast ist: “Ahh, das Bundesverfassungsgericht wird das doch wohl wieder kippen, oder?”. Und jetzt kolaboriert die Fraktion, der ich meine Stimme gegeben habe, auch noch dabei wie in Deutschland eine Zensur-Infrastruktur installieren.

Das Maß ist voll.

Ich kann und werde diese SPD nicht mehr wählen, Punkt. Und ich werde dafür sorgen das es auch niemand in meiner Ungebung tut.

Jens Kaufmann

(Youtube Direktgondry, via Nerdcore, via Polkarobot)

Music is and has always been the best way of expressing love and Michel Gondry  proofs this with „Carol Brown“ once again.

Well I was hopping that the google talk patch would work but It does not look like it.

So use my twitter.

http://www.twitter.com/jensemann

Heute ist der vorletzte Tag von Modul 1 meines Management Trainings. Gott sei dank. Ich bin ja eigentlich ein sehr geselliger Kerl aber ich hab die Nase voll, bis zum Anschlag.
Zwanzig Leute, alle Akademiker die sich die ganze Woche über, von zwei Trainern auf einem Adrenalienlevel halten lassen, welches einfach nicht gesund sein kann. Unnötig Spannungen sind da nicht nur vorprogrammiert sondern gewollt.
Was soll ich da noch sagen.
Das schlimme ist ja nur dass es so durchschaubar ist und ich mich trotzdem immerwieder darauf einlasse nur um dann später festzustellen, dass ich Ideot mich über Kleinigkeiten aufrege, statt der ganzen Situation mit der Distanz zu begegen die ihr gebührt.
Im Moment strengt mich die ganze Bande, die künstlichen Situationen und die Belanglosigkeit der “Übungen” einfach an. Ich verstehe die Intention dahinter, auch warum Konflikte entstehen und wie Vermeidung möglich wäre aber er hat mich gepackte;
der Lagerkoller.
Ich werde jetzt den Abend damit verbringen mich ausschlieslich um mich zu kümmern, etwas Musik zuhören, zu lesen und vieleicht noch ein bisschen schreiben. Ich denke dass erlaubt mir wieder im Einklang mit meiner Umwelt zu leben. Mann, Mann, Mann.

Grüße
J

Today I got to play with a 310 from zCorp. Nice tool I have to say. This is a powder binder system based monochrome 3D printer. That means that powder is filled in a hole layer by layer and a inkjet nozzle basically paints the appropriate cross section on it and therefore the powder is glued together. So you can form almost any object. But there are some problems with the thing, one It takes ages to dry. I have some rather small part about 30 x 50 x 5 mm but even after an hour drying the first part I touched crumbled directly. Second a resolution of 300 dpi, yeah you wish I might make so validation parts to see what it can do depending on the feature ( I am going to post them later). And last but not least the whole powder thing is a bloody mess. It takes ages to free your parts form the excessive powder masses while avoiding damaging your part on one hand and not letting the used powder fall back in the feeder.

Well I am going to test some of the other systems. Because I will need flexible parts at the end anyway. I am also going to try shapeways a dutch 3D printing social thing.

I keep you posted

Well, after not having a TV for the last tree and a bit years I was able to cover my daily craving for news, information and entertainment entirely by the web. Audio and video podcast together with the shire amount nonsense that found its way on my screen through twitter. My girlfriend and I became completely addicted to this way of self conscious consume of media.

After being back in Germany over christmas and reliving the experience of normal TV entertainment I am impressed how anybody can stand this. And it not only the unbelievable bad translations. The main problem are the producer assume there audience to have the intellect of a brick. No controversy, no critic on anything, a ‘what ever you do, don’t say anything that could upset anybody’-mentality. So you can feel that there is the same kind of attachment of the producers towards there productions like that of a McDonald’s (or Burger King or any other one of those) employee to a particular burger

That’s is something I am not used to anymore.

If you are a frequent podcast listener/viewer you are used to sometimes bad quality, but never to a lake of engagement or even a feeling that nobody gives a shit about the show they are doing.

This all was true for the podcast and the staff of 1up.com.

It WAS.

Yesterday the 6th of January 2009 the 1up network was bought buy UGO networks that is part of the Hearst Corporation. So what? Well, couple of hours later twitter was going haywire. First it was announced that EGM just died and then one by one twittered that they have been laid-off. Incredible, as I read through the list that was posted on joystiq I could not believe it. It seems to be the usual story, a big and well established media concern buys a company without understanding why it is successful.

That the power of the community of a website is not attached to a URL then to the people that are the face and voice of it, is still not understood. I am not sure how well 1up will develop. I from my perspective can and want not support this kind of management. I am just sorry for all the folks that are still at 1up because you are going to be struggling as much as the folk that have been laid-off. It is going to be a pain to keep the place alive.

Well I am going to miss you guys, I hope it wasn’t the last of you that we all heard from you. My advice is get together, start selling you Grandmas’ houses get a domain and put a big “donate”-button on it.

The Best to all of you.

J

As some of you might know I got a new job a couple of weeks ago. Its a KTP a Knowledge Transfer Partnership, in theory a pretty nifty idea. You take a bunch of academics and put them into industry projects. Then you give them some inside on management and let them transport the bleeding edge research in a commercial environment. As I said sounds nice.

And to make all the materials ‘accessible’ everything is stored in the cloud. But this cloud is called Sharepoint, MS Sharepoint 2003.

And what happens when I was trying to login:

Please note: The KTP Portal has been developed using MS Sharepoint 2003 and in order for users to make use of all available features please use Internet Explorer version 6 or 7, and not Firefox or Safari. The portal does not currently support Apple Macintosh users.

WTF. I think it is ridiculous that a government funded project is forcing participants to use a certain product when there are alternatives that do not require anything and are free by the way. I was directly all over it and I bed I am the first who has the problem. And nobody will give a shit because we all know:

Never touch a running system

Please guys redo your course work on requirement engineering and find out if you have considered all your potential usergroups. Hint MS windows is not the only operating system.

Why sharepoint, why??

Podcasts

I am a hardcore podcast listener and you know that I am sometimes also write some more or less interesting blog entries. I would love the capability to quote sections of certain podcasts to comment on them or to use them as a sources for some statements. But this is a real pain at the moment. You have to write down what the time was of the comment, import the podcast in garageband or any other audio editor at hand, make new file out of it, tag it, upload it and integrate it in you blog post. That means you will not do it, never, ever.

So what I want is a possibility to just jump back a couple of seconds, set a start marker, wait to the end of the quote press again to set an end marker, get the waveform displayed so that i can adjust the waveform by pinching it into the boundaries, than get a text field/Headline field write my short blog entry and than upload it directly from there or if I don’t have a proper connection, let iTunes upload it to my blog while syncing.

Is that asked to much?