Tiny Samson Meteorite Condensor Mic

I'm a huge fan of the Samson Meteor, which I've used for more podcast recording than any other mic I own. This looks great, and is even more portable, so I can't wait to try it.

Meteorite is a USB condenser microphone that produces rich audio recordings for any application. Featuring a 14mm diaphragm, Meteorite's smooth, flat frequency response and CD quality 16-bit, 44.1/48kHz resolution gives you professional sound reproduction features in an ultra-portable design.

Meteorite mounts to a removable magnetic base that gives the mic a full range of motion and optimal positioning for any recording application. In addition, its stylish chrome-plated body and modest size make it the perfect mic accessory for any desktop.

History in (Stolen & Uncredited) Pics

How to get rich on the back of a scuzzy business model.

The audiences that Di Petta and Cameron have built are created with the work of photographers who they don't pay or even credit. They don't provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs.

They are playing by rules that "old media" and most new media do not. To one way of thinking, they are cheating at the media game, and that's why they're winning. (Which they are.)

Apple Is The "Sleeping Giant" In Payments

Still rumours, though the WSJ has been the source of controlled leaks before. I don't think that's the case here, but it's certainly a fact that Apple has been putting all of the parts into place for a killer play in mobile payments. 

Apple Inc. AAPL -1.82% is laying the groundwork for an expanded mobile-payments service, leveraging its growing base of iPhone and iPad users and the hundreds of millions of credit cards on file through its iTunes stores.

Eddy Cue, Apple's iTunes and App Store chief and a key lieutenant of Chief Executive Tim Cook, has met with industry executives to discuss Apple's interest in handling payments for physical goods and services on its devices, according to people familiar with the situation.

In another sign of the company's interest, Apple moved Jennifer Bailey, a longtime executive who was running its online stores, into a new role to build a payment business within the technology giant, three people with knowledge of the move said.

No Birthday Card From The BBC

Is this really the only BBC piece on the thirtieth anniversary of Macintosh? Seriously? Even on their Technology News site it's the only link I can find.

Stephen Fry on Macintosh At 30

Always eloquent, always entertaining, usually right.

What cannot be denied is that the first Macintosh changed my life completely. It made me want to write, I couldn’t wait to get to it every morning. If you compare computers to offices, the Mac was the equivalent of the most beautifully designed colourful space, with jazzy carpets on shiny oak floors, a pool table, wooden beams, a cappuccino machine, posters and great music playing. The rest of the world trudged into Microsoft’s operating system: a grey, soulless partitioned office, with nylon carpets, flickering fluorescent lamps and a faintly damp smell. I made that architectural design analogy time after time and no one seemed to notice, thought I was just pretentious. But now of course, MS are as aware of sick building/OS syndrome as anyone else, and have, since the launch of iPad and new range of OS X operating systems gone out of their way to tread the true path to deliciousness, colour, feel, joy, pleasure and taste without which function cannot … well … function. - See more at: http://www.stephenfry.com/2014/01/24/mac-at-30/single-page/#sthash.Ruda45ck.dpuf

The Novella Finds A New Life In Digital Books

There are a lot of fixed costs in print publishing and distribution that don't depend on the length of a book. Digital-only distribution changes some of that. Personally I'm reading a lot more short pieces than tradional full-length books these days, and I'm much more likely to spring for a $2-$4 short read than a longer book that's likely to sit around unfinished for months.

This is one reason why the novella – the short novel of between 20,000 and 40,000 words – has never been hugely popular here. Publishers have tended to look on it with suspicion as being neither one thing nor the other, and magazine editors were likewise unenthusiastic, unlikely to welcome something that might take up a whole issue, unless its author was very famous and popular. The word “novella” was itself off-putting – not quite English, you know. Yet it’s a beautiful and satisfying form, a story that can be read in a sitting, and may be more substantial and satisfying than the short story.

"The Wind Rises" Blows Up A Storm

You have to hand it to Miyazaki, he knows how to go out with a bang. I'm almost breathless with anticipation for this film.

Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises is a lot of things. It's the final feature-length film from one of the all-time greats of Japanese animation. It's a gorgeous, Oscar-nominated work that brings prewar Japan to life in ways that have never been seen before. It's Miyazaki's most pointedly adult movie, with a slow-burning tragedy replacing the magical realism and cute characters that have made Studio Ghibli's films appeal across generations. And it's the most controversial animated movie in recent memory.

"We're The Only One Left"

An amazing journey. 

“Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they’re all gone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, in an interview on Apple’s Cupertino campus Thursday. “We’re the only one left. We’re still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over.”

Time Slicing

The history of photography might well be described by the slicing up of time in finer and finer increments. These are some amazing examples.

The word “photography” might bring to mind the stark granite of an Ansel Adams photograph, or perhaps the memory of a childhood vacation. But the camera is also a scientific tool, whose progress can, in one sense, be measured by its ability to freeze ever-smaller fragments of time for our observation. In 1826, Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce needed at least eight hours to create an imprint of the view from the upstairs window of his Burgundy chateau onto a pewter plate coated with bitumen. Today, we can capture photos with an exposure time of a trillionth of a second, and are at the brink of attosecond photography—that is, snapshots taken 10 billion trillion times faster than those first grainy images in the east of France.

iPhone 5S Owners Use More Data

Anecdotally, I can confirm this. My data usage is up from when I had the iPhone 5. My personal take? The device isn't consuming more data per se, but the real increase in speed and responsiveness means that I'm simply using it more. Heaven knows what would happen if I switched to a 4G network.

Apple users have been the ‘hungriest’ consumers of mobile data in the 2010, 2011 and 2012 data measured by the study (iPhone 4, iPhone 4s and iPhone 5 respectively). Last year, the report indicated a possible end to this dominance as Galaxy S III users closed the gap. But iPhone 5s usage is the most intense witnessed to date, keeping Apple users at the top of the chart.

The study found that iPhone 5s users demand seven times as much data as the benchmark iPhone 3G users in developed markets (20 percent increase on iPhone 5) and 20 times as much data in developing markets (50 percent increase on iPhone 5). Beyond the 5s, Apple products account for six of the top ten ‘hungriest handsets’, along with two Samsung products, one HTC and one Sony.

In Prison, Radio Still Trumps MP3

Fascinating article on Sony's SRF-39FP, the tiny, transparent prison radio that runs on a single AA battery and can pick up weak signals through thick prison walls. There's a program to introduce MP3 players and a secure (literally) download service, but the venerable AM/FM radio is hanging in there. 

A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson said that the MP3 program wasn’t expected to make money in its early years. Price is one reason: the MP3 player sold in federal prisons costs roughly three times as much as an SRF-39FP, and downloads can cost up to a dollar and fifty-five cents per song. Limited song selection is another reason; the Bureau of Prisons prohibits songs deemed explicit or likely to incite the inmate population. (JPay, a company that provides services to inmates, boasts that, with its catalogue of ten million songs, “no other music service in corrections offers as many tracks for download.”) However, despite modest expectations for the technology upgrade, the Bureau of Prisons spokesperson Ed Ross said that more than fifty per cent of federal inmates have already bought MP3 players. It seems inevitable that the MP3 player will soon completely eclipse radios like the SRF-39FP in American prisons, just as they did outside, but for now both devices are woven into prison life.

Thanks to myapplemenu.com for the link.

Nintendo Doesn't Need To Take Its Games To Mobile

I don't agree with every part of this, but it's definitely smarter than the "Nintendo should abandon  hardware" articles.

Nintendo doesn’t need to go where its customers went; it needs to get them back or find new ones. Not having games on iPhone is not Nintendo’s problem. This is Nintendo’s problem: For the last few years, it has been attempting to use ~$250 game platforms on which you must pay $40-60 to play a game to compete with ~$250 game platforms that give you infinite games for free. Nintendo cannot win this fight. When consumers look at a 3DS and a Kindle and decide they want to play games on the Kindle, it’s not because of the hardware, but because that hardware is a magic portal to a world full of free entertainment. For Nintendo to stay relevant, it must develop a strategy that can legitimately compete with that reality.

Why Are Teens Deserting Facebook?

There's been a lot of talk about Facebook not being cool with kids anymore, and skewing towards an older demographic (anecdotally it's the older people I know who are the biggest users), but the privacy aspects seem to be having an impact too:

Beyond disruptive technology, Facebook’s creeping irrelevance among youth may have something to do with sheer perception. Francesca Johnson, a Grade 7 student at Branksome Hall—an independent school for girls in Toronto—isn’t currently allowed by her parents to sign up for Facebook, but she’s not entirely sure she ever will (she uses Instagram instead). Francesca says the site’s dubious privacy settings make her uncomfortable. She recalls one Facebook-heavy social media lecture she heard at school: “They told us a story about how one person said something bad about someone and he didn’t get accepted into college. I don’t want that to happen to me.” Francesca’s older sister, 15-year-old Anna (who prefers Instagram to Facebook, as well), thinks that some youth have moved away from the site, or stopped checking it as frequently, because parent-teacher scare tactics are more effective than we often think. After listening to the kind of social media lecture described by her sister above, Anna says she’s seen classmates “actually go on [Facebook] and change their privacy settings. One or two people even deactivated.”

It's Alive! Returns To Futurilla Radio

Those of you paying attention will notice that, last Friday, we quietly slipped out a new episode of the movie podcast It's Alive! Happy to have it back. The format is slightly different to the original show, and this week I'm happy to be guesting as regular host Stuart and I talk about remakes and reboots. Hope you enjoy it.

More Futurilla Radio news soon.

iBooks Textbooks & iTunes U Expand Global Reach

John Gruber was asking about how the Textbooks thing was going and–right on cue–Apple announces a big expansion internationally. Great news for education, especially for those of us with overseas courses.

CUPERTINO, California—January 21, 2014—Apple® today announced iBooks® Textbooks and iTunes U® Course Manager are expanding into new markets across Asia, Latin America, Europe and elsewhere around the world. iBooks Textbooks bring Multi-Touch™ textbooks with dynamic, current and interactive content to teachers and students in 51 countries now including Brazil, Italy and Japan; and iTunes U Course Manager, available in 70 countries now including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia, allows educators to create and distribute courses for their own classrooms, or share them publicly, on the iTunes U app.

How Mighty Software Giants Fall

It's hard to overstate how dominant QuarkXPress was in the publishing world, and in design education anyone suggesting we teach students to use anything else was on a hiding to nothing (I remember similar battles over desktop video editing). There are lessons to be learned from this tale.

As the big dog of desktop publishing in the '80s and '90s, QuarkXPress was synonymous with professional publishing. In fact, it was publishing. But its hurried and steady decline is one of the greatest business failures in modern tech.

Quark's demise is truly the stuff of legend. In fact, the story reads like the fall of any empire: failed battles, growing discontent among the overtaxed masses, hungry and energized foes, hubris, greed, and... uh, CMYK PDFs. What did QuarkXPress do—or fail to do—that saw its complete dominance of desktop publishing wither in less than a decade? In short, it didn’t listen.

Your Own Ultrasound Foetal Scan 3D Printed

Just what you always wanted. Actually I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen this sooner.

For $600, a company named 3D Babies will turn your ultrasound into a life-sized fetal sculpture, delivered in a satin-lined wood box that would be impolite to call a coffin.

Nintendo Needs To Correct Course

Balanced and thoughtful commentary on the challenge faced by the iconic console giant.

We all knew it was coming, but Nintendo unleashed the bad-news bonanza late last night: It won’t make the 55 billion yen (about $520 million) profit it initially forecasted for this fiscal year, but instead it will lose about 25 billion yen ($240 million) due to weaker than expected sales of pretty much all of its products. It lowered this year’s sales forecast for the Wii U console from 9 million units to 2.8 million.

The End Of Film

 "The Wolf Of Wall Street" is Paramount's first digital-only distribution.

Paramount recently notified theater owners that its Will Ferrell comedy "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues," which opened in December, was the last movie released on 35-mm film, these people said. Previously, only small movies such as documentaries were released solely in digital format.

The decision is likely to encourage other studios to follow suit, accelerating a complete phase-out of film that could come by the end of the year. "It's of huge significance because Paramount is the first studio to make this policy known," said Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. "For 120 years, film and 35 mm has been the format of choice for theatrical presentations. Now we're seeing the end of that. I'm not shocked that it's happened, but how quickly it has happened."

Stark Differences In The US & UK Ebook Markets

Fascinating data on the actual prices pain for ebooks, and the best price points from an overall revenue perspective.

From talking to my users, they fall broadly into two categories. First there is the avid readers who buy many books each week; their watchlist is so long that they are happy to buy whichever is cheap today. Then there is the reader who has a particular book in mind; they do not buy very often but when they do, they are not price-sensitive, they just want the book straightaway.

But why the difference between the US and the UK?