No home should be without an emergency radio of some kind to use in times of crisis. These small, self powered, portable emergency radios are also great to take along on camping trips and to keep in the car in the winter in case of trouble. This side by side comparison of several popular emergency radios is intended to help the reader make a reasonable and informed choice when shopping for an emergency radio for the home.
In my closet at home I have two boxes full of old collectible plates with images of the old Star Trek series on them. Once you have finished laughing and making snide southern country boy jokes at my expense I will point out that they were investments, not love affairs with the franchise. Still, today when I saw a post over at Everything USB mentioning the upcoming release of the new Star Trek reboot will be available on USB stick I was intrigued.
Apparently starting November 17th you can get a special collectors edition USB key in the shape of a Star Trek logo that holds on it a standard definition DivX copy of the movie. It is DRM encrypted and can only be played on up to five different computers but apparently you can also burn it to DVD. Read the whole article to find out more, but they make a good point that the movie is only taking up around 1gig of the 4gig flash drive, so it would have been possible to throw out a Hi-Def version if they had wanted to.
Unable so far to find this available in the USA, but Amazon and other stores are preselling the Star Trek 2009 DVD and Star Trek 2009 Blu-Ray already. Looks like you get far more on the discs than you would with the simple little USB key so my money will probably be going for the discs.
Leave it to the guys over at Samson Electronics to come out with a new twist on digital audio recording technology. I am a big fan of the other Zoom digital audio recorders such as the Zoom H4n, as many other music educators are as well, but they now have released a new hybrid unit into the marketplace known as the Zoom Q3. The twist is that this little unit not only records stereo audio, but it has a built in video camera to record video with at the same time. At first glance I was kind of confused as it didn’t make much sense to me, but then I saw the potential applications of having both things available in one compact place. Imagine throwing this thing on a tripod during a marching band rehearsal to not only record the audio but also the video at the same time. A director could easily use the same thing in a classroom to record himself conducting while still getting high quality stereo audio at the same time.
I have not held a unit in my own hands yet to try it, so part of me wonders how this would be any better than a traditional video camera or one of the popular Flip video cameras, but the ads I have seen say that it uses the same microphones as the H4n so my guess would be that you are probably buying the unit for the audio more than the video. It only records in 640×480 pixel resolution which is perfect for putting on YouTube but lousy for anything that you might want to save on to DVD or watch on a larger TV screen.
The form factor seems to be a bit of a step back from the stylish solid feel of the H4n, and the lack of many buttons on the unit makes me wonder how hard it will be to quickly adjust the settings on the unit. Still, I will have to wait until I see it in person to make a real judgment call. Also the 2GB SD card seems downright puny for recording video and stereo audio at the same time. Still, all of the other portable digital audio recorders from Zoom have been really good, so I hope that this one follows suit. If anyone has actually had a chance to try out the Zoom Q3 Digital Audio and Video Recorder please leave a comment and let us know what you think!
New Gadgets | admin | 
October 31, 2009 8:40 pm | 
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