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!
I came to the realization a few weeks ago that I had to move beyond the built in parental controls in Windows to something a little more flexible to limit the amount of time my son was spending playing games. The problem I had with the Windows parental controls is that it only allowed me to set times of the day that he was able to play. Our schedule varies greatly from day to day, and with only one game computer in the house sometimes he would not be able to play at a certain time and would come crying to me saying that he had been cheated. After digging around through a bunch of other parental control software titles like NetNanny and Cybercop I finally downloaded and tried TimesUpKidz, and found that all my prayers had been answered.
The thing that makes TimesUpKidz so nice is how customizable it is. I can create settings for any user with an account on the machine and set time limits in many different ways. The way I finally set things was to limit time to one hour of access on school days, with a little bonus time on the weekends. The system keeps a log of how much of this time my child uses each day. If you truly want to teach some time management skills set TimesUpKidz to provide a set amount of play time per week. If the child uses it all up in one day, so be it, they will not be able to log in again until the next week. You can also set the system to require a child to take a break after a certain amount of play time, say like taking a fifteen minute break after playing for one hour.
The TimesUpKidz program obviously has some interesting applications for other uses as well. For those who spend too much time behind their computer set the system to force a break every hour or two or simply set limits on how much surfing you can do in one sitting.
The TimesUpKidz software comes with a free thirty day trial, and purchasing a license only costs $29.99. I am not the type of person that buys a lot of shareware software but TimesUpKidz does everything I need it to and does it exactly the way I need it done in terms of controlling my child’s access to the computer. Highly recommended!
NASA and space travel have always been fascinating to me. I remember as a kid going to Space Camp and dreaming of one day being an astronaut. Obviously that never happened (too scared of heights for one thing) but I still have a collection of old NASA mission patches that I started collecting back during my impressionable youth. None of them are nearly as cool as the patches that Wired.com managed to find in an article they recently posted on their web site. The three part article shows many of the more humorous mission patches (both official and unofficial) that have been used over the decades of manned space flight.
My personal favorite? That of the C.O.L.B.E.R.T, the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, made to honor comedian Steven Colbert for whom the space station’s treadmill is officially named.
Last year I had a near catastrophy at work. I am a school teacher that travels from building to building as a part of my teaching duties and I carry a laptop around with me. The students use it on a regular basis to record themselves playing their instruments and to use a program called SmartMusic Studio. One day a student forgot to remove the microphone from her instrument and in her joy of finally passing the song she turned and pulled the laptop off the top of the piano and onto the floor. The laptop survived but just barely.
A few months later I found a product called the Replug Break Away Audio Cable Connector that is essentially a magnetic break away audio plug that works with any existing 3.5mm headphone jack. Simply take your headphone (or microphone) cable from your laptop, iPhone, or MP3 player and plug in the Replug between the headphones and the device. If you walk too far away and start to bend or pull too hard on the connection the magnet breaks away and prevents the cable from snapping its contacts or from breaking the internal connections inside the deviceFor the laptop example it probably would have prevented it being pulled onto the floor altogether, as it would have snapped off when the student walked away from the laptop. I was lucky that the laptop survived, but it could have just as easily broken the microphone port as well. The Replug sounds like a great idea and it is priced very conservatively at around $9 on Amazon and comes in both black or white.
Batteries may be on their way out. In case you have not heard new kinds of energy storage devices called supercapacitors are making their way into many different consumer electronics. The difference between normal batteries and supercapacitors is that while a battery takes several hours to recharge a supercapacitor takes just a couple of minutes. Ultracapacitors can take only seconds to recharge, even from a completely dead state.
The first real blog post I made here on Gadgets Gizmos and Other Good Stuff was on the Light For Life, an ultracapacitor LED tactical grade flashlight that charges in just 90 seconds and is aimed at the police and fire market. Normal everyday people can still buy the thing, but as of the time of writing this article they are so back ordered that they have temporarily stopped allowing people to order them. Apparently the high price tag ($170) did not phase too many would be buyers.
Now, I am seeing many more supercapacitor and ultracapacitor powered devices coming on the market. I might personally have to go and order an Ecolight Solar Rechargeable Flashlight. It’s not as powerful or as fast to charge as the Light for Life, but it still puts out 50 lumens, and charges in four minutes when plugged in or in one hour if using the solar panels that are built into it.
For another cool little ultracapacitor powered gadget I see that Coleman has come out with the Flashcell Cordless Screwdriver. This one charges in just 90 seconds and has a lifetime of over 500,000 charges! Very cool, if only I could figure out how to keep from losing the stupid driver bits…
Music oriented video games tend to be a mixed bag. The vast majority are pure mind numbing entertainment with very little extrinsic value in terms of learning a new skill or developing an ability. In Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS however, the challenges are both visual and auditory, and depending on your level of musicianship they can be quite an intellectual challenge.
What is Rhythm Heaven All About?
Rhythm Heaven’s game play is based on developing a strong sense of rhythmic accuracy but is done in a fun, cartoonish way. A player makes his way over fifty mini games, each one with a slightly different theme but with varying degrees of required accuracy. The last of every five games is a remix, where the four preceding games are thrown together in random succession and with increasing levels of difficulty.
Each level has it’s own threshold past which a player must pass before they can move on to the next mini game. The level of accuracy varies between games, but for some it will take even experienced musicians several tries before they are accurate enough to move on. One downside to the game is that the individual mini games are always the exact same thing. There is no real variety or randomness to the play, or at least it seems like it. For beginners and those that are rhythmically challenged though, this actually can work out to be a good thing as the game play is simple yet addicting in many different ways.
The first few games include:
Built To Scale – Flick the screen with the stylus at the correct time, just as the scale gets to “sol” so that the pin is shoved into the widget and assembled correctly.
Glee Club – You control one member of a vocal trio, making him sing or stop singing in rhythm with the other singers. Flicking the mouse makes him do a cool little scream!
Fillbots – You fill up robots by accurately pumping fluid into them in time to the music. Four beats for the small robots, eight beats worth for the big ones.
Fan Club – A basic call and response game where you clap in different patterns based on what the singer has just said. It’s harder than it sounds!
Remix 1 – A mashup of the previous four games at a faster tempo.
Rhythm Rally – Ping pong that requires a very high level of rhythmic accuracy. Flick the screen at exactly the correct beat or you hit the ball out of bounds. Much harder than it looks!
Shoot Em’Up – A space invader inspired call and response game where you copy the complex rhythms that are played.
Bluebirds – Similar to Fan Club but with an avian military style theme.
Moai Doo-Wop – Two Moai (Easter Island statues) sing and jive in another call and response type game.
Remix 2- A remix of the previous four games.
Love Lizards – Scrape a lizard’s back in time with the music to make the other lizard fall in love with you.
Crop Stomp – Stomp on the down beat to pick the veggies, flick on the eighth note up beat to toss them into the basket, flick on the sixteenth note to grab moles and throw them out of the garden.
Freeze Frame – Snap photos of race cars as the cross the finish line with lots of off-beat rhythms. As the game progresses more of the screen gets covered, requiring you to use your ears more and more to time your shots
The Dazzles – A cheerleading kind of competition, trying to get a contestant to cheer and move at the appropriate time to the music.
Remix 3 – Fast paced remix of the previous four games.
More games too!
Other reviewers of this game have not been so kind. While many of the Rhythm Heaven reviews from other sites all seem to hit the point that it is a fairly tough game to win at. While that may be true to some extent it is still a lot of fun and rather addicting as you try to get your rhythmic timing just right. Yes, it is a bit harder to complete especially if you are a non-musician, but unlike other games where you practice a level with the only reward being that you finish the game, completing Rhythm Heaven can actually help you improve your rhythmic accuracy on a visual and auditory level. As anyone that plays it will attest to, you can’t solely rely on the visuals to pass the levels. You have to use your ear and develop a very keen internal sense of rhythm in order to advance through the game.
As video games go Rhythm Heaven for the Nintendo DS is a good play for all ages.
Pros: A fun, brain intensive game that almost anyone can enjoy playing. The mini games are inventive and very original. A good edutainment alternative for aspiring musicians to play around with.
Cons: Relatively rapid completion of the game if you have a good sense of rhythm and beat. Although it is rated E, children under age nine or so may have problems getting accurate enough to move on to the higher levels.
When we first got our Wii all we had was the good old Wii Sports game and Wii Music. The kids rather quickly got tired of Wii Music but Wii Sports has stuck with us for over a year and is still a popular game with our four kids. When I heard that Wii Sports Resort had been released I decided that I had to go out and get it despite the rather high cost of ownership.
For those unfamiliar with Wii Sports Resort it includes twelve different games ranging from classics like a souped up version of the old bowling game to more unique titles like wakeboarding, archery, and fencing. Each of the games is well rendered, with easy enough rules even for my three year old to figure out how to play. My only problem with the game is the price tag. Not the $50 for the game (many popular Nintendo titles seem to start out at that price level) but with the required additional controllers that you have to buy to play the games. Wii Sports Resort uses a new enhanced motion detection accessory called the Wii Motion Plus. It attaches to the end of the Wii remote and comes with a special extended length jacket to put the remote in. The big problem is that each remote needs a Wii Motion Plus, and each adaptor costs an additional $20 (the game ships with one included). If a friend comes over to play and brings his remote it will not work unless he also has a Wii Motion Plus to go with it. In another bit of annoyance for certain games (like Mario Cart) you have to take the Wii Motion Plus off if you want to use a steering wheel or if your hands are too small to be comfortable (such as with small children). Removing and reinstalling the Wii Motion Plus is relatively easy, but it is still an annoyance due to the special effort you have to make to get the thing in and out of the new, longer jacket.
Overall though, I can’t complain about the games. Even the old games like bowling are definately enhanced with the new controller. My three year old who used to bowl 270 now gets a more reasonable 100 or so. In the end, if you can afford to invest $70 for the game and two controllers then Wii Sports Resort is a resonable buy for the amount of game play involved and will provide your family with hours of interactive entertainment. Would I buy it again, sure,
Nikon Coolpix S1000pj Digital Camera and Video Projector
If you are in the market for a new digital camera take a moment to check out the new Nikon Coolpix S1000pj Digital Camera / Projector
for something totally new and exciting. More than just an ordinary 12 megapixel camera, the Coolpix S1000pj includes a built in video projector for projecting both images and videos onto a wall or any other white surface. Imagine taking pictures at a family event or at a game and taking them home to instantly display them just by pointing the camera at a blank wall!
This thing just sounds so cool to me. Not too long ago I remember reading about a new pocket sized video projector called the Optima EP-PK-101 Pocket Projector and was drooling over it as well, but the Nikon combines two often used devices into one in a way that makes sense. No idea if it can take the output from a laptop or the composite video from my iPhone and throw it up on a screen or not, but if it does I think I am going to have to take a real close look at it as a potential purchase for me in the classroom. I am always frustrated with having to carry so many different devices with me when I move from school to school (or room to room) during the week. Having a projector wrapped up into something as tiny as a camera (and having the digital camera available to boot!) would be a very nice device to have.
The Nikon Coolpix S1000pj camera/projector will ship in September of 2009.
Infoworld today released a slide show presentation of their take on the ten best open source software applications for Windows. I’m not sure that I totally agree with all of them, so I have my own list of great free, open source apps that no Windows user should be without:
Open Office - I agree with them on this one. While I long for the day that I can use my MS Access databases seamlessly with OpenOffice, in almost every other respect this open source software program has taken away 90% of my need to pay for MS Office. It opens, edits, and saves Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents with ease, and the development community behind it is always releasing new updates to add features and fix problems.
Filezilla – This is the other app that I agree with Infoworld on. I use it almost every day to manage the many different web sites that I am in charge of. You can’t ask for a better free FTP client.
VideoLan Client (VLC) - While I am also a fan of Media Player Classic, VLC has really made me a big fan of late. It is a small yet powerful media player that has been able to play almost any file that I ask it to. There is also a version that can fit on a USB stick to take with you when using someone else’s computer.
The GIMP – I consider myself to be a very novice photographer, but I still make use of the more powerful tools and abilities of the GIMP to edit my photos. The interface and controls take a little bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it you will no longer have a need for paying hundreds of dollars for Photoshop.
Audacity – I also use Audacity all of the time as a music educator. This simple, free application is a modest yet powerful audio recorder and editor that can be used for podcasting, mixing your own remix of your favorite tunes, or cleaning up recordings of live performances.
I have been on Twitter for about a year now but never really USED it until recently when I tried out an application called Tweetdeck. I have tried using others like Twhirl and Firefox based Twitter clients, but none have given me the functionality and easy organization that I have found in Tweetdeck.
Tweetdeck allows a user to split their Twitter deluge up into different panes. One pane is specifically for tweets by people you follow, another shows you the most recent tweets where others have retweeted something that you posted or where you are mentioned by your @username. A third pane show me all of my direct messages. Additional panes can be added as well, for example I have one pane that is a search that updates any tweets on Twitter that match a certain set of keywords. Replying, retweeting, or viewing a user’s profile is quick and easy, just a right mouse click away. The system also has a built in URL shortening service link and a variety of other useful features.
The only minor annoyance is that Tweetdeck uses the Adobe Air platform to run on. You have to download and install Adobe Air (free download) before you can then install and run the Tweetdeck application. The first time I installed Tweetdeck I also had a little problem where some of the settings got corrupted. I finally found the answer to the problem on the Tweetdeck forums, but I also must say that the Tweetdeck support community is very fast in responding to suggestions and questions. Not bad for a free product!
Try it out! I don’t think I would be using Twitter to the extent I am doing so without its help. It has made using Twitter much easier and much faster in almost every way.
Computer Hardware, New Gadgets | admin | 
October 9, 2009 1:10 am | 
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I came to the realization a few weeks ago that I had to move beyond the built in parental controls in Windows to something a little more flexible to limit the amount of time my son was spending playing games. The problem I had with the Windows parental controls is that it only allowed me to set times of the day that he was able to play. Our schedule varies greatly from day to day, and with only one game computer in the house sometimes he would not be able to play at a certain time and would come crying to me saying that he had been cheated. After digging around through a bunch of other parental control software titles like NetNanny and Cybercop I finally downloaded and tried TimesUpKidz, and found that all my prayers had been answered.
Last year I had a near catastrophy at work. I am a school teacher that travels from building to building as a part of my teaching duties and I carry a laptop around with me. The students use it on a regular basis to record themselves playing their instruments and to use a program called SmartMusic Studio. One day a student forgot to remove the microphone from her instrument and in her joy of finally passing the song she turned and pulled the laptop off the top of the piano and onto the floor. The laptop survived but just barely.
for the Nintendo DS however, the challenges are both visual and auditory, and depending on your level of musicianship they can be quite an intellectual challenge.
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