We've been living in the new house for about a week now, and things are coming along. Every day or two we find some new little disaster that needs dealing with. It turns out that the dishwasher is leaking, and the central air conditioning unit either needs fixing or replacing. But the washer and dryer work, our new sink is awesome, and most of our kitchen cabinets are in place.
And my new office is still filled with boxes and junk because I've been too busy to set things up properly, but that's on my to do list for this weekend. I decided that I've outgrown a single desk setup, so we picked up a second desk from Ikea a few weeks ago. Right now it's covered with odds and ends, but eventually I hope to use it to give myself a little extra workspace.
We also picked up an office chair for $30 from a secondhand store. It's far more comfortable than the desk chair I had been using, and it's at least $100 cheaper than anything I would have picked up from an office supply store.
Sharp eyed viewers will also notice that the windowsills have been ripped off. We have a guy fashioning replacements which should be in place in the next week or two. Did I mention this room is still a work in progress?
But all told, there's plenty of room for me, my computers, boxes of files, and some recording equipment. There's even a closet which I'm going to use for storage and as an occasional voice booth when I need to do radio work from home. That's the nice thing about converting a spare bedroom into a home office. They tend to come with closets, which are excellent at damping sounds if you throw a few shirts and a pair of pants or two in there.
As if my life hadn't been busy enough, Farrah and I decided to buy a house recently. So on top of blogging for managing the fast-growing Liliputing, blogging for Download Squad, and anchoring newscasts a few days a week at WHYY-FM, we've been doing all sorts of housy stuff.
First there was the house hunting, mortgage applying, offer putting-in, negotiatin' and so forth. About a month ago we closed the deal and we've been working to make the house habitable ever since.
We move in a few weeks from now. But the house was a bit more of a fixer upper than we'd expected. We knew we wanted to remodel the incredibly tiny kitchen and make it bigger. But we also had to have a leaky roof fixed, deal with some faulty plumbing in the house, and there's still a fair amount of work to do. For instance, the laundry is on the third floor instead of the basement, which is nice. But the people who rehabbed the house a few years ago forgot to vent the dryer, so if you don't want lint rolling around the third floor of the house (which happens to be the floor my home office will be on), we need to knock a hole in the wall to vent the dryer.
A few weeks ago we signed up for DSL service with Verizon. Since we only need internet service and not cable TV or land line telephone service, DSL was by far the cheapest option. And every major room in the house has multiple phone jacks. Unfortunally, they were all wired wrong.
So when the modem showed up, I plugged it in to each room with the same results: nothing. I went out and purchased a cheap telephone handset to test the lines. Again, nothing. But if you climbed a ladder and plugged the handset into the Verizon box outside the house, you could hear a busy signal. So we could either run a line out a window and into that box as a permanent solution or call Verizon for help.
We chose the latter option, and the story gets long and sordid. But the short version is that I waited at the house from 8:00am until 7:00pm last Tuesday and nobody from Verizon ever showed up. Over the span of two days I spent about two hours on the phone until I found a Verizon supervisor that was actually quite helpful, and today two friendly Verizon techs came to the house and fixed our wiring. It was all very exciting and I'm writing this blog post using our brand new internet connection.
You can find more updates about the progress of our new home at Farrah's blog: Creative Neurosis.
After a short while, I realized there was a lot to say about this new generation of little computers that people were starting to call netbooks, and I launched Eee Site. But by April of 2008, it was clear that this wasn't just about the Asus Eee PC anymore. HP, Dell, Acer, and a number of other computer makers were getting in on the action, and rather than try to squeeze all of that information into a web page named for a single computer, I decided to launch a site with a broader focus. And Liliputing was born.
It turns out the low power, low priced computing trend was even bigger than I had anticipated. In 2008, practically every major computer maker (with the exception of Apple and Sony) launched a netbook. And a ton of companies I'd never heard of joined their ranks, including some companies that had never even released computers before. In 2009 we're starting to see a few new trends in the netbook space including:
- Mini-laptops with touchscreen interfaces
- Mobile carriers subsidizing netbooks the same way they do with cellphones for customers who sign up for long term data plans
- A number of companies are starting to talk about releasing netbooks based on low power ARM processors which could run Windows CE or Linux and get battery life that blows away today's Intel Atom/Windows powered machines
It looks like Marantz is offering a $100 rebate on the PMD620 handheld digital audio recorder. BSW and Sweetwater are both showing the rebate on their product pages, which brings the price of the recorder down to $299 after rebate.
But some sites, like DJDeals are selling the recorder for as low as $322 before rebate, which means you can pick up a PMD620 for just $222 after rebate.
The rebate form says you have to purchase the recorder from an authorized dealer, but it's not entirely clear which dealers are unauthorized. It looks like you should be OK as long as you buy a new recorder from a store and not a refurbished or secondhand unit from a reseller. But I'm not making any promises.
via AudioGearDeals
The Zoom H4n digital audio recorder is Zoom's third handheld flash memory recorder. It's the most expensive of the bunch, but it also features the best build quality of the three and is much easier to use than its predecessors. The sound quality is also pretty good, although you can achieve higher quality recordings with more expensive equipment. Still, for about $350, the H4n might appeal to a wide group of audio recordists, ranging from people who are looking for a cheap recorder that can power condenser mics that require phantom power to those who just don't want to shell out $450 or more for a recorder that offers only marginally better sounding recordings.
.The other day I posted audio recordings comparing the built in microphones on the Zoom H4n, Zoom H4, and Sony PCM-D50 digital audio recorders. Today I have some recordings made using two different external mics: an ElectroVoice RE50 dynamic mic and an AKG Perception 100 studio-style condensor.
, while the Zoom H4n costs $346. The Sony PCM-D50 goes for about $469
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NPR's Day to Day airs its final broadcast today. The program has been an NPR staple for the last 6 years, and while it was never carried by as many member stations as flagship programs like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, the program was always one of my favorite NPR shows.