Revisited: Pulse Smartpen

I’ve been in class for three weeks now and I wanted to give an update on the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen that I blogged about a month ago. I’ll try to write a final review after either midterms or finals, to see how having the pen changed (and hopefully helped) my studying.

Audio

The Pulse takes surprisingly good audio. When listening to the recordings from classes I’ve been impressed with what the pen picks up and that pretty much anything I could hear while I was sitting in lecture the pen records. There is a small mic on the pen itself but you also have the option of plugging in a pair of earbuds that include microphones that record the sound as you hear it (in 3-D, as they call it… isn’t that just called stereo? Whatever). Granted, there are a lot of situation where it’s pretty rude to take notes when you’re wearing earbuds so they include a necklace that will just hold the microphones around your neck so they can still pick up the audio without making you look like a total jerk. Here’s the thing, even if you’re wearing the mics like that, there is still a cord coming out of your pen. Obviously you’re doing more than just writing and it still looks pretty rude. I haven’t used that yet. If I were at a large conference I might feel okay doing that, but certainly not in class– even in the big lectures. Regardless, as I said, the audio that the mic in the pen records is still really nice and I’m not complaining.

Storage

I have the 2gb pen so I’ve got more space than others might, but I was definitely wondering how much the pen would be able to hold. Would it be able to store the audio for lectures for a whole semester? I’m not sure, but it looks like I’ll be able to store a lot more on it than I originally thought. I’ve had three weeks of classes and recorded a LOT of audio– well over 11 hours (I don’t know where to find the total audio time recorded, but that gives you enough of an idea) and there’s still plenty of space. I’ve got about 1.6 gig left, and a lot of the used space is the software that was on it when I got it.

This is great because it means that a storage issue won’t get in the way of being able to use the pen the way it’s intended. One of the biggest perks of the Pulse is that I can hold my notebook and tap the pen on something I wrote and hear what the professor was saying. I can do the same on the computer, but I don’t always have the computer with me and I also seem to be a somewhat tactile learner– I hate reading on the computer, I need a hard copy to mark up and highlight. When I ultimately DO run out of space I’ll be able to access the notes and audio on my computer after archiving them (removing from the pen) but I won’t be able to use the actual notebook to access those audio files anymore. Fortunately, I can see that the audio doesn’t take up as much space as I expected and that won’t have to happen for quite a while.

Battery Life

The battery life is pretty decent so normally I wouldn’t even mention it, except that I’m in the unusual case of having extremely limited USB real estate. I have a Macbook Air which only has one USB port. Normally this would be easily manageable, but I don’t have wi-fi in my dorm so I had to get a USB Ethernet adapter (as the Air doesn’t have an ethernet port). So this means I can’t do anything online while I’ve got something that needs the USB port. Not a huge problem, but sort of a hassle. ANYWAY– all that to say that battery life is pretty important to me because It’s a pain to leave the pen charging after I upload my notes. That said, so far the battery life has been great. I only need to charge it every few days at the most. I had the battery die in the middle of class this week, but I probably hadn’t charged it in about a week. I also discovered that my AC/USB adapter works for charging as well. So that will help.

When I first got this I found the most interest from my journalist friends. They were really curious to hear what I thought about it and after having spent some time with the pen I can say that I really recommend it. I don’t know all the features that journos would be looking for, but I can certainly see it being extremely useful. The pen doesn’t convert my notes to a text file, but apparently you can buy an upgrade to do that. Even so, I think that having audio linked to your notes would be fabulously helpful after interviews and such.

This is all I can think of for now. I’m really enjoying the pen, but I think the real test will come when I am studying for exams. I’ll write a final review then.

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Any thoughts? Leave comments!

Also, what do you guys think of this 3 post review format? First Impressions, Revisited, and then Final Verdict or something along those lines? I like that it lets me come back to a gadget after I’ve had some time to play with it. Other than the Flip, I’m not sure how many more gadget reviews I’ll be doing, but I think I’ll try to stick with it anyway.

First Impressions: Flip Mino HD

I know it’s been a while since I blogged, but I’ve just gotten back to school in Washington, DC and I’ve been pretty caught up with that. The semester has started wonderfully and I am thrilled to be back.

Moving on.

A few of you might have caught that along w/ my fabulous new smartpen, I also have been able to play with a Flip Mino HD lately. I wanted to do another first impressions post about this because I really enjoy reviewing gadgets.

Perk one: User friendly interface. Holy cow, this thing couldn’t be simpler. Flips are designed very much with ease of use in mind and have a one button interface. Basically there is a big red button on the back that you press when you want to record. Then the touch buttons light up so that you can zoom in or out. To stop recording you hit the red button again. That’s pretty much it. When you aren’t recording you can hit the play/pause button to go back and look at the videos you’ve already taken and delete the ones that aren’t works of cinematic genius.

Perk two: no cables! Ok, to me, this isn’t much more than a nifty feature. It’s very convenient, but not a real selling point. The flip has a built in USB jack that flips out when you want to upload video so you don’t need another cable. This keeps things tidier, but usually I upload video at my desk where I have all of my cables stashed anyway.

Perk three: great quality. The Flip Mino HD takes really nice quality video and audio considering its size. (Here are the actual specs.) I’m really new to the video sphere, but so far I’ve been really impressed. The same applies for the playback on the camera itself. There’s a screen that’s about one inch or so across that gives you a decent idea of the video you just took, but the sound is surprisingly full for such a small device.

It slips really easily into my purse so I’ve been trying to remember to take it with me in case something interesting happens (like the car fire on my first day of work). Here are a few of the videos I’ve taken so far.

^^ This is the remains of the car fire that happened outside the office on my first day of work.

^^ This was my good morning video on Inauguration Day

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Do you take a lot of video? What do you use? Have you used a Flip before? What did you think! Let me know in the comments below!

As always, if you’d like to have follow up comments emailed to you, check out Feed My Inbox.

First Impressions: Pulse Smartpen

I am lucky enough to have gotten my hands on a Pulse Smartpen made by Livescribe. It’s currently sitting next to me in its cradle charging and I thought I’d take a minute to tell you a little bit about it and what I think.

Basically the Pulse is a pen that records what you write and what you hear. The pen has a microphone and an infrared camera and then links the two together. I’m hoping to use the pen to take notes in class from now on. It could be really helpful!

The people at Livescribe have done a good job of making their rather complex product easy to understand and use. There is an interactive tutorial that helps you configure your pen and try out all the basic functions. There are buttons and menus and all sorts of controls that are right on the paper to use (special paper of course, but you can print your own, apparently!)

I can’t tell you too much about how well the product works, but that the tutorial stuff I’ve gone through has at least met my expectations (which weren’t too low) and I’m eager to try it out for real come the start of my spring semester in a few weeks.

There is one little feature that I thought was fun and I wanted to show you. To be honest it’s pretty useless, but it’s a good way to show off what the pen can do. Enjoy!

PS I’m actually showing off two gadgets in one here. That video was taken with a Flip Mino HD. Expect a first impressions post soon on that too!

Impressed with Facebook Advertisements

Happy Holidays, everyone! Hope you’ve all been able to take some time out of your schedule to enjoy family and friends. I know I have! I just wanted to write a quick post about something I noticed on Facebook about a week ago.

A few weeks ago I posted this Facebook status about an album I’d just bought and was listening to:

I’ve changed my status a few times since then, but last week I saw this ad:

I suppose it’s significant that I didn’t actually click through, but I did stop everything to take a screen shot so I could eventually blog about it. That’s something, right?

Anyway, I was impressed and thought I’d share.

Hope you’re all well!

Happy Holidays

A Charlie Brown Holiday

Originally uploaded by william couch

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, dear readers. I hope you’ve been able to spend it with the ones you love.

Twitter’s Place in Breaking News

Yesterday a plane crashed as it was trying to take off from Denver International Airport as @BreakingNewsOn told us. (as an aside, BreakingNewsOn is without question my favorite news source on twitter. I don’t really know how they do it, but they get breaking news fast.) Then a while later it filtered through twitter that @2drinksbehind was actually on the plane in question and was tweeting about it. He is thankfully safe and none of the injured are in critical condition.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable just put up this quick post about Twitter beating the main stream press as usual but he ended it with a good point:

And yet, breaking the news is by no means the only role of news agencies: parsing that raw information, and filtering it, and making sense of it in a broader context, is where news organizations continue to shine.

That got me thinking about Twitter’s place in the whole process of news. Twitter and other web 2.0 tools are not going to kill mainstream media (I’m not sure many people think they are), but they have (as far as I can tell) two main advantages.

1. Speed: Twitter especially can put out information more or less instantly. This has already been shown with the terrorist attacks in Mumbai as well as the Current.tv discussions during the Presidential debates. As far as legitimately breaking news (as in, “holy crap my plane just crashed 5 minutes ago”-breaking) Twitter (or similar services) have stolen the spotlight and will continue to do so. As Cashmore points out, however– there is nothing filtered (or fact checked) about this style of delivery.
2. Humanity: I’m not calling the news industry a bunch of robots (some of my favorite people are journos) but the objective (or not.. that’s not the discussion I’m trying to have) style of reporting allows for a good deal less personal touch than a tweet or blog post or comment about an event. As @jesseluna observed earlier, different people tweeting about the crash last night provided different details because they all had different experiences. This creates much richer and more personal event coverage; something we rarely have a chance to see in main stream media.

These were just some of my thoughts. This isn’t an attack on the news industry, merely a commentary on the way twitter and other tools are changing the way we receive news.

As usual, please leave your thoughts in the comments! If you’d like to have comments emailed to you check out Feed My Inbox.

It’s Snowing!!

Holy crap it’s snowing on my blog! If you’re reading this from the RSS feed you need to stop by and see what I’m talking about (and check out my new theme and spiffy banner if you haven’t yet).

If you have a wordpress blog, here’s how you get some snow of your own :)

Thoughts on (over)using twitter

Finals time = crunch time. I’m avoiding hmwk by using the internet (bad, I know, but every student out there knows what I’m talking about), but I’m still aware I’ve got work to do so this is gonna be a quick post. It’s something that I’ve been tossing around in my mind for a few weeks now and I really want to have a discussion with you guys about this.

Here are three tweets I just sent out:

• I scan all @replies on twitter (not just to people I know), but I tend to tweet assuming most other people don’t. Is that weird?
• If I want to highlight someone’s work I’ll make sure that their name isn’t the beginning of the tweet, etc.
• By assuming that ppl don’t see ALL my @replies it gives me the freedom to engage in as many conversations as I want to w/o feeling obnoxious

Personally, I was orignally somewhat concerned that I was tweeting too much and I would just annoy people. But I know a lot of people only read @replies to people they know. Since that’s a option, I have started assuming that most of my twitter followers do that so that if they want they don’t have to have their twitter stream clogged w/ my tweets. I decided I couldn’t let my worries about annoying people keep me from engaging in all the fun conversations on twitter.

Did that makes sense? I really really want to know what you think about this. How do you deal with processing twitter overload? Do you worry about contributing to the overload?

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PS because I really want to have a conversation about this, I’m reminding you that you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the comments on this post. I’m not sure how to send that feed to your email (sorry I don’t have a link that automatically does that) but I’m sure someone can explain it) -K

UPDATE:: Nicktabick was kind enough to show me this link which will let you have the comments emailed to you so you can keep track of the conversation (which is getting really good!!): Feed My Inbox

New theme

I just changed my blog theme so if you’re reading this via RSS feed you can ignore it– but if you’re stopping by the blog, bare with me over then next week or so as I tighten all the bolts and make it look pretty.

Thanks for reading!

WORLD AIDS DAY 2008

While most of you know that I’m an internet addict, fewer of you know that I have passions outside the internet. One of these passions is the city of Washington, DC. Another is the field of Global Public Health. Today is World AIDS Day and I thought I’d share with you a few statistics about the HIV epidemic in my beloved city.

(Statistics courtesy of the Whitman-Walker Clinic)

• The rate of new cases of HIV in DC is 11 times the national average.
• In DC, approximately one in twenty adults is infected with HIV.

As of December 31, 2006:

• There were 8,368 people are known to be living with AIDS in the District of Columbia
• Of those, 26% were exposed to the virus through heterosexual contact. This is NOT just a gay man’s disease.
• This is up 10% from the all-time average of exposure to HIV from heterosexual contact in DC
• Conversely, there have been 9,047 reported deaths related to AIDS in DC. This means that for everyone living with AIDS in DC right now, at least one person has already died as a result of the disease in this city alone.

So what can you do?

• Be informed. HIV/AIDS is still a new epidemic and scientists are rapidly learning more about the virus. What we thought we knew ten years ago is no longer true, both because the trends of the disease are changing and we are learning more about the virus itself. Just because you learned it in health class doesn’t mean it’s still true. The times they are a-changin’! (and so is our understanding of how HIV functions)
• Get Involved. There are countless ways for you to be a proactive member of the fight against AIDS. You don’t have to have the disease or know anyone who does or even be among a high risk population to care. (I’ll add a short list of groups I know of at the end of this post. Take a look at one or two.)
• Consume! This is the fun part. There are lots of organizations dedicated to AIDS relief and research. A personal favorite is the (product) RED campaign which creates awareness and sends money to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. (read the (RED) FAQ to understand how it works). Eight different brands now sell (RED) products, including Starbucks, Gap, Apple, Hallmark, and Converse, among others. (hint: with the holidays approaching, these make great presents for any of your socially conscious loved ones as well as your favorite bloggers. Just saying…)

EDIT: Check out my blog post about how Starbucks is going especially (RED) today. Then go drink some coffee! (Or hot chocolate, if you’re like me)

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Get involved!

• For people in Central Pennsylvania:
  AIDS Community Alliance of South Central PA
• For people in Washington, DC:
  Whitman-Walker Clinic
• For college students:
  Student Global AIDS Campaign
• For anyone interested:
  Join (RED)