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) Make your own iPod music with Belkin home studio
As a guitarist and singer, I've been looking for an affordable device that lets me make good recordings without a lot of muss and fuss.
So when I first saw the TuneStudio, which is electronics accessory-maker Belkin International Inc.'s recently released four-channel audio mixer -- and the first I've seen with an iPod dock -- I was excited but skeptical.
The prospect of recording songs by my band, Cupcake Fighting League, straight to my iPod with something more advanced than a small portable microphone intrigued me. But I had doubts about how portable and versatile the TuneStudio would actually be.
As it turns out, the TuneStudio is an affordable choice ($400, though it is widely available online for $200 to $300) for musicians who want a stylish, lightweight device for recording and mixing on the fly -- all good things since you never know when inspiration might strike. More>> - (
) It's not you, it's me
It's payback time. It seems to have been payback time for quite some bedraggled time now. Finishing with people, or being finished with by them - people I had once even briefly loved - is something I have started to wonder if I excel at. This has never struck me as particularly odd. I thought everyone did it. I suppose they do. In their teens, and twenties. But it hits me, suddenly, that colleagues tend to greet me now not with, 'How's X?' but, 'Still with X?'; sometimes they even mention an actual name. It is surely a little odd not to have children at my age (47). It has also, rather more sombrely, struck me that the older I get the more pronounced the tilt of the balance: where once it was always me doing the finishing, now it is, more often than not, not.. More>>
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) Projectors to Magnify Cell-Phone Cinema
Recognizing that it's not much fun to watch movies on a tiny cell phone, a number of companies are racing to develop gadgets that project what's playing on the small screen onto walls, table cloths and other handy surfaces."Pico projectors" that are small enough to carry around in a shirt pocket are expected on the market later this year. Eventually, the technology will be tiny enough to be built into phones and portable media players, the companies say.
Microvision Inc., a small Redmond, Wash., company, was at the CTIA Wireless industry show this week to demonstrate a prototype of its projector. It's about the size of two full-size iPods, but by the time it goes on sale later this year, it should be about 30 percent smaller, said Russell Hannigan, the company's director of projector product management. More>>