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Category Archives: Gadgetry

Why I (mostly) Dislike The iPhone 4S

iPhone 4SIf you’ve even casually glanced at my site or social stream then you’ll know that I’m an Android fan. I am an Open Source enthusiast, in favor of Copyright and Patent reform, so on and so forth. So what am I doing with an iPhone?

It was actually issued to me for work. My Blackberry Bold 9000 was dying, and people in our enterprise have been gravitating away from Blackberry to iPhone, so it was the logical choice. Work doesn’t allow Android devices yet, but our management solution can handle it (as well as Windows phone), so it is not far off.

For my personal phone I use a DroidX on Verizon (running stock Android 2.3.4, aka Gingerbread). I love the Droid and it has served me well.

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Review: TC-Electronics VoiceLive Play

A review? Why not!!

TC-Helicon VoiceLive PlayI recently purchased a TC-Electronics VoiceLive Play when my hand me down CreateXT started getting flaky. Overall I’m very happy with the device. It is solidly built and extremely easy to use and program. The controls are logically laid out and it’s got all the inputs and outputs that I need.

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Will people use Siri? I don’t think so

Siri screen capture

A screen cap from Siri

I’m interested to see if the new Siri voice command stuff on the iPhone 4S goes anywhere. I don’t think that it will, but it’s not because Android was there first or because I don’t think it works. It’s because I don’t think people will use it.

Yes, Android had voice commands first, but Siri is very different. It was created by a dedicated company based on military artificial intelligence research – not just a side project to take dictation. Siri was fully fleshed out before Apple bought it. Voice on Android works (if you speak slowly and clearly) but it isn’t “smart”. The breakthrough of Siri is that it works out what you want based on natural language and context, not keywords.

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Moving My Recording Studio Completely To Linux

Update: I just upgraded my primary workstation to the full KXStudio as a test. Details at the end of the post

I have long been wanting to replace the Windows operating system on our studio machine with Linux, but haven’t for a number of reasons. Recently the machine has been having fits and garbled a very important interview, so it came time to wipe it and start over.

Our home server took a dump, so our regular studio box took its place. Reconstituted server hardware is now in the studio, however it is less than ideal. It was my primary desktop machine about 7 years ago sporting a 1.1 GHz AMD AthlonXP processor and 1 gig of memory (system bus is only like 200 Mhz), so it’s limited in what can be expected from it performance-wise. Someday the studio will get a proper hardware upgrade. It would help if we sold the friggin’ house though.

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