Posts Tagged ‘usb’

the analogue hole

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

I have a bunch of Catherine’s old family recordings to digitise (do people still do that - sit around a tape recorder and make recordings?) and I had recorded one of Ken’s shows on minidisc, so I needed a relatively clean way to get analogue audio onto the computer.

I ended up getting a Griffin iMic, a small USB audio input device. The sound quality is remarkably clean; here’s a sine wave recorded from CD to minidisc, then recorded on the iMic:

tracks000.png

 

The  iMic seems to work with all Mac audio software as an input device. The free Final Vinyl recording sofware is pretty, but a bit buggy and annoyingly, only works when the iMic is connected. I just use Audacity, and have done with it.

so-called wizard

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

Windows has just spent the last 15 minutes searching for a driver for my Garmin GPS. Y’know, the one I use with the computer a lot. It’s claiming it’s new hardware, but in the words of Syd, “I’ve had it for months”. Oh Windows, you really are very stupid. In fact, you are a silly wizard.

a nerd whee!

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

The USB data transfer works flawlessly from the GPSMap 60CSx to GPSBabel.

a small form of happiness is

Sunday, March 25th, 2007

… a USB key with the irritating U3 software uninstalled.

Seriously, U3 is a major annoyance if you:

  • use Mac
  • use Linux
  • work on a PC with locked-down permissions
  • work on a PC with a one-letter drive gap (like having D: and F:, but no E:); U3’s read-only system will appear in the gap, but your data won’t be accessible.
    (It’s not really U3’s fault. The fact that Windows still has drive letters amazes me; why don’t they go for the whole 70s thing and have punch cards and gargantuan 5MB hard disk packs?)

All four of the above apply to me, so u3 uninstall.exe is my friend.

acned, yet inscrutable

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007

acned yet inscrutable

(it’s actually the USB connector from my Kingmax Super Stick …)

a pox on nonstandard USB cables and those who would create them

Monday, March 19th, 2007

I’m trying to get all the bits of my Sony Cybershot P100 kit together, and I can’t find the dad-blamed USB cable. It’s a weird connector, and two reputable camera dealers have cried ixnay on the vailabilityay. So I have to find it.

I have already turned the house over looking for it. Yes, I know that the recipient could just use a card reader, but it wouldn’t be so good.

Gah! Things! They’ll get you in the end.