I‘ve acquired a few gadgets recently and this week they were all put to use so I wanted to share them in true Brotherhood of Nerds style.

Podcasting

Tara and I have been thinking about starting a podcast for shits and giggles since we left TWoP and earlier this week we finally launched the first episode of what we are calling Overwhelming Positivity. I’ve always been a relatively well-rounded computer nerd but I never really got into audio stuff before — it just never came up. The episode is pretty rough because there was six people in one room sharing one mic but I’ve already learned a lot from it.

A lot of the advice on the net about podcasting hardware says the same thing — that you don’t need to spend a ton of money on hardware but there’s value in spending a bit on getting something in the tier above shitty headsets you get for $15 at Walgreens. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I splurged a bit and got the Samson C03 and a pop filter to stop those annoying PFFTs from breaking the listener’s eardrums.

I recorded the audio within Garageband which is really easy to use and comes with a useful library of copyright-safe jingles, effects and songs. I also edited the podcast in Garageband bringing the running time from 1:45 down to 0:38 and adding transitions, music and effects where needed. As I mentioned there are some lousy bits of low audio in the podcast and I did my best to raise the levels in Garageband at those points but it didn’t do much to help. In true Murphy’s Law style the day after we published I found the magic bullet for cleaning up audio levels — a magic program from beyond the stars called The Levelator. I don’t truly understand how it works but it does. I’ll definitely be running episode two through this first. The other thing we’ll be doing next time is using more than one mic so that not only everyone has a better chance on coming in clearer but that each person will be recorded on their own track in Garageband which will make editing the whole thing much easier. If they are not able to record with us locally there’s a way to get great audio using Skype.

Geotagging

I wish I made this purchase before we went to Hawaii in April. It’s a tiny little GPS doodad that once turned on tracks your location once per second and writes your latitude and longitude to a log file on the device. That’s all it does. It does not give you directions or tell you where the local Starbucks is. It’s useful to add geotags to photos you take while the device is tracking your location. With some dedicated software that uses various types of magic to sync the tracker’s log file and your photo time stamps you can add the location data to each photo’s metadata.

With each photo now “geotagged” there’s a lot of programs and websites that can use it. You can see one example on my Flickr map where all my geotagged photos from a marathon walk from the Upper West Side to Williamsburg are plotted on map. You can also upload this data to Google Earth and even show your route path and other nerd-fun.

Filming

Ever since we saw Maria Bello work her Jedi mind tricks on a bat-shit crazy passenger on a plane I’ve been thinking I’d like to have a camcorder and specifically one I could pull out and use at anytime. I decided on a Flip Video Ultra since it’s about the size of a last-generation digital camera and it was pretty cheap at $170.

It also fits perfectly in my jacket’s front pocket so I can just walk around and shoot whatever without too much fuss. Check out the Dominican King of UWS:

And this guy on a break in the Bowery getting ready for a turf way with those bastards from SoHo: