NevOn 2.0 Experimental

Geez, not keeping eyes on the blog for a month and I discover over 25 pieces of crap waiting in the moderation queue.

Spam comments is what I'm talking about.

Puerile comments and I'd be amazed if any normal person would be fooled into thinking any of them are genuine. But, as with email spam, I guess some people do just click on links.

But none of this crap made it to the blog.

[EDIT] Did I say 25? There were in fact over 125 (three digits) pieces of crap here. The other 100 were trapped by MT's junk filter. That works very well. A vicarious pleasure to zap 'em all.

[EDIT 2] Plus over 40 spam trackbacks! All but one were trapped by MT's junk trackback filter. Pretty good.

Posted by Neville at 01:37 PM | Permalink

I hadn't realized that it's over a month since I posted to this blog.

I'm not ignoring the blog, not at all. A time thing - lack of it, rather - is all. I've been spending more time (this weekend, anyway) on my WordPress experiment.

I will be making the move from TypePad pretty soon. And this blog will be the home for my current NevOn Experimental with my primary blog going to WordPress.

There, I've now made the complete decision!

Posted by Neville at 01:29 PM | Permalink

As my podcasting partner Shel Holtz and I often say with tongues firmly in cheek, "We have copious spare time."

So with that in mind, I just started a new blog on WordPress.com, the new free blog hosting service launched in August by WordPress.

Very easy to set up and the admin interface is very similar indeed to that of WordPress itself, ie, what I see with this blog when I log in to it.

I received the invitation - you have to be invited - from Rob Safuto. Rob's also a multiple blogger - in addition to his excellent PodcastNYC, he also writes the highly-readable The New York Minute Show, an insider's podcast about the Big Apple, and the Red Room Chronicles, a blog about Marriott Hotels.

I'd actually received an invite from WordPress in September. But I didn't get around to activating it until last weekend - which is when I discovered that the invite expired after seven days.

Anyway, I have the new blog, just called Neville on WordPress.com. Not sure yet what I'll do with it nor how frequently I'll post to it.

Have to see how much of that copious spare time I can use.

(Cross-posted from NevOn 2.0, my WordPress experiment.)

Posted by Neville at 01:20 PM | Permalink

I bought a mixer on my trip to London a few days ago - an Alesis Multimix8 USB.

Among its many features are 8-channel mixing, 4 microphone/line inputs, a load of special effects as well as phantom power for a condenser microphone. Full specs here. Bundled with it is Cubase LE recording software. That's primarily intended for music mixing and I'll probably stick with Audacity for podcast voice recording.

I bought the Alesis at Maplin Electronics in Bayswater for just under 130 quid, along with a Shure C606 dynamic cardioid microphone. It all looks to be more than ample for what I want to do with audio recording for podcasting, at least at this point - an affordable hardware-based recording and mixing system that's easy to install and set up and isn't too complicated to figure out and use.

Installation was very easy - turn it on, plug the USB cable into the PC, turn on the PC and that was basically it. Windows XP saw it immediately and, after changing the default recording/playback settings in the control panel audio setup, I was good to go.

So I've been experimenting a bit today, and learning (or trying to at least) some new things. I'm sure I don't yet have the optimum settings for standard voice recording - this 5-minute test recording (MP3, 2Mb) might indicate that - so more trial-and-error testing ahead. I plan to use it when Shel and I record Monday's edition of For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.

One issue I may encounter - echo when recording over Skype. Shel and I have had this problem for a while in our twice-weekly shows. The echo doesn't record but I certainly hear it. We think it's a mixer issue. So I wonder what will happen on Monday when I'm using this mixer and Shel's using his and we're recording over Skype...

Posted by Neville at 06:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)