Well, as you may have seen from my Flickr page, I welcomed a new bundle of joy into my home this past week: a shiny new MacBook Pro (15″ 2.16GHz, 2GB RAM, 120GB [5400RPM] HD.) So then I had to pull some things over from the G5 and start setting it up. I put the G5 in Firewire mode, and started importing music first. Wow, was that ever cathartic! It was almost like cleaning out your closet from the house you grew up in… I started dumping music that I hadn’t listened to in years, and laughing at some of the junk I used to think was awesome. A lot of it went back to the Napster heyday.

Instead of dragging all my software over, I just downloaded (or reinstalled) the stuff that I needed. I didn’t want to bog the laptop down with apps that I would never use. It went in this order:
World of Warcraft
Quicksilver
Firefox
Adium 1.0
Growl
AppZapper
Twitterific
smcFanControl (Ryan told me about this… good for keeping the laptop cool when playing WoW)

What apps would you go and download immediately? What can’t you live without? I need some more suggestions!

I feel kind of goofy posting this, but I think the effort needs to be recognized! Jon and Kevin C. have created an OS X widget for my blog. They have tons of other great blog readers as well, so go check them out at their site, J|K Design Associates. I have lovingly named it “The Vidget.”

Download it here.
Also, it’s very meta that my posting about the Vidget will show up on the Vidget shortly.

I think my WoW time is about to suffer.

Tom and I recently shot a video called “Podcasting 101,” where we gave some tips on how to create your own podcast. I’m kind of glad that I hadn’t heard about the Pinnacle Podcast Factory from Pinnacle Systems. This things looks pretty rad:

• Podcast Factory
  The Podcast Factory professional audio interface brings your computer both microphone and instrument inputs, plus headphone and stereo outputs—all via a simple USB cable. It can also double as a professional audio interface for most popular music software like Apple GarageBand, Sony Acid, and Magix Music Maker.
• M-Audio Broadcast Microphone Included
  Use the included microphone with desktop stand to record broadcast-quality speech for professional-sounding podcasts—instruments too.
• Editor Software
  The package includes software that makes it simple to record and edit basic audio content, then convert it to MP3 files for posting on Web podcast sites.
• Ableton Live Lite 4
  This special edition of Ableton’s award-winning Live software lets you easily produce more sophisticated shows containing speech, music, sound effects and more. It even lets non-musicians create custom soundtracks for any podcast.
• Podifier
  Podifier is a simple-to-use application that automates the creation of an RSS feed, the enclosing of one or more MP3 files and the FTP application to upload them to a server.

from Product Summary

Intense. Pinnacle is a division of Avid, who also owns Pro-Tools: therefore, I’m sure there’s no question of quality. Doesn’t seem to be overly expensive either, although I could only find a price on Shiny Shiny for £99.99. The product doesn’t show up in the dropdown menu for purchasing on the site.

The one thing it’s really missing is a good way to record interviews over VoIP. I know there are workarounds, but there really shouldn’t need to be. Give me that, and then I’d consider throwing together my own show! Hah!