Only- Electronics

For all its public devotion to innovation, the computer industry has been unwilling to break one rule — it takes a keyboard and mouse to use a home computer.

Beverly writes, I need to record voice to CD, efficiently, and have the cd play in any normal CD player. I have an M-Audio Microtrack recorder with 1gb compact flash, but it seems that I have a high quality recording but it takes up a lot of space. In a work day I need to make 6 recordings. Does it make sense to consider a 30gb iPod to record voice to, and then burn to CD?

You don’t mention how long your six recordings per day are, but if you want good quality sound for recording, don’t use the iPod or any other portable media player. The Microtrack recorder is a good tool for what you are doing. If you want to use less space per file change your record settings. Under the Record Settings on the Menu make the following changes: Set Encoder to WAV. Set Sample Rate to 44.1. Set Bits to 16 (not 24). Using these settings, you will get about 90 minutes on a 1GB Compact Flash card and won’t notice any quality difference. A much cheaper solution than buying an iPod would be to get several 1GB or 2GB compact flash cards and then swapping the card when it gets full. This also gives you the flexibility of using the Microtrack all day long. Keep in mind that an audio CD only holds as much as 74 minutes of audio, so a single 1GB card recording 90 minutes of voice audio is more audio than you can fit on a single audio CD.

The power of the ocean: Wave Energy takes off in Portugal. A high-tech solution to, sadly, abandoned babies in Italy. Work from home? Ever get lonely? No longer the case in France. And cars are catching on in Vietnam.

The XM and Sirius satellite radio services came into being to give listeners a creative alternative to the soul-numbing monotony of commercial FM. But a proposed merger announced this week comes right off the standard playlist of other merger-happy industries.

A major conference on climate change in Washington DC and the view from China, India, and South Africa. Mexican drug cartels go online. A cheesy webcam in England. 365 suggestions for how you can make the world a better place. And, careful where you leave your footprint: the British police are watching. Intermixed within it all, some good ole’ fashioned banjos from Nashville.

Used Smartphones and PDAs for Sale on eBay Reveal Massive Volume of Sensitive Data. ” Used smartphones and PDAs for…

Customers might not like the idea of technology that allows some uses of music (like copying iTunes downloads to their iPods) but forbids others (like copying the same song to another kind of music player). But until recently, it didn’t seem to bother the executives behind these anti-piracy systems.

The Tech podcast is back after a one-week hiatus. On this weeks podcast. Getting your vitamins by eating more rice; genetically-modified rice that is. An elaborate maze of underground nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. What will tougher new vehicle emission standards in Europe mean for Detroit? Cement bricks that eat smog in Italy. The TV show “Friends” — Chinese style and on the Internet. A new United Nations report on Global Warming and world attitudes about climate change. And make your wardrobe environmentally friendly!

Browsing the Web on your cellphone can seem so hard that most people don’t even try. But why should that be?

Tony writes, “Part of [my] podcast will involve material I record on an Olympus Digital Voice Recorder WS-100. It transfers the files to the PC via USB connection. However, when I tried to open the file with Audacity, it says the file is a Window Media file and need to convert it.”

The Olympus WS-100 is definitely a convenient tool for voice recording applications. Before I get into how to convert Windows Media WMA files to WAV files you can edit with Audacity, let me offer an important tip: if you plan to edit the audio recorded with the WS-100, make sure you record in the HQ mode. The lower quality modes apply extra compression which is great for saving space, but your audio won’t sound good if you recompress to something like MP3 later.

To convert files from WMA to WAV, the easy (although somewhat ugly) solution is WinFF. The app uses file conversion support from FFmpeg to convert between many different audio and video formats. Read on for step-by-step instructions for converting from WMA to WAV with WinFF.