Tuesday’s edition of WNPR’s Colin McEnroe Show focused on the past, present, and future of the TV remote control and various other buttons that control our lives.
The show featured Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button, and Caetlin Benson-Allott, author of Remote Control — two books I am now adding to my Christmas list.
If you’ve enjoyed our Button of the Month column, you may find this discussion fascinating.
Talking to Seth Meyers, director Darren Aronofsky shares a few details about the tech behind “Postcard from Earth,” his new movie made for that giant 18K wraparound Sphere screen in Las Vegas.
Most notably, the camera used to shoot it records 32 gigabytes per second. The end result is half a petabyte file — the storage equivalent of roughly 1,953 base model M2 MacBooks Air.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Goosebumps author R.L. Stine mentions how smartphones have changed the way he writes his horror novels. Everyone has a phone to call for help!
“I spend a lot of time in the beginning of every book trying to get rid of the phones to make sure they don’t interfere.”
A few Verge staffers have be been playing around with a new app called Orion, which turns the iPad into a HDMI monitor. Dan got Dex running to his iPad, Parker sent his Switch’s video output to the device, and I used the tablet as a monitor for my retro Windows PC.
Study up, this will be on the next dongle quiz.
With the new $499 SM7dB (kinda punny), Shure adds an integrated preamp to the classic radio microphone to bring its audio signal up to proper recording levels right out of the gate. This will help out podcasters and traveling audio engineers who typically have to use a Cloudlifter box whenever they want the SM7b sound.
Although it’s a good option, newer consumer audio interfaces boast the preamps’ ability to provide enough signal boost to these mics anyway.
The Verge video team took a trip around NYC to compare noise-cancelling headphones from Apple, Sony, and Bose — including twenty-year-old QC-1s and a set of $1,300 aviation headphones. Then we sent them to an independent lab for more tests.
You can read more about those results here, but please watch me spend hours on a hot day outside for journalism.
Also: Liam Neeson used it to blow something up.
Unlike its X2U predecessor, settings like gain and monitoring on this $129 device are only controllable through Shure’s MOTIV app.
I plugged the MVX2U into an iPad and was easily able to record my podcasting mics with it. This will do the trick if you are really traveling light (it’s a little over 3 inches long), but boy does it sacrifice the audio quality of Shure’s own SM7b. Comparing it next to my regular interface, it sounds thinner and noisier than I’d personally like for my recording. Convenience over quality!
