mediageek


  • In Praise of the Elusive, Simple Earbud

    I like earbuds. Not in-ear-monitors (IEMs) that go into your ear canal, which are often called “earbuds,” even though they’re not ­– at least they’re not to me. I’m talking about old fashioned earbuds, like the ones that came with your iPod or MP3 player in 2005. They have wires and just sit in your…


  • Mediageek Radioshow and Podcast now at the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications in the Internet Archive

    I am very honored to have my old radioshow and podcast, also named mediageek, archived at the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications in the Internet Archive. While listening back to some old episodes, nearly all recorded live from a community radio studio, occasionally makes me cringe, there are also interviews I’m proud of,…


  • Is the Best Digicam the One that’s in Your Junk Drawer? A Reassessment of the Olympus Stylus 830

    I’ve been monitoring this apparent digicam revival, and have noted that the true connoisseurs have a particular affection for the CCD sensors these cameras contained from their invention in the late 90s through the first decade of the new century when the CMOS sensor took over. Wanting to re-check this out, I thought it might be fun…


  • How I Became the Cassette King of Community Radio

    In the late 1990s, when I was in grad school at a major Midwestern state university, my assistantship was working in the Language Learning Lab, supervising the video facilities – delivering VCRs on carts and maintaining an aging and lightly-used production studio. There was also an audio lab that was managed by a full-time professional,…


  • I May Have Found What I’m Looking For (Note Taking with Less Friction)

    This is a follow-up to my first post, wherein I detailed the increasing friction and my growing complaints with Evernote, after about a decade of use. When I left off, I confessed switching to Microsoft OneNote, in part due to being free without restriction (except storage) and its integration with Microsoft 365 (née Office) for…


  • The Digicam Revival – I Saw It Coming

    I saw this coming. Recently the New York Times reported that, “The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera.” One 18 year-old, “documented prom night with an Olympus FE–230, a 7.1-megapixel, silver digital camera made in 2007 and previously owned by his mother.” A 22 year-old, “returned to her mother’s digital camera, a Canon…


  • Searching for Note Taking with Less Friction

    This is my first post of 2023 and also my contribution to #bringbackblogging, wherein I’ve pledged to post at least three times in January. (Goodness, I remember posting three time a day, some two decades ago). The effort is largely a response to a infantile billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter, and the overall effects of dominant…


  • The Kodak V570: A True Digital Lomo?

    I realize it may be click-baitey to call any camera a “Digital Lomo.” But I’m quite serious and not at all baiting for clicks. (What good would they do me, anyway? There’s no advertising on my site. It generates zero dollars.) For reasons I’ll explain I think the released-in-2006 Kodak V570 meets my criteria for…


  • The Best Way To Deal with “Difficult” People: Don’t

    I wrote the following piece as a Twitter thread a few weeks ago. However, at the time (and as I publish this), my Twitter feed is private, and a kind reader commented that they wished it were public so they could share this thread. I responded that I might turn it into a blog post.…


  • The Feed vs. the Archive

    The longstanding photo sharing site Flickr recently was acquired from Yahoo by the much-smaller professional photo site SmugMug. As a 14+ year user of Flickr, I saw this as a good thing, since the service seemed to endure benign neglect under Yahoo’s unsteady stewardship. But, under the pressure of keeping the service economically sustainable SumgMug…