ATHEN MEETING UPDATE & Pre-CSUN Post

Just a reminder about the ATHEN meeting at CSUN. Please note the room change from a previous post - we hope to see you all there!

ATHEN Meeting at CSUN
Wed March 22nd
5:00 - 6:30 PM
Santa Monica C
LAX Hilton Hotel 2nd Floor

Now for some updates and posts that I have been putting off this week while taking care of other stuff [school work, house work, work work] in prep for a week in California. I will be posting from the conference and hope to have some pics of products and such. Also be sure to visit the Axistive site for more professional listings.

First up - the IBM Magic Book Audio Recorder. From the Gizmodo blurb:

IBM is taking audio recording to the next level with this unique voice recorder. The Magic Book records the audio digitally, but the best part is the search functionality. There are a variety of searching options including time range, keywords or even a person’s voice. All of this is done thanks to advanced voice-recognition technology. To top everything off, this voice recorder comes with a little biometric goodness in the form of a fingerprint reader.

From Engadget comes information on the rival to the new Sony eBook Reader. And an estimated double the price of the Sony product, the Iliad eBook Reader from iRex sports greater memory, more file friendliness, USB ports and a much cooler name! But what it still seems to lack is what the little known Jinke Hanlin eBook sports - an mp3 player (cool!)

The Speech Accent Archive ... the what! You read right - it's an archive of more than 500 Quicktime audio clips of individuals all reading the same tongue twisting paragraph for the purpose of comparison and research. Not much to do with us but considering that we eal with Mary, Mike, Crystal and whoever else may come along as the technology improves. till then it's nice to image what could be.

And finally-it's time for an external harddrive smackdown! The New England eText crews have a preference for Lacie while Ron and the west-coasters get workin' with drives from Buffalo. For the time being Buffalo may have the upper hand with their USB powered 80GB drive (non-flash). With a buffer unit between the external drive and the USB port that takes uses power from the computer and takes the place of bulky a/c adaptors that require the drive to be plugged into a traditional socket. Till now the largest available USB powered external drive was 16 GB flashbased thumbdrive --- 80 gigs on a regular platter disc that can be run off of USB -- amazing!