MobileViews Blog

In this Hawaii Techies Edition of the MobileViews Podcast, I’m joined by guest co-host Kiman Wong. We discuss our memories and involvement in various Internet connectivity efforts starting in the 1980s analog modem days through current day broadband services. Kiman and I had parallel paths over the past 30 years. We both started at GTE Telephone Operations but then diverged. I was involved in some aspects of the 1990s DSL rollout and then in the 2010s, as part of the State of Hawaii Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs CATV/Broadband Division. Kiman spent the next several decades at Time Warner Oceanic Cable (now part of Charter Spectrum) including a period as the General Manager for its Roadrunner Cable Modem service.

We also touch on a few related topics.

Kiman noted that Amazon Prime Photos has unlimited still photo storage but a finite video limit. This Amazon Photos FAQ confirms that this limit is 5GB.
Amazon Photos has a 5GB video upload limit

I noted that the retired AT&T tran-pacific submarine cable (HAW-4) was transferred to the University of Hawaii which created the undersea Aloha Cabled Observatory.
U of Hawaii Cabled Observatory

What is there ?

There are five modules that are connected together on the seafloor. The Junction Box is connected to the HAW-4 cable and to the Observatory module. Together, they supply 1200 watts of power and 100 Megabits per second of Ethernet communications to sensor systems on these two modules, and to the other three modules. The other modules are the Camera tripod, the AMM bottom node, and the TAAM mooring. Sensors provide live video of the ocean bottom around the ACO, sound from local and distant sources, currents, pressure, temperature, and salinity.

You can find a collection of audio and video clips from the undersea observatory here:
ACO Audio/Video Library

Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

MobileViews Podcast from Audible.com

In MobileViews mini-podcast 33, I threw MobileViews Podcast 440 into Adobe Podcast beta to learn more about the currently free service’s noise reduction and speech enhancement. The result was underwhelming. However, I conceded this may be because (a) the audio was already processed by Microsoft Team’s noise reduction feature and (b) an already reasonable quality audio is not the best test case for the service.

So, I walked outside and recorded a minute of myself speaking with a good breeze blowing, many birds chirping, and an aircraft flying in the distance. After a brief preamble by me, you can hear the audio recorded outdoors without any post-processing followed by the same minute of audio processed by Adobe Podcast beta. The difference is striking. You can see in the screenshot here a few seconds of both tracks before and after Adobe Podcast processing. In the screenshot example, you can see where a bird chirp is nearly completely removed by Adobe Podcast.

My current thinking, though, is that if I start recording podcasts outdoors, I want to keep most of the ambient sound except for the wind over the microphone. A mic wind sheild should handle that without needing additional post-processing. More tests to come…

Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

MobileViews Podcast from Audible.com

MobileViews Podcast 444

In this podcast, Jon Westfall and I discuss:

• MobileViews mini-podcast 33: Testing Adobe Podcast beta – noise reduction & speech enhancement A/B comparison
• Is this Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing?
• MacWhisper is a macOS app that uses OpenAI to transcribe audio files into text
  Whisper Transcription
• Valentines day is coming up, maybe a good time to talk “Spouse Tech”?

Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

MobileViews Podcast from Audible.com

In this mini-podcast (4 minutes 45 seconds long), I give my initial impressions of Adobe Podcast beta which claims to reduce noise and enhance speech for podcasts.

I fed it a podcast recorded a few weeks ago (MobileViews Podcast 440). For this podcast, I used a low cost ($30) VIM VIP condenser mic. My podcast co-host, Jon Westfall, used a mic built into a headphone. So, we did not use any high end recording mics.

For this mini-podcast intro, I’m using an affordable $99 Blue Yeti condenser mic.

While Adobe Podcast appears to volume level multiple speakers, the noise reductions and speech enhancements seems to be doing clipping volume levels and then filtering out high frequencies. The result, to my ears, is a muddier sound than the original.

However, this may be because my podcast co-host Jon Westfall and I recorded this podcast using Microsoft Teams which performs real-time noise reduction. So, Adobe Podcast’s attempt to filter noise resulted in the muddier sound.

The lesson here is perform a test using any tool before

You can hear a short snippet of the original podcast recording and then the same snippet after it was processed by Adobe Podcast beta

Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

MobileViews Podcast from Audible.com

Jon Westfall and I are joined by guest panelist Jason Dunn for this podcast. We discussed

1. CNBC: Intel’s horrible 2022
2. Todd finally is making peace with Microsoft OneNote and To-Do
3. Apple’s Freeform in comparison with Microsoft Teams and a related discussion of the Electron framework
4. Jason’s experiences with electric vehicles, solar panels, and battery technology
5. Letting go of old but still functional gadgets
6. ChatGPT haiku 🙂

Available via Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

MobileViews Podcast from Audible.com

Dutch Rabbit

Happy Lunar New Year: Year of the Water Rabbit
In this podcast, Jon Westfall and I discuss:

• Jon’s new BattlingPickle’s PsychOut Discord Server now in Beta… Come join and talk about psychology, technology, intersection of all of that.
• High school’s lights can’t be turned off because of a software failure
• New podcasts creation down
• GNU Octave scientific programming language
• Apple Lisa source code released
• CNET pausing AI article generation
• The Three Body Problem novel by Liu Cixin, which won the 2015 Hugo award for best novel, has been adapted as a TV series. The first episode is available for free on YouTube. The first 10 episodes of the 30 episode series are available on the Viki.com streaming service.

  YouTube

  Viki.com

This podcast is available from Google Music Podcasts and Apple iTunes.

MobileViews Podcast from Audible.com