As anyone who has ever attempted to record audio on an iPod or iPhone can tell you, the built-in mic won’t exactly produce sound quality to rival your local radio station. In fact, your final recordings will end up sounding a lot closer to something recorded on a Talkboy in 1993 than anything worthy of NPR.
SwitchEasy’s ThumbTacks are designed to solve this problem without the unwieldy bulk and weight of a professional recording setup. The aptly named aftermarket microphones have been designed to look exactly like thumbtacks – right down to scale – with gold-plated stereo plugs instead of sharp pins, and a trio of holes up top to admit sound.
Plug it in, fire up your favorite recording application, and you’re ready to capture hours of sound, minus the phone-like crackle and warped voice of the stock setup. Unlike a professional mic, it’s also small enough to drop in a pocket or backpack and forget about until you need it. (Just don’t plop it in the same desk drawer at your real thumbtacks, that might cause some confusion.) You still may not be capturing NPR-caliber interviews, but at least your spur-of-the-moment audio memos or friends’ impromptu rap performances won’t shatter the eardrums on playback.
You can currently pick up a ThumbTack in red, white or black for $13. More information can be found at SwitchEasy’s site.
SwitchEasy ThumbTack iPod Microphone
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.