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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and Chris discuss Nvidia’s generative audio Ai, a Minecraft theme park, Google’s Gemini Ai’s violent response to a kid’s question, PlayStation’s new mobile console, Google’s antitrust problems, and more.
Our guest this show:
Paul Crimm, Chief Technology Officer – Honeywell Productivity Services and Solutions
Rob on Block Island, Rhode Island asked: My computer doesn’t have a disk drive, so I want to buy one that I can plug into the USB port. That’s probably a pretty easy answer for you, and it’s probably pretty inexpensive, but I’d love to hear your recommendation. And question number two is I have a portable audio system with a mini jack for the auxiliary input. I want to use the system to play a long music mix, maybe three or four hours long that I have on a USB drive. Is it possible that you could recommend that outboard disk drive, which itself has a USB input, into which I could plug that music mix USB So that it plays on the audio system or if I’m trying to do too much with too few things. Is there another way to get music from that USB into the mini jack? Is there such a thing as a cord that is a USB female on one end and a mini male on the other? So that my audio system will know just to play the music?
Rob, external disk drives are standard and compatible across
the board, but if youre looking for something that will work as
effortlessly as possible then you can get one made by your
computers manufacturer.
Every manufacturer from LG, to Lenovo, to Dell, to Apple and
everyone in between sell their own external CD/DVD drives.
Thats not strictly necessary, they are standard and should be
compatible with any device and these drives are a very mature
technology (to the point of being largely obsolete) so you cant
really go wrong no matter which you choose. Youll see a price
range of about $25 to $100, theres no real harm in staying close
to the low end unless you plan to use the drive a lot.
In terms of piping audio to a mini audio jack, you can
find players on Amazon for as little as $15 that will take a USB
input and typically have some awful, tiny built-in speaker and an
audio out jack. That may be the way to go. You can ignore the
speaker and just use it as an audio passthrough interface.
For example, a Hemobllo Mini Speaker sells for about $17 on
Amazon, weve never heard of that brand before and likely never
will again, but really its a glorified adapter that lets you press
play and decodes the MP3 audio for you before piping it to the
speaker.
A compact MP3 player with an FM tuner, literally being sold as
Compact MP3 Player With FM Tuner without even a made up
brand name goes for about $22 right now.
You can also get a bluetooth to mini audio jack adapter
and just stream it from your computer or phone wirelessly. Long
term that may be the most versatile and comfortable option and
it also wont take up much extra room. For those youre still
largely looking at $15 to $20 at any online store.
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