Finally, a charity that brings real value to those who need it the most: The OMPC project aims to supply children everywhere with the greatest notebook technology in the world. Also check out their second initiative, One Zune Per Teen!

For podcasting, no matter if you do audio or video, the most important thing is sound. Of, course, getting the lighting right if you film this is crucial too, but if your audience can't hear you, it doesn't matter how good you look. Recording higher-quality audio is not something you can do with a built-in microphone or a small headset - you need heavy ordenance. This means buying a studio microhpone, a mixer, a good soundcard and some well-shieded cables - we're talking close to 800 Euros here, and enough stuff to fill up a small cabinet.

At least we did, until Røde came along and introduced their Podcaster USB microphone. At around 190 Euros, you get a studio-quality "kidney" microphone that sends sound and gets its power from a USB port. No more mixers, no issues with soundcard ports, and the recording quality is impressive. The Podcaster is currently supported under Windows and OS X, but I'm sure it won't be long till our Linux-using friends find a way to support it.

I'm buying mine tomorrow, and as soon as I find the time to play around with it, I'll post an update with some sound samples. From what I've read so far, if you want to do voice recording in "commercial" quality without spending a four-digit sum on equipment, the Podcaster is probably the way to go.

Lesson of the day: It seems that the Apache that comes with OS X is chrooted. This is annoying because it makes a range of useful local-running scripts unusable. I wanted to create a little cgi script that would allow me to control iTunes from my GameBoy DS via Nintendo Browser - which works on the drawing board, but the Apache blocks all system() calls. Oh well, while working on the problem, I found Dot Tunes, which does the job rather well.