"The Lust" Rears Its Beautiful Cyclindrical Head!

Just because I haven't posted anything about my ongoing "gadget lust war" doesn't mean it isn't raging on people!

Look at this little bastard. He's all cute and shaped like a pen. Nope!
He's got a little ARM9 processor for a brain, an infrared camera in the tip, a badass microphone, a pretty loud speaker, and even a screen built into the side. Not just an ordinary pen. The "LiveScribe Pulse" (as some moron in marketing named it) uses a microdot system on special paper (which is surprisingly affordable at $5 a notebook) to sync up your notes with the recording e.g. While in your English class you start an enumerated list of things to study for in the upcoming test. The teacher is talking quite quickly and you are struggling to keep up. You think you have written everything down but three days later you come back to your notes and 6.) looks like it's written in Farsi. All you do is tap the pen to the paper where 6.) is and the pen will playback the audio at that exact moment in class where the teacher spoke that item.

So what you say? Well I kinda agree with you and truth be told the lust has already come and gone. I will be strong and it won't be this little guy that pushes me over the edge. But perhaps without you dear readers I would be $200 in the hole now?

What was the initial allure though? I've been looking for a quick way to reference, index, and backup everything I write (because I like to write) and nothing was really working for me. While I was in China the first time I kept a little Moleskine with tons of notes and thoughts about everything. Those books are hard to beat. I bet most of you would agree. It still pains me to this day but in one of my many college moves my little journal completely disappeared. I've looked everywhere (and for several years). It would have been nice to "backup" those notes I took by syncing them to a computer. The physical object would still be there but in case it is ever lost at least there is a digital copy (which I am very aware can be lost as well).

This backup scheme is a similar (fallacious?) argument to the "your house is on fire. What do you take with you?" scenario. Moms usually answer, "the boxes/books of photos." I think most people now would simply say, "My laptop." Photos, music, notes, documents, etc. They all have digital homes now. I think it is one of the better aspects of computing (minus nasty hard drive failures) and keeps homes a little less cluttered and eco-friendly.

Anyway, even though I never had a laptop in college I STILL wouldn't be caught dead with one in a lecture. I just like how easy it is to write by hand. Notebooks are cheap and easily replaceable. Maybe it's just my generation who thinks you are a dork if you bring a laptop to a lecture hall (Legally Blonde didn't fool anyone!) but they are becoming more and more common. Even a sexy Macbook Air or Vaio P weighs more than a few pieces of paper (there's a slight price difference as well) and needs to be plugged in every 3 hours.

But really to get to the heart of the matter (why I think the Pulse is pretty sweet in theory) we must go back into my childhood to understand this gadget lust.


I always loved to record things. This little fella to the right I believe came out the same year I was born. All of you who have experienced the awesomeness know there is nothing that can compare. It's like playing Super Mario Brothers. You know the graphics suck but it's a classic and there is absolutely nothing that can take its place.


Enter 1993 and this little piece of crap.
One of the first (and last) times I was completely duped by Hollywood advertising. It was originally designed as a non-working prop for Home Alone 2 but "it was made into a retail version, brought on by a massive letter-writing campaign by young fans of the film." I was not one of those "young fans" but I did get it for Christmas and was mildly thrilled. Now the Talkboy didn't really have anything on the old Fisher Price except for its size, portability, and doofy "extending" microphone. I think I broke mine in less than a year. The one cool feature it did have was pitch shifting. Still, again with the slight nostalgia. I was 12 years old.

The rest of my tale isn't that exciting. I had a microcassette recorder in high school which basically just succeeded in embarrassing several people I felt like messing with. My recording career got its first big break with Gary Miyasaki's Yamaha MT4X four track recorder at the end of high school. God I loved that thing! I realized in recording and mastering the "Dresdens" album in 1999 that this would be sort of fun to do all the time and that I was at least slightly good at it.

My third year of college (after two years of recording really funny stuff on my newly purchased four track with my good friend Jimmy) I moved up to the big boys: ProTools 6 with a wide array of State Owned (and locked up) microphones ranging in price from $100 to several thousand dollars. Now this was all well and good but I completely lost portability in all those years. I never got a pocket digital recorder because the audio quality completely sucked compared to the stuff I was working with at the time. Portable DATs are WAY too expensive (even now). I also take really good notes so didn't need to record lectures. Plus who wants to deal with a huge 2 hour unlabeled wav file on Calculus??

So it's not really rational to want the "LiveScribe Pulse" purely for the audio recording itself (minus nostalgia and nerdiness) unless you count the referencing ability that renders that aforementioned 2 hour wav file completely usable and linked to visual notes. However, the fact that you can sync your hand written notes to a PC or Mac and index them is VERY seductive. If I have a huge notebook full of writing and I can simply type "Husserl's founding of Phenomenology" into my computer and find exactly on what page I wrote it but then can also copy and paste those notes into a paper I'm writing then I'm one happy little philosopher. The Pulse does not have OCR yet but there is a search function built into the software. Unlike most things and food, Technology and Jazz Musicians often improve with time!

Again, I may take my own advice in my gadget article and wait for a newer and better version to come out (I hear the Pulse 2 is powered by blowing into it). The important thing to note here I guess is that technology is capable of "improving" things as simple as a pen. This should make you afraid.

Hey Kate!
If I buy you one of these things will you get me the other two for Christmas?