The web page for Blue Microphone’s plug-in mic for iPhone — known as Mikey 2 — still says its release date is 8/20/10, but the buy now text is not clickable.

The opening blurb on Mikey 2′s product page:

The all-new Mikey is the perfect tool for mobile recording. Featuring two custom-tuned Blue capsules for stereo recording, a line-input, USB pass through and a stylish updated 230-degree rotating design. Mikey’s three gain settings allow for a versatile recording experience for everything from a loud concert to a whisper. Record lectures, voice notes, live music, interviews, and more. Mikey also comes with its own soft carrying pouch for convenient storage and protection while on the go. Mikey turns your iPod or iPhone into the coolest mobile recording device around!

Pretty much ready to buy. Even called Blue a while back asking about it. Anybody have the lowdown?

BumpTop — a Mac program that converts your drab desktop from 2D into 3D —  looks interesting enough to try.

Tech Startups brings a “hands-on” review and opines.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Slow moving but breathtakingly gorgeous.  HD, fullscreen it.

Full CG architecture and nature never looked more, um, (vibrantly) natural; although while gradually seeping into the surreal.

To delve into this further, visit The Third & The Seventh site and view the shorter Compositing Breakdown companion video below.

Compositing Breakdown (T&S) from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

So Microsoft labs in Cairo, Egypt, have developed a way to combine various videos shot live on separate cell phones, of essentially the same scene, and combine them into a single, wider video.

A college of mine referred to this as, “adaptive supersampled combinators!”

New Scientist has a write up.

Let’s take it one step further and add real time image enhancement to improve the final video result.  Serious tech.

Nearly A Nerd welcomes web programmer and enthusiastic new Droid owner Joel Doetsch who’s also blogged his favorite Android apps.

So, sick and tired of all the iPhone hype, you took it upon yourself to go out and buy a Droid today. Maybe you were ready to break into the ever expanding smart-phone market, maybe your friends were all laughing at your LG8300. Whatever the case may be, you now have a Droid. It’s sleek, it’s powerful, and…the ringtones are godawful.

In the old days, one would either pay the exorbitant amount of $1.99 for a new ringtone from an app store, or go the more tech-savvy route and install bitpim and illegally force your own ringtones onto it. Either way, the issue was solved. You can’t do that with the Droid. I know, you’re probably questioning that $200 purchase now. I mean sure it has a free GPS with turn by turn directions, but what’s that worth if I can’t even listen to my favorite Miley Cyrus song every time someone calls me?

Well fret no more. Here are the simple instructions for getting all your crazy ringtones onto your phone.

First, we prepare the phone.

The Droid comes with a 16GB SD card already installed. It should also come with a USB cable. You’ll want to attach it to your computer and to the Droid. If you can’t figure out which end goes where, please contact your nearest tech savvy friend.

From the Droid, at the top of the screen you’ll see the USB connector icon. If you pull that down on the touch-screen you’ll get a box called “USB Connected”. If you then click that box, you’ll get the option to “Mount” (you’re a dirty person by the way). Hit that, and now you’re connected to your PC.

In your PC, go to “My Computer” and you’ll see a Removable Disk. If you click on that, there will be a number of files and folders already on the SD Card. Create these folders if they aren’t already there

Create a folder called media inside that folder create another folder called audio

Finally, inside that folder create 3 more folders:
ringtones
notifications
alarms

Those 3 folders will take care of all the different types of ringtones you’ll need on your fancy phone.

So now your phone is prepared to take in music, now how do you get it there?

Go to the marketplace and download an app called Ringdroid. This is an application that allows you to cut pieces of an mp3 out for use as a ringtone. It’s also free as of this writing. Also useful would be to download an application called Astro, which is a file manager. But it’s not completely necessary

Once you’ve done that, take your Miley mp3 and copy it into the main SD Card directory (what you saw when you first opened the removable disk). Use windows “safely remove hardware” button to unhook your USB and then turn off the USB on your phone the same way you turned it on.

Open the Ringdroid app, and select your song. From there it’s basically straightforward. Pick the start and stop points, and hit save. You can also delete the original mp3 from the top directory to save space. Rinse and repeat for any other In my experiences, it’s automatically saved it in my ringtones directory. If that’s what you were going for, then stop. You’re done. Congratulations!

If you want it in a different directory you can either

A) Reconnect your USB, go to the ringtones directory you created earlier, cut and paste the file into the directory you want it to go into (notifications or alarms)

or

B) Use the Astro file manager to do the same thing. It’s a fairly intuitive program, so I won’t get into the details of that. If you can’t get it to work, you’d best go with option A.

I hope I have enlightened, entertained, and otherwise enamored you with my instructions. Have fun, but don’t hold me responsible when your co-workers beat you within an inch of your life for having “The Safety Dance” constantly play when you’re called.

-Joel Doetsch

I follow Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) on Twitter — why, I don’t really know — and usually just pass over his copious twittering. But the other day his mention of BuzzVoice caught my eye.  BuzzVoice takes the stuff you read and reads it aloud for you.

Of course a computer voice does all the reading, but BuzzVoice still seems like it would be more convenient than current ways of doing this — such as copy and pasting everything into a Text to Speech thing.

And there is an app for that (this).  You can purchase the iPhone/iPod touch app or access BuzzVoice via their site.

Below, a comparison of Basic vs. Pro plans from BuzzVoice:

I watched some demo videos.  They accurately show how the service works, but why no samples stories.  Sure, you can easily register for free to check it out, but I see no reason why real, working examples shouldn’t be out front.

Even though the Google Voice app was rejected by Apple, Google went ahead and put out Google Voice through the web, via mobile Safari, at google.com/voice. I haven’t had much time to test it out, but did make a test call using Google voice from my iPhone’s Safari browser.

All my voice mails and SMS text messages showed up too, but I archived them so you can’t see them on this screen grab.

Looks like every feature available to Google Voice users from the regular web is available from the iPhone now.  You just have to access it through Safari on the device.

UPDATE:  I’ve been told what I have here has been up since March.  What else could Google possibly do to improve upon this shy of making a stand alone app or making it more presentable in Safari?  This whole thing stems from a Mashable post.

UPDATE 2 (1/26/10): Now Google Voice for iPhone is even more legit.  Look like this now:

The University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering has reconstructed Rome in a day.

By harvesting thousands of images from the web and then matching common points in the photos, they were able to compute 3-D visualizations.  All in the span of 24 hours.  I am vastly oversimplifying, so check out Digital Urban’s write up and visit the project page for more video and information.

(The video above is sample work utilizing 58,000 images of Dubrovnik from Flickr.)

A while back I was chatting with some folks about how somebody needs to come up with a program that easily allows you to churn out WordPress templates with little to no programing skills. It seems Artisteer now does just this.

Only I can’t use it now because it is Windows only.  So feel free to relate your experiences with it in the comments.  Is Artisteer a beginners only product or is it robust enough for professionals?  Does it integrate well with WordPress?  What do some of the final results look like?

You can also design Joomla and Drupal templates with Artisteer.

Below, a program screen shot: