Rich’s Random Podcast Generator: Phablet – a phone approaching the size of a tablet – RRPG004

This week we stray a bit from the usual tech talk with a couple of discussions: how we get our news, and one in particular – the current state of writing skills.

As Jim and Mike are both involved in hiring new personnel at their respective companies, they see a number of resumes. However, their actual interview processes vary a good deal from each other. Mike takes the more traditional approach by first reviewing the resume, which had better be well-written or it hits the trash can. Jim’s company, on the other hand, begins by having the applicants take an online test and gets around to the resume later in the process. It’s interesting to hear each perspective, and yet each way seems to work well.

Rich is running with a new mic setup this week – an SM58 going through an M-Audio Fast Track USB audio interface. He’s replacing his Logitech ClearChat Pro headset mic which he thinks is too thin sounding and lacking a smooth dynamic response.

Tim Black loves his Blue Yeti, an excellent microphone for less than $90 – big sound in close proximity. Tim sets his on a desk a few feet away so we don’t get a true representation of what this mic can do, but take our word; it’s a good bang for the buck.

And we still don’t know how Jim gets all that sound out of an $39 Plantronics headset. Some suspect he has a Heil PR40 hanging overhead, just out of sight.

Tim shares a happy tale of how he recovered a ton of accidentally deleted music files with Piriform’s Recuva. Mike’s had a similar experience, using PhotoRec to recover a bunch of photos from a thumb drive.

Mike is finally getting around to redoing his unRAID setup. He’s not been happy with his server’s performance, but a new SATA card will give his parity drive much better throughput and boost the overall read/write speeds. He’ll also update the unRAID OS which resides on a thumb drive. Crazy! We can’t wait to hear how it goes.

Hey, have you seen the Samsung Galaxy Note? This is one huge phone, on the order of a small tablet. Or as our friend Gary Johnson says, this thing’s a phablet!

And finally, yet another HP TouchPad update. HP will be doing another production run, but the guys think they might try to squeeze folks for $250 instead of selling them for the fire-sale price of $99 which sent them flying off store shelves in the first place. Jim goes off on a bit of a rant over HP’s handling of the whole affair, channeling well-known HP antagonist Christian Johnson.

In the show this week: Jim Collison, Rich O’Neil, Mike Howard, John Zajdler, Tim Black

Rich’s RPG is a weekly show hosted by Jim Collison and Rich O’Neil. We talk tech with other like-minded folks, using Google + hangout to facilitate our discussions. Together we cover whatever’s interesting – hot or not, current or historical. No outlines, no agenda, no worries. Join us!

Jim’s Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/jcollison

Contact the show at podcast@theaverageguy.tv

If you have a product or a topic you would like us to discuss, please tag your articles in Delicious using the tag “TheAverageGuy”.

Find this and other great Podcasts from the Average Guy Network at http://theaverageguy.tv

Intro and Exit Music used by permission from “”In the Shadow Of The Great Machine” by Fool’s Chaos. Hear more great tunes at Fool’s Chaos