It’s a truth about human perception we can’t avoid: viewers will forgive crap video if the audio rocks, but great visuals with ear-grating sound? Epic fail. So, it’s little wonder that Blue, a company that’s made spectacular microphones for digital recording since 1995, added a tiny webcam to its outstanding Snowflake USB mic to create the Eyeball webcam. The Snowflake was a golfball-sized version of Blue’s Snowball USB mic, which is what I use for all my podcasting. The Eyeball ($100) looks identical to the Snowflake but has a little pop-out webcam recessed into the lefthand side. Pop out — it’s on. Pop in — it’s off. The webcam on the Eyeball 1.0 (the one I own) is a 1.3 megapixel sensor with solid saturation, acuity and light-gathering (for a tiny sensor). It’s no Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000, but few webcams are. Eyeball 2, just released by Blue, sports a 2 megapixel sensor. In practice, I’m not sure you’re going to see much difference on Canadian bandwidths. And, it’s the mic that rocks the Eyeball — it’s a terrific cartioid-pattern capsule mic with solid bass response capable of CD-level recording. The whole shebang packs up into a tough small housing for portable podcasting — when you need a roving eyeball.

Scenario: You don’t work in an IT department, and you don’t date anyone who does, plus you don’t have a 15-year-old living at home anymore — yet you want to make one or more of your hard drives available to you and others on the internet. You could hire an IT human (or a 15-year-old) to configure an FTP server for you. Or, you could just shell out $129 (US) for a Pogoplug. The version of the Pogoplug I use looks like the white power brick that came with a circa ‘80s laptop. The newest version functions identically, but now sports a hot magenta cradle and cable support. It has power in, ethernet and USB ports, and that’s it. You plug it into the wall, into your home network and attach a USB drive (or more than one on a USB hub). You then go to the Pogoplug website, enter your serial number, your email address and a password and, bam! — all the drives jacked into the Pogoplug are available (and sharable) securely online. No configuration. No firewall issues. Nothing. You can even get to the files using an iPhone or a dedicated Pogoplug app for Windows and Mac, and share files huge files on social networks. I’ve have a terabyte drive on my Pogoplug for months now, and it’s worked perfectly. And, come on, who’d really want to date someone from the IT department?