The camera I grabbed was iHome brand basic webcam for around $15.  Most webcams will work with this system from what I can tell. I literally did no research beforehand, which I do not recommend. I got very lucky that the camera I chose worked without much trouble (which practically NEVER happens for me).  I highly suggest checking to make sure the hardware will work before buying this or any other camera for this application.

The program I am using is called ZoneMinder, which is a fully featured open source CCTV security system .  It was written by someone who had a similar experience to me.  This program allows you to have multiple cameras which can be set to only record when they detect motion, and you can even break the camera images into separate zones of detection. This program can also integrate with X10 hardware to control all sorts of toys.  All of this is hosted on a web server so you can access it from anywhere in the world if you desire. I’m only going to set up something locally to only record if motion is detected.

Again, you want to make sure your  hardware will work with the program, so head over to the ZoneMinder Wiki hardware compatibility list as well as the UVCvideo compatibility list since ZoneMinder can use the UCVvideo drivers for linux.

My camera happened to work with the UCVvideo drivers, so I had to install that first. You can skip this section if you already have a working camera.  To begin with I had to install patchUtils form synaptic. You can do the same with the command below:

sudo apt-get install patchUtils

Then I downloaded and installed the UCVvideo drivers [1 ]

git clone git://linuxtv.org/media_build.git
cd media_build
./build
make install

At this point I kept having a bit of a problem, but I found the answer on another blog. This involved running two commands to actually insert the UCV modules:

sudo depmod -a
modprobe uvcvideo

Everyone will need the following commands to install the dependencies for ZoneMinder. Again, it runs a webserver, so there are a few important dependencies to be installed. Luckily I found a good tutorial to help figure out what all I would need.

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libarchive-tar-perl libarchive-zip-perl libdate-manip-perl libdevice-serialport-perl
sudo apt-get install libjpeg62 libmime-perl libstdc++6 libwww-perl zlib1g

At this point, you *may* need to reboot for Apache to configure correctly. I didn’t, but the author of the tutorial I used did.
Now, finally we can install ZoneMinder itself. I installed it form synaptic, but you can get updated installations form the ZoneMInder website. Otherwise run the following:

sudo apt-get install zoneminder

After installing ZoneMinder, you now need to configure and start Apache:

sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zoneminder.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload
sudo adduser www-data video

At this point, open Firefox and go to the ZoneMinder dashboard by visiting

http://localhost/zm

Now before I could Add a new monitor (add my camera to ZoneMInder) I had to use another program to connect my camera to ZoneMinder. I found a good video series that explains the steps for installing and configuring my camera and ZoneMinder.  The program I needed was mjpg_streamer which you can get and install from sourceforge.
Of course to install this, you can just double-click the .deb file and install it as normal.
Now you have to run mjpg_streamer from the commandline using the following command:

mjpg_Streamer -i “input_uvc.so -d /dev/video0 -y -r 640×480 -f” -o “output_http.so -p 8080″

A short explanation here: “-d /dev/video0″  is the device you want to use. To find out which device your camera is, enter “ls /dev/video*” into the terminal. If you only have one camera, then it will pop up as the only result. Use that address. -y stands for YUYV format MPEG files. “-r 640×480″ attempts to set the resolution. My camera technically supports this resolution, however, that is if you have the correct drivers, which I do not. The -o “output_http.so -p 8080″ means that you are going to stream the video feed to port 8080 on this machine.

Additionally, you can add the flag “-b” to this command to run it in the background. If you do this, you have to manually kill mjpg_streamer when you want to close it.

killall mjpg_streamer

If you didn’t get any errors, we can check to see if the video is streaming correctly. Open a new tab in Firefox and go to

http://localhost:8080/?action=stream

If you see video, then it is working. If not, go back and double-check you’ve followed all my instructions correctly. If that doesn’t solve your problem, post on the ZoneMInder or UVC forums. I honestly do not know enough to be able to troubleshoot any more than I am explaining in this guide.

So now that your camera is streaming video, we can connect it to ZoneMinder (FINALLY!) So, go back to the ZoneMinder dashboard in your Firefox browser ( http://localhost/zm ) and click “Add New Monitor”. A window will pop up that looks like this make your values match the ones seen in this image):

Name this monitor whatever you like (no spaces or special characters), change the “Source Type” to “Remote”, change the function to Modect, check “enabled”  then click the “Source” tab. This window should look like this, expect with blank textbooks:

Fill in the textbooks as I have in the example image above. Basically, you are telling ZoneMinder where to find the streaming video. The “remote Host Name” should be “localhost” since you are using the same machine. Port should be the same value as what you used in the mjpg_streamer command above (8080). The “Remote Host Path” is everything after the backslash form the web address we used to test the camera above “?action=stream”.  Now notice the Capture Width and Height is different from what the mjpg_streamer command was.  This was an issue with my camera. It could not handle the 620×480 resolution and it defaulted to what is seen here. Be sure that the resolution in these boxes matches the resolution of your video stream. You can check this by looking at the page title of the webpage we used to test the camera “http://localhost:8080/?action=stream” It should read something like “(JPEG Image, 320×240 pixels) – Mozilla Firefox”. Those are the values you should use here. Click “Save” when you are finished editing these settings.

That popup should close and the ZoneMinder dashboard should refresh. If everything is working correctly, your new monitor should have been added. If the text “localhost” under the “Source”  column is red, then you have a problem and need to make sure your settings are correct, and that mjpg_streamer is running. Otherwise, the text should be green.  Click the motor name to open a live view your new security camera.

With the current settings, it will only record an event if it detects motion. When this happens, the dashboard of ZoneMinder will add numbers in the “Events” column. Click this number to view the event. (Click “Refresh” on the dashboard if it doesn’t update those columns fast enough for you). This will now play back the video of the specific event. The window below shows an example of what an event would look like.

That is it! We are finished. Now I have a smart motion triggered security cam that will archive footage if anyone goes near our cars. Your mileage may vary of course depending on the cameras, lighting, etc. of your particular situation. I was surprised how easy all of this actually was! I’m going to play around with this a bit more and see if I can make it a full fledged security system for our house.

If you have had success with this, please post a comment and tell us about it.

Many people are curious about linux, or maybe have even tried linux at some point. There is a huge difference between people trying linux, and people using linux. Hopefully this article will sort of ease your transition into using linux, either as a full time OS or even just enough to get around if you ever encounter it. Once you are familiar with software on one OS, its tough to move on but with this article I hope to list out some linux software that replaces many of the XP programs I once loved and how to run certain irreplaceable Windows software on linux.

The version of linux used here is Linux Mint, which is built off Ubuntu.

(Image provided by Wikimedia Commons. Authors Larry Ewing, Simon Budig, Anja Gerwinski)

Image Editing:

While using XP, the best image editor I found was Paint.NET. This software gave a perfect blend of advanced functionality with very simple and familiar interfaces. Since it uses .NET, it is not available for Linux machines.

After testing out all the other image editors I could find (including Gimp) I settled on two progrms programs. The first is KolorPaint.

KolorPaint is a bit more advanced than Microsoft Paint, but has a similar layout and is very simple and intuitive to use. I can’t say much about this program other than it is the most used graphics application used on my computer. It is great for the kinds of simple things I do with images. It is by far my favorite graphics application.

The second graphics application I use quite a bit is named Krita.

Krita has a very intuitive layout, similar to Paint.NET, is a fairly lightweight image editor and even has advanced options. You can even write your own scripts. If you are familiar with Paint.NET, this is the perfect Linux replacement. It might take a little while to get used to where buttons and options are, but once you do you should feel right at home. I generally don’t do more advanced graphics editing. I don’t get into the whole Photoshop deal. If you do, Krita can still handle most of what you throw at it from what I have read.

Pinta is said to be a linux-native clone of Paint.NET.  So far it looks pretty good though some features are missing.

If these don’t cut it for you, then you can try to old staple of linux graphics editors The Gimp. If you’d like a more familiar photoshop-esque look and feel, try Gimpshop.

Everything mentioned so far have all been free programs, but one I’ve heard rave reviews about is Pixel Image Editor. It costs a little bit of money, but nothing compared to Photoshop, and it is multiplatform, meaning it can run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

For Vector Graphics, I use Inkscape. This software is free and multiplatform and I was using it on XP before I switched to linux. It is quite easy to learn and does a good job. In fact I used it to modify a project on Thingiverse and have my own laser cut.

Some say you can use Photoshop in linux by using software called Crossover (more on this later) But I haven’t tried it myself.

Office Suite:

This has plagued me a bit. I’ve been using OpenOffice for a few of years now, well before my switch. I really like it and it is a full office replacement, however switching between OpenOffice (OO) and Microsoft Office is sometimes somewhat problematic. I have not had much success with Koffice.

Document Editing:

If your document is formatted a specific way, in one software, the other will not render it correctly in many cases. It is pulling teeth to try to get the text to fit exactly how it did in the original software. This is not limited to Word and OO Writer. Using other document editing software such as Abiword, and KWord prove just as problematic.

As far as which is best to use, I prefer OO Writer. Abiword is very fast to load (unlike either Microsoft Office or OO) but did not work well on my system. Kword is fast as well, but does not render images from documents on my system,

You can always go with a cloud office suite such as Google Docs or Zoho.

Presentations:

The same problem occurs with presentations. Once edited in OO, many times the presentation does not render very well in Microsoft (the world standard.)

Spreadsheets:

I don’t use this a lot, but when I do, for basic stuff, OO Spreadsheet is exactly the same as Excel at the level I use them.

Formulae:

OO Math is similar to Microsoft Equation Editor. This is just a personal preference thing. I like using the OO interface better than the Microsoft interface.

I use OO Math in OO Writer especially when I am writing school papers. When inserting a formula, a new pane in opened in your document window at the bottom, and you can see how the formula looks in your document as you type.

Overall:

You can run Microsoft Office in Linux under Crossover Linux or WINE , which I do as well, but I only use it when it is absolutely necessary to keep the formatting of the document exactly the same as it previously was. It is a bit buggy, and you cannot easily install certain plugins and it crashes from time to time for no apparent reason.

Overall, I suggest OpenOffice. If you NEED Microsoft Office, I suggest using a trial of the MS Office suite running in Crossover or WINE before buying and fully installing it to see if it works well with your system.

File Searching:

Some people swear by Beagle but I prefer Searchmonkey. Searchmonkey allows you to use Regular Expressions to search within files, and searches all the files on your system. Searchmonkey is by far the fastest search utility I have ever used.  If you are used to Windows file searches taking forever to complete, you will be surprised at the speed of Searchmonkey!

WYSIWYG HTML Editing:

From time to time, I’m in need of a WYSIWYG HTML Editor. It started with Nvu, then Komposer and now Seamonkey. They are all basically the same software, literally. They were all built off the same project.

Seamonkey is the most advanced I think at this point. You may know of Seamonkey as a good web browser on its own but if you go to “Window–>Composer” in the menu bar, it will open the current page as editable HTML in a WYSIWYG editor. I’ve used to this to edit static webpages for classes, for work, and even for a simple online portfolio. This works perfectly with a lot of open source web design templates.

One thing I dislike is that in my current version the HTML has no syntax highlighting. Nvu and Komposer both have syntax highlighting last I checked. Komposer even has a CSS editor built in.

With all three of these programs, the generated HTML is kind of hard to read in the sense that there are no spaces between things. I personally like to add some blank spaces in the HTML code between </div> lines just to make things easier to read, but if you do this, all three of the programs will eliminate the spaces when you go back the the WYSIWYG editor tab. Sometimes it is easier just to open the HTML in a syntax-highlighting text editor.

Screenshots:

Many times, I need to take screenshots on my desktop, whether it is for school or for an article. I could hit the Print Screen button, then edit the resulting image in an image editor, but that becomes very time consuming if I am taking a lot of screenshots.

In Windows, I used Winsnap or Snagit for desktop screenshots. In Linux, I found a near perfect replacement with KSnapshot.

Here you can see KSnapshot with a screenshot of KolourPaint for this article.

Batch Image Resize:

Uploading lots of images to the internet is a hassle, especially if you have to manually resize them all form the massive filesizes digital cameras take nowadays. Instead of having to use the terminal and look up some random script or program, I can use an incredibly simple GUI application.

Squash is a multiplatform batch image resizer. The program is great! You select the pictures you want to resize, select the percentage by which you want to resize them, and click the “Resize Images” button. Simple as that! It is a multithreaded application so it tries to fully take advantage of your processor to make resizing very fast. This is perfect for shrinking pics for the web and for Flickr or Picasa uploading.

Squash shrinking pics for this article.

So far this program in version 0.3 so it seems like the team is off to a great start. Personally I’d like to see a couple of features in the future releases such as the ability to select exact pixel size of resized images, as well as keeping the images in the window so you can run them again at a different size if needed. Otherwise this is a great program!

Coding:

Everyone has their own preferences. Some people love working in the terminal with Emacs or Vi. Personally I like a GUI text editor when coding.

gedit is a great general purpose text editor with syntax highlighting and plugins.

Kate is the editor I’m using more and more often nowadays.  it is a simply interface, but has several built-in features making it preferable for C/C++ development. I like the terminal being built in as well as the Build Plugin. Also, you can edit the settings of the editor very easily and even save your changes as a “Session.”

UniversalIndent is a great tool for code beautifying/ indenting. It is actually  GUI for several other code beautifiers. The options are very easy to use and it is great for use with simple text editors.

Netbeans is my absolute favorite IDE for java. This may be because I haven’t tried hard enough to learn other tools like Eclipse. Honestly, the features and ease of use of Netbeans has never put me in a position in which I would need to try another tool. It has consistently been a very high quality, feature-rich java IDE. There are tons of tutorials online for any problem you might run into using it. Out of several of the other GUI designers I’ve used for C or C++, Netbeans has hands-down the easiest and best GUI designer I’ve ever used. I very highly recommend this for java developers.

Music and Video Multimedia Playing:

VLC Player is a multiplatform all around media player. I’ve been using it since before my Linux conversion. It is simple and basic and that’s why I use it. It can even play .MOV files. This helps get away from the Apple’s dreaded Quicktime player. Personally I use it to make playlists of my music.

Video Editing Software:

I haven’t personally used these just yet, but three promising prospects I have heard a lot about lately are VLMC, OpenShot, and PiTiVi. Since I have yet to use any of these, I’ll refrain from judging them, but I recommend you try them all if you are interested in video editing.

Running Other Linux Distro Programs:

Alien is an amazing converter tool. It allows you to use a package file from another linux distribution.

Basically major flavors of linux have their own “package” format. If you download a program from the internet in .RPM format for instance, that was the RedHat or Fedora format, and you couldn’t easily use that program on Ubuntu. Alien fixes that problem by converting .RPM into .DEB files. It actually does a lot more than that, it can convert RPM, DPKG, SLP,and TGZ files between one another.

This opens up pretty much any program written for any major linux distro to be run on any other linux distro easily.

Running Windows Programs:

WINE is a program that allows you to run windows programs inside linux seamlessly. Simply double click your .EXE file and it should run in WINE (once installed.) WINE works with most windows programs, however, certain ones will give you some trouble or require special attention, or even hacks.

To make WINE a fully usable and commercial product, a company called CodeWeavers based their software Crossover on it. You don’t have to go into hard settings, or look at scripts or code or do any hacks in Crossover’s software in my experience. They have two main programs of interest.

Crossover Games gives you the ability to run many popular games or graphics-dependant windows software on linux.

Crossover Linux is useful for running standard Windows programs such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Lotus notes, Quicken, etc. I have used this with limited success with Microsoft Office. There are two versions of this software. The standard version just allows you to do regular Windows stuff and Office. The pro version includes Crossover Games support as well as some other perks if you choose to install this on an entire network of computers.

For the money I highly recommend getting Crossover Linux Pro.

Music Editing (Recording)

Reaper is actually a Windows and OS X only program. It is a full featured free multitrack music editor, complete with MIDI and VST support. To run Reaper in linux there are a couple of options. Personally,

I use Crossover Games to run mine as it is easy to connect my USB microphone to the input of the program. It is quick and easy. I only use this software from time to time if a certain riff hits me while playing guitar and I want to save it.

Another option is using WINE directly. This can get rather messy and it is not easy to select your input. I had this working, but you have to start Jack Audio Connection Controller (qjackctl) before you start Reaper. You also have to tweak its settings quite a bit to get the buffering correct.

The last option is to use LinReaper.  Read through the forum linked to get the newest version. I personally never got this working on my system despite a couple of tries.

Problems with reaper include constant updates (which isn’t a problem on native systems, but annoying to set everything up again and again in crossover or WINE) and the fact that it doesn’t have a built in WAV editor. You have to get a separate WAV editor for this task which you can link in Reaper’s settings; though I’ve had limited success linking anything to Reaper running in WINE or Crossover.

The WAV editor I prefer is a simple lightweight Windows program called Wavosaur. I’ve had great success with this program.

Some great native linux Music editing software are also available.

Audacity is cross platform and has been around for quite some time.It has a simple interface and is very intuitive to use.

Ardour is a more advanced audio editor.  It has more options and is more akin to Acid Pro or ProTools.

Google Sketchup:

Google Sketchup is a simple, free, easy to use 3D CAD software. It is only for Windows or OS X machines. Personally, I’ve used Google Sketchup with limited success in Crossover Games on my Linux Mint machines. Sometimes exporting 2D images of the Sketches crashes Sketchup which can require a fresh install to fix. Plugins also don’t show up in the menu for me.

Wings 3D, Misfit Model 3D,  Meshlab and others are some great native linux 3D CAD software packages.

Conclusion:

I won’t lie to you and say I have it all figured out just yet. I keep my old XP machine in case I have to run software that is Windows specific (which is rather rare.) As far as school work goes, in some cases you must use Internet Explorer for accessing online materials and sometimes certain simulation softwares, etc. As rare as this is, you want to make sure you won’t be inconvenienced by it.

Since I bought a new computer, I decided to keep my old one instead of get rid of it. This system has worked well for me. A great option for many people is to dual boot Windows and Linux. It is a great option but this is up to you. Others still may choose to use a virtual machine within Windows to host a linux computer, or vice versa. What ever your method, I hope to have helped your transitions to linux.

I recently had an MRI and wanted to make an animated GIF out of the images. I found a couple of great little programs that made this task a breeze.

To make an animated GIF of your MRI, we’ll first want to strip off your name and personal info from each of the images. This makes the resulting images look cooler. This step is optional, but highly recommended as your personal info will stay private, but you’ll end up with a wicked set of images.

Open your CD, navigate to “Data.” Within this folder you should see one or more folders with a name like EXP000**. These are where the actual views are stored. They should each contain some .jpg files, some HTML files and some .dcm files. We are interested in the .dcm files; they are called DICOM images. We need some software that can view and edit and convert DICOM images. A great free medical viewing program is called ezDICOM. This same website has details on the format as well as suggestions for many other editors, but I won’t cover any of those.

I’m running ezDICOM in Linux under WINE for this tutorial.

Make sure you are viewing thumbnails in your folder (View–>Thumbnails). Look at the .jpg files to see which ones are from the same series of images. Sometimes many different views are mixed together in these folders. You may want to create a folder on your desktop to organize files that are from the same view. You can also run the program that came with the CD to see which views are from the same series.

In ezDICOM, go to File–> Open and hold the shift key as you select all the correct DICOM images.

From here you can edit the size and contrast of the images if you choose. The main point is to eliminate any data or text on the images in preparation of the next step. From here I usually save all the files as images to a separate folder. Do this by hitting “Ctrl+s” then selecting .jpeg as the filetype. Name the file what number in the series it is using the name of the DICOM it came from. Be sure to name the first 9 images with a leading 0 as in 01, 02,03, etc. This helps keep the images in the correct order later on.

I ran through 24 images very quickly using this approach. Additionally, there is a standalone DICOM to jpeg converter in the ezDICOM package called “dcm2jpg.exe” This is a command line program that says you simply have to drag and drop .dcm files on top of it and it’ll convert them to jpeg for you. This can likely do batches of files and speed up your process, but since I only had 24 images I was interested in here, I did it manually.

The next step is to get the images into a GIF animation.

For this I used a program called GiftedMotion. This dead simple JAVA program allows you to easily make animated GIF images on any platform. Simply go to File–>Load and Shift-select the .jpeg images you just made. Once all the images are loaded, you can hit the “Play” button to see what the GIF will look like. If things are out of order you can use the arrow buttons in the Sequence editor to move stuff around. You can also play with the length of time each frame is shown and move them around somewhat.

When you are happy with the results, hit the “Record” button to save the resulting GIF. It will take some time, and the larger your images are and the higher the number you have, the longer it will take, but the results are a wicked animated GIF of your brain scan.

Even some “experts” at the music store will have no clue what they are talking about, so let me enlighten you something so you won’t fall prey to their stupidity.

I like to record music from time to time on my computer.  Nothing special, a riff here or there on the guitar, or a cover song or something. I wanted to have the simplest method for recording so when I chose to, I can focus on recording music instead of setting things up.   I found the MXL USB.006 Condenser Microphone to be perfect for my application, however everyone and their brother advised me against it. Even the guy who sold it to me at “Guitar Place” said it wasn’t as good as running a standard condenser mic through a mixer and using a USB sound card. The one he recommended was the Behringer UCA202.  So I bought them both to see the differences.

With both items plugged in, issuing the command “lsusb” to list all my USB devices in the terminal shows the following:

Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 004: ID 08bb:2900 Texas Instruments Japan PCM2900 Audio Codec
Bus 006 Device 003: ID 08bb:2902 Texas Instruments Japan
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 007: ID 062a:0000 Creative Labs Optical mouse
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 003: ID 1267:0103 Logic3 / SpectraVideo plc G-720 Keyboard
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

The numbers in the 6th column show the hexadecimal of values vendor ID and product ID numbers.  You can see two entries for “Texas Instruments…”  The one that says “PCM2900 Audio Codec”  is the MXL mic.  The other TI entry is for the Behringer UCA202.   Notice that the Product ID is very similar (2900 vs. 2902).  This refers to the chip they are using to convert the audio to USB.  Being that they are both 290x means they are the same series of chip.

Here are the datasheets for these chips:

Here’s the 2902 (in the Behringer) and here you can find the 2900 (in the MXL mic)

The only difference between these two chips is that one (the one in the Behringer) has SPDIF out, and the other does not. Quality is exactly the same.

This lead me to think that the foretold lack of quality must be from an inferior microphone element. This lead me to more research. The mic itself is considered a “cardioid condenser mic.”  “Cardioid” means if you were to draw out a shape of where the mic can actually pic up sound (its sensitivity pattern) you will find it is shaped somewhat like a heart ( ♥ ). Wikipedia has a great article showing the different sensitivity patterns of mics.

The term “condenser” means that basically the mic is a variable capacitor. Sound waves vary the distance between two capacitive plates changing the capacitance between them. This change in capacitance is the electronic incarnation of the sound, allowing it to then be mixed normally.

MXL claim that they use their standard gold-sputtered diaphragm condenser mic element in the USB.006.

Condenser mics require DC power to work . For this they use 48v Phantom Power. This is basically provided by a mixer or preamp and is sent via XLR mic cable. Since the USB.006 mic has no normal XLR cable, they MXL had to come up with a way to provide phantom power for the mic element. They likely used a charge pump circuit to up the 5v DC USB power to 48v. This allows the output of the MXL USB.006 to be exactly comparable to standard condenser mics.

It is safe to say that the MXL USB006 mic has the same quality as any comparable mic running through a mixer and into the Behringer UCA202. Anyone who says they can tell a difference is a complete moron (like many self proclaimed “gurus” who work at music stores.)  Put it this way; if they knew what they were talking about, do you think they’d be the guy selling you stuff at the music store?

I know this isn’t the case for everyone. Many times you will find an authentic guru at the music store.  It just really bothered me how these people just accepted that the USB mic wasn’t as good as the other methods because some other “expert” told them so. Worse than that, they undersold themselves (sicne many work on commission and the Behringer costs about 1/3 to 1/4 the costs of the USB.006 mic) and perpetrating a lie. Spouting off bad advice is no way to help people. If you don’t know what you are talking about, please at least try to look it up before giving advice on the topic.

Both the MXL USB.006 and the Behringer UCA202 are great cheap USB sound devices and I highly recommend both of them to anyone looking for good quality simple and fast recording. Personally, I use them both at the same time when I record, and even use the Behringer UCA202 as the default sound card on my machine.

</rant>