More and more, people are finding that Skype is a great alternative to picking up the phone and calling a friend or colleague, whether they're just a few miles away or halfway around the globe. I use the service to collaborate with people from around the United States and since we both run the free app (get it at skype.com) it's completely free for all parties involved. With a bit of fiddling, you can even set up three way conference calls.

Or you can do what I do: use Skype as a way to record podcasts (I'm involved with two: Boulder Open Podcast and Three In Sight) even when everyone can't sit down in the same room in front of the same microphone. But how do you record Skype calls? That's not a feature built into the application.

That's where Call Recorder for Skype from Ecamm Network came in: I downloaded a copy of this commercial application ($19.95) and installed it on my Mac.

I've been working extensively in Apple's GarageBand on my MacBook Pro and it's always worked great, except this afternoon I got the error message Core Audio: Disk is too slow (Write) (-10002). What does it mean and how do I fix it? Do I need a new disk drive??

While your Macintosh is a fantastic audio editing machine, you may have noticed that Garageband can only see one microphone at a time. All is not lost - Apple includes a tool that can be used to create an "Aggregate Device." An Aggregate Device is what Apple calls a virtual input device - a device that looks like a microphone, but as you'll see is actually more than one microphone combined into one option. How to do it, though?