Rocca’s iPhone helps him perfect his hair
NEW YORK Humorist and journalist Mo Rocca, a CBS News Sunday Morning correspondent and host of the Cooking Channel’s My Grandmother’s Ravioli, never goes anywhere without his iPhone.
He uses it for everything from research to personal grooming, as he told us at CBS News here, which began with Rocca clicking on the iPhone camera app to check himself out as he adjusted his hair.
HAIR AND THE IPHONE
“Hair is my most important accessory; the iPhone is my second most important accessory,” Rocca says. On a recent airport excursion, he got miffed when his iPhone went along the belt on the security line and ended up in someone else’s hands. “The man in front of me picked it up. I was so offended. That was as if you picked up my child.”
TRAVELING DEVICES
On a recent trip to Egypt for Sunday Morning, he brought an iPhone, MacBook laptop, Amazon Kindle e-reader (he’s reading a book about the Mexican-American war) and Snowball, a USB microphone made by Blue Microphone that plugs into the USB port of his laptop. He took the Snowball out of his bag so security could clear it. “I don’t have to take it out, but do because people think it might be a bomb. It looks like a bomb that Wile E. Coyote would use against the Road Runner. It’s so absurd. Would I try to hurt people with something that looks so cartoonish, like it was made by Acme?”
HOW HE RECORDS ON THE ROAD
He brings the Snowball microphone so he can record voiceovers for his Sunday Morning pieces, and goes to great lengths to achieve perfect sound in a hotel room.
He takes his laptop, which has the script, and attaches the Snowball mike via USB. Then he gets under the bed covers in his hotel room, “like I’m in a cave. I’ll also have pillows inside forming a little fort, but I have to make sure I don’t move too much, because otherwise the sheets will rustle, and that will make its own sound, like I’m on a beach somewhere.” Then he clicks “record,” using the software program Audacity to track his voiceover. Afterward, he sends the MP3 file back to his CBS producers.
If he were to just record his voice with the microphone on the hotel room desk, his bosses would complain of “popping ” sounds and that there was too much echo, he says.
FAVORITE APPS
Wikipedia Mobile (free; Apple, Android), Apple’s Podcast app (free), YouTube (free; Apple, Android), Politico (free; Apple, Android), Words with Friends (free or $2.99 without ads; Apple, Android) and Park Now, a free app that lets you find and pay for parking. He used it for a visit to his mother in Bethesda, Md. “I wanted her to be really impressed.” But she wasn’t. She said, “Why don’t we just put money in the meter?” She was right, he adds.
COMPULSIVE APP CLOSER
“I’m a compulsive app closer,” Rocca says, offering up one of his favorite tips. If you double click the iPhone home screen, you can see all the apps that are open in the background — and draining your battery — and turn them off. Hit them twice to see the minus sign to close them.
“I’m constantly doing this. I’ve taught all my friends.
“I’m not an early adopter. This is the one thing I know I can impress them with. They’ll complain about their battery life, and I’ll say, ‘Did you close your apps?’ They won’t know what I’m talking about, then I’ll double click and see that they have 35 apps open.”