New Media Center

So CES is in full swing and there is varying opinion when the question “did you see anything cool at CES” gets asked. Some of the gadget blogs that I mentioned in the last post make it sound like everything is cool. So here is my take on what I’ve read about so far. By this time most product announcements have probably been made, but I’ll sure update this if there is a breaking news story. I can see why media people covering CES feel exhausted because there is so much information to boil down into a summary. I’m going to first state what I see are the trends, and then highlight some products that are of interest to me personally.

It seems like there are 3 basic hot categories. 3D Televisions, Tablet/”Slate” Computers, and Media Set-Top Boxes. None of these categories are radically new. They are evolutionary changes of existing technology. Of the three, 3D TV seems to be receiving the most emphasis, and to me is the most enigmatic. This technology was essentially introduced at last year’s CES, and to me nothing has changed this year to indicate that it will be anything but fraught with problems. Thought you saw the last of the format wars ala HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray? Wait until you get into the 3D glasses format war. Don’t get me wrong. I saw a few 3D movies at the theater this year (Coraline, Monsters vs. Aliens, Up, and a shark movie at an Imax theater). All of them were great experiences, and really did add something. However, there is still the problem with those stupid glasses, starting with, they look stupid! They are better than they were, but what happens if you already wear glasses, or you get sick or have headaches watching the movies? What happens if you don’t have enough glasses for all of your guests over to watch your movie? While the technology is cool, it’s also gimmicky and a niche that seems too narrow to succeed with where the technology is now. One day we will have TVs with enough resolution built-in that 3D without glasses will look fantastic, but I honestly don’t know why it’s being emphasized so much this year. You will be able to buy some really cool glasses though. This story sums up the 3D problem.

Next up are the computer tablets or slates. It seems that the term slate is being used more because Apple is rumored to be announcing the iSlate later this month. It’s amazing to me that companies are announcing their “iSlate killer” when Apple hasn’t even announced theirs yet. Now that is one intimidating company, that Apple. We’ll see if any of them revolutionize the computer industry. I think the tablet/slate is compelling based on the Apple iTunes ecosystem. Imagine a device that can be a media device that plays music, complete with the iTunes LP feature (with bonus extras like videos and liner notes), and also movies that look great on a 10″ glossy screen. Add Wifi/3G, an E-book reader, the applications from the App Store and you’ve got something there. We’ll see what the price is. Lenovo seems to be somewhat scooping Apple with their device, the Lenovo IdeaPad, which is a hybrid. It is a tablet/slate that docks inside a laptop.

Last but not least is the Media Set-Top box. These are an interesting category because of the huge transition and convergence era that we are in. To briefly describe what they are, it helps to understand what they replace. I happen to have a computer (formerly a large desktop PC, now a Mac Mini) attached to my TV to allow me to play my media files through my home theater system. Most people however will not want to go to the trouble or expense to hook a computer up to their new HDTV. Enter the Media Set-Top box. For around $100-$200 you get a device that connects to the Internet and allows you to watch the likes of YouTube, NetFlix, and Hulu, see pictures from your Flickr account, and stream music from Pandora or your own music collection. You can even hook up an external hard drive filled with your own photos, music and movies. It is a device that at least begins to, and maybe completely eliminates the need for Cable or Satellite Set-Top boxes. Some people are already spending $100-200 a MONTH on Cable bills. The most successful device will be the one with the most flexibility and the best user interface. It needs to be customizable and able to add any new service that comes along. Two that stand out at CES are the Popbox and the Boxee box. Both do what I described above and both have their pros and cons. I prefer Boxee simply because it is also software that you can load on your computer (PC, Mac, and Linux). Boxee is likely to be a post in itself. We will continue to see combinations of these Internet services being built into TVs and Blu-ray players.

To round things out, here are a few products I saw that I’ve either been waiting for, or are just cool. First, and it doesn’t seem exciting at all, but it is something I’ve wished for and that is a USB key that is actually like a key. I have had other flash drives that have had a key ring, but they have always broke because they weren’t reinforced. The Lacie CooKey and Whizkey are key shaped USB drives starting in 4GB sizes and going up to 32GB.

Netbooks are popular at CES, but one of the complaints is the small keyboard. Well, Asus, which is the maker of the Eee PC netbook, decided that you could put a computer in a full size keyboard, then connect wirelessly to a video display. It’s called the EeeKeyboard PC.

Finally, coolest of all is a remote control helicopter that is (are you ready?) driven with an iPhone. The AR.Drone seems to be the most fun toy of all of CES. The video should say it all.

Happy New Year!

There’s no question that a new year brings a sense of anticipation for better things. The whole resolution thing is a great indicator that people at least psychologically want to make things better and are excited about what is to come. 2009 in particular seems to be a year that people are more than pleased to see kicked to the curb, as is the whole “oughts” decade. At the University of Mary Washington, it is another new semester (starting on 1/11) and students are once again filled with the excitement from the anticipation of new classes, and maybe a fresh start. For me this time of year means a re-dedication of my efforts as a New Media Specialist. Part of my job is a technology evangelist. Not of the corporate fashion, but in the educational technology sense, advocating for technology that enhances teaching and learning. So in general, this time of year also means new technology, that I evaluate on both a professional, as well as a personal level. One of the showcases that I always look forward to is CES, or the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Today is the first day of the show, where ironically consumers are not welcome:

The International CES is not open to the general public and all attendees must be in the consumer electronics industry to be eligible to attend the show.

The show is a monstrous event (I’m told) where you literally could walk for miles to see all of what CES has to offer. So instead of going to the show, consumers rely on news organizations and “gadget” web sites to cover what’s new. Which coverage (and how much) you follow depends on how geeky you are. For my money one of the best tech sites period is Cnet, which I often recommend to faculty, students, and others for researching technology products that they are looking to buy. They have an outstanding crew of technology reviewers, so it’s not surprising that their CES coverage is outstanding as well. A steady stream of new technology posts comes from their Crave website, which is what they refers to as their Gadget Blog. Other places to get CES coverage includes Gizmodo, Engadget, PC Magazine, and ZDNet. Two other resources worth a special mention are the Live CES coverage provided by Leo Laporte’s TWIT (This Week in Tech) network, and by a site called GDGT. The TWIT coverage is kind of a grass roots approach to what is at CES. Leo and crew are attempting to do live, everyman style coverage (at live.twit.tv) of the new tech and it will be interesting to see if they can pull it off. TWIT is attempting to become a new style of network, with less of a corporate approach and more of a user-centric feel. So far it has been a wildly successful venture.

GDGT (yes, pronounced gadget) is a website that is a geeky tech guy/gal’s dream. When they are not covering CES they are a site that bills itself as a social gadget platform, where you can connect with other gadget owners and get support for the technology that you use. You actually can register for an account and add the gadgets that you own to a list and connect with others who use the same gadgets. How geeky is that?!?

Part II of this post will be a write-up of what I think will be the exciting products for the new year.

Recently, a faculty member asked me a question that initially didn’t appear to be difficult to answer. “How do you resize an image?” When I’m working on multimedia projects, I do it many times over, or at least I did. Actually now, it is greatly automated for me and very complicated to tell someone how to resize their image because it contains the generally unsatisfactory answer – it depends.

Let me start by answering when and why you would want to resize a digital image. The most common use of digital images is to post them to a web page for others to see. The most common images that we have to share are digital images from our cameras. We see images on web pages all the time and often they are images that came from a digital camera. People upload images to web pages all the time and the images look fine. So why is “how do I resize images for the web” a difficult question to answer? Well, the process of uploading an image hides the step of resizing the image. It is taken care of behind the scenes automatically. That original size image, if it came from a digital camera (one over 5 megapixels or so), would overwhelm a web page. You would have to scroll up and down as well as left and right to see all of the image (unless you have a super-high resolution, and physically large, monitor).

If you’ve ever uploaded an image to Facebook, Flickr, or any other image sharing site, your image may be resized several times. In the case of Facebook, you get what’s known as a thumbnail, an image that is literally not much bigger than your thumb. Your image also gets resized to a normal size image that is intended for your friends or family members to see. Flickr, on the other hand, goes a bit further, so they resize a given image to a thumbnail size as well as small, medium, and large. They will even include the original size image.

The next obvious question might be then, why wouldn’t you just use the image sharing sites to house your resized images. For most circumstances that is exactly what I recommend. For applications such as WordPress blogs (you know like UMW Blogs) there is a Flickr plugin that allows you to easily insert your images in a post or a page. However, if for some reason you need to resize you image to specific dimensions, here are some options for you. Keep in mind that not all image resizing algorithms are created equal. Some tools will simply do a better job at resizing than others.

• The standard bearer program of image manipulation is Photoshop. However, at several hundred dollars for the full version, it is certainly overkill for doing simple image resizing. However, if you have the program anyway, you simply load your image, go to the Image menu, and choose Image Size… you can then change the width and/or height of your image.
• If you are on a Mac, you already have a great image resizer built into your OS. It is the program Preview. You know the one that displays your images when you double-click on them (it displays your PDFs as well). If you open an image using Preview, you can go to the Tools menu and choose Adjust Size… You can then change the width and/or height of your image, then choose File/Save As… Note that the quality of using Preview for resizing images is on par with Photoshop, and you can also do batch resizing (which means you can select multiple images and resize several at a time.
• On the PC, I recommend you use a free piece of software called VSO Image Resizer. With this handy program you will now have resizing capability a the click of a mouse, or rather a right-click. After downloading and installing the program, find the image you want to resize on your computer and right-click the file. From the menu choose VSO Image Resizer. The program is free for personal use, but you will have to click the Continue button to get to the resizing screen. Now you can choose to resize using one of the listed Profiles or type in a custom resolution. Once installed it is a very handy program. VSO resizer works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 machines. Note that this program will attempt install the Ask Toolbar. If you don’t want it, make sure to uncheck the appropriate boxes.
• Picasa, my favorite image management program, does an OK job of resizing images. You use the Export button and then select the dimensions for your files. It will also batch resize several images. Picasa runs on Mac (Intel Macs only), PC, and Linux computers.
• Shrink O’Matic is a program written as an Adobe AIR application that runs the same on a Mac, a PC or a Linux machine. You simply drag and drop one or several images in the program’s window, choose your settings, and shrink away!
• ShrinkPictures.com and ResizeYourImage.com are two of the many websites that allow you to use a web service to resize images on your computer. Upload your original image and then resize it however you like. There is some inherent caution that should be taken with any website that you upload images to. These seem to be harmless.

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New Media can mean working with huge files. Moving them from one computer to another has gotten easier with large capacity USB powered hard drives ( I like the Western Digital Passport drives). However, trying to move files from a PC to a Mac, or vice-versa can cause some issues. One of the problems is that the file systems are different. Computers need to keep track of not only an awful lot of documents, but other operating system files as well. The way that PCs keep track of files is with file systems known as either FAT32 or NTFS. Macs use a system called HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended). FAT32 is the older of the two file systems for the PC and Macs readily recognize (can read and write files to) drives that are formatted using FAT32. On newly formatted drives FAT32 is also a bit faster than NTFS.

So problem solved right? Just format your drive as a FAT32 drive and you can swap files all day long between Macs and PCs. Well not so fast. First, note that I said on a newly formatted drive FAT32 is faster. However, files get what we call fragmented over time. They get spread out into different areas of a hard drive as it fills up and then as files get deleted. NTFS actually is better at file integrity and reliability than FAT32.

Second, and the major problem with FAT32 formatting, as it relates to new media, is that the maximum file size is 4GB. So if you plan to do video editing, you will run into this limitation on a FAT32 hard drive. Capturing digital video, such as from a Mini-DV tape, takes up about 12GB per hour of video. Depending on what software you are using to capture the video, it may fail in an elegant, or not so elegant way. You should then convert or format your hard drive to NTFS.

Now that introduces some issues with Macs in that they can read data off of an NTFS formatted drive, but that can’t write to them. That obviously can be a major inconvenience. There is a solution in the form of freely available software known as NTFS-3G. The version for Mac OSX includes the MacFUSE software that gets installed as part of the package (it used to be something that you installed separately). The most reliable way to prepare the hard drive is to completely reformat the drive using the Disk Utility software in the Applications/Utilities folder on the Mac (after installing NTFS-3G of course).

Format the drive to use the Windows NT Filesystem (NTFS-3G) as shown above. This obviously takes a little bit of planning ahead as you will wipe out whatever is currently on the drive, so back it up! Hope this helps all you Mac and PC people to come together and holds hands – for as long as you can stand it.

pc vs mac photo by natashalcd.

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I recently switched from Windows to Mac, and one of the things I miss is the Windows Live Writer software that allowed me to write a post in a word processor-like program on my desktop and then send the finalized post to my blog. This allowed me to be more spontaneous with my posts, and it also saved me several steps to posting such as logging in and getting to the editing screen. It also saved me from using less than efficient means of inserting media like pictures and videos.

Now that I’m on the Mac I have found Blogo. It allows me to do many, if not all of the things that WLW allowed, and does it in the Mac drag-and-drop way. The best feature by far is the support for sites such as YouTube and Flickr. Simply go to the site page that your video or image is on and click the “Send to Blogo” bookmarklet in Safari or Firefox (instructions on how to create the bookmarklet are simple and available from the Help menu). A placeholder image appears in the editor window. You can preview how the video or image will look by using the Preview button. You can then see exactly how things will look in your blog, and then you can make any changes before you publish.

You can also drag-and-drop text from a text editor into Blogo, and you can even add blockquotes easily by highlighting text in a web page and clicking the Send to Blogo bookmarklet (it even includes a link to the source automatically).

Blogo’s interface is designed to let you take your mind off the details and just write.

link: Blogo: The blog editor for your Mac

You can enter tags and/or categories in a post. They are entered into a single field in the editor window, and you distinguish categories from tags by using a hashtag before the category name (ex. #newmedia). It will even pick up your categories from your blog and offer them in a drop down menu.

It can publish to many platforms including Blogger and WordPress, and you can set up multiple accounts to post to. It’s not free like Windows Live Writer ($25 US), but I think it’s quicker and easier, and it produces cleaner code in WordPress. One less reason to miss Windows (that was for the Bava).

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Now Jing might sound like the name of a  Chinese dynasty but, it is actually a free piece of software that allows you to do screen captures, create screencasts, and share it all easily. So lets break Jing down.

As a screen capturing software it is great. As some of you Windows users probably have experienced, taking screenshots is a pain in the behind. Jing allows you to capture a window, pane, or region so you get just what you need. Jing also has a simple markup feature so you can add a text box, arrow, rectangle, or highlight what you want. After you have your screenshot you have several options for sharing it. Either creating a link, sending it to Flickr, or just saving it to your desktop. One of Jing's aims is to make sharing of your stuff as easy & quick as possible and they do this well.

Jing also can let you record up to 5 minutes of video of the window or region of your choice. Creating a quick and cheap screencast is simple with the features that let you narrate on the fly and allow you to upload your product as soon as you finish recording. Along the same lines as screen captures Jing makes it easy to share your screencasts with the world. So before you know it you will be screencasting like Andy Rush!

Now I've been speaking strictly about the free version of Jing but, if you find the service useful you may consider upgrading to the pro account for $14.95 a year. With that you have more uploading and encoding options for your screencasts, lose the logo on videos and add webcam footage into your screencasts. If that is not for you, Jing still has the basic account for free (and we like free).

Like we always say at Stuff for Starving Students, try it and see what you think. And if you've done something really cool with any "stuff" we have talked about (or haven't!) let us know and we will feature you.

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*We’ll get the footnote out of the way. The Mac that you buy is not free, but once you have it, GarageBand is a part of the iLife suite that comes with every Apple Macintosh purchase. The other software that will allow us to record a Skype call to GarageBand is free.

GarageBand on the Mac is a great program that allows you to produce some very professional podcasts. That includes enhanced podcasts, which essentially are slides timed with the audio and are displayed on the iPod that you’re listening to the podcast on. Setting up a recording of multiple people is a matter of using an audio mixer and giving everyone their own microphone and recording it in GarageBand. However, if you can’t get the people all into one space, how do you record them? One way is to use the free voice-over-Internet (VOIP) service called Skype. Skype allows anyone with an Internet connection and a microphone to talk to anyone else on the Internet. You can talk to multiple people at a time.

There are two ways that a group of people can record a podcast using Skype. One is to have everyone involved use their own copy of GarageBand (or other recording software), and then edit all of the audio files (after emailing or uploading to a common space) together as one. There are many advantages to this method. Generally the recording quality will be better as you won’t have to rely on the quality of the Internet connection, which in turn affects the Skype call quality. You also have more editing control over each individual. The disadvantages are the editing after the fact. You need to receive all of the individual audio files and assemble them in GarageBand and make sure the conversation is synchronized. A very detailed overview of this method is written up at the Hivelogic website.

The other way to record a Skype conversation is the method we outline on our Digital Media Cookbook site. Essentially one person does the recording of all of the participants. One person serves as the recorder and editor. The other people just have to worry about getting connected to the Internet and be heard by the person responsible for doing the recording. Each participant will only need the Skype software. The editor will need GarageBand to do the recording, along with the Skype software. In addition, two other free programs are used to re-route and pass through system audio to GarageBand. Soundflower simply allows software to pass sound on to other applications. LineIn allows sound input devices (microphones or other line-in devices) to be passed through to recording software. The combination of GarageBand, Soundflower and LineIn allow the mixing of system sounds and live microphone input to easily be recorded without complicated hardware setups.

The recipe called Recording a Skype Call Using GarageBand, SoundFlower, and LineIn outlines the setup. This procedure was inspired by a post by Ahmad Humeid’s. Go to the recipe page to see the programs and links to get the software, as well as the screencast showing how to set the preferences for each program. Below we’ll quickly outline the settings.

System Preferences Input and Output

GarageBand Audio Settings

Skype Audio Settings

LineIn Audio Settings

Note the the “Pass Thru” button is enabled.

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Sometimes Apple leaves features out of products for inexplicable reasons . We’re on version 3.0 of the iPhone software and their iTunes application does not allow you to subscribe to a podcast using the standard itpc:// protocol, nor can you add a feed manually, like you can with the desktop version of iTunes. The screenshot from the iPhone above shows you what happens when you click on an iTunes subscribe link in the web browser.

An alternative program with the above features that you can use for the iPhone is called RSS Player. I mentioned this app in my post about AudioBoo, and it will allow you to get more podcasts that are outside of the iTunes universe. It’s $0.99 from the iTunes store.

As an example of how to give users a practical way to subscribe to podcasts using the iPhone, I created this video demonstrating how you browse to a webpage using the iPhone and by clicking a specially coded button, it will automatically start the process for adding a new feed to the RSS Player program.

The example podcasting site, which has some content and multiple tests of AudioBoo, is simply called Podcasting @ UMW. The RSS Player button is created by using the following link (using the rssplayer:// protocol) – rssplayer://www.podcaster.fm?feedurl=http://podcasts.umwblogs.org/feed. RSS Player will work over WiFi or 3G and there is no 10MB file limit like there is with iTunes. The app is a little bit wonky and lacks some of the polish of an iPhone app, but it gets the job done.

I was getting nostalgic about my blogs (as nostalgic as I can get with something that started in 2004). I wondered how I could get an easy view of my blog posts, and review where I had gone over the last 5 years. I decided to use a plugin that I used at the New Media Center website called Dagon Sitemap Generator. Anyway, I stumbled upon a post from March 2005 called GroundhogChase.com. It wasn’t the site that I had originally blogged about. It was and is a site produced by the Pennsylvania Tourism Office, but the videos have been updated (in 2006 maybe?). It’s a whole remake of The Shining, with Groundhogs! It’s brilliant!

Now go see the site Groundhog 202. Any Shining fan will laugh out loud, especially the scene where “Wendy” interrupts “Jack” while typing out his “novel”. Why didn’t this get more play. Thanks to my blog, it will now.

I did find the original videos that were there back in the day. It was a series of 8 or so videos complete with both endings – if the groundhog saw his shadow, or not. Here it is in one all-encompassing video from YouTube:

Good stuff, but the update is fantastic!

AudioBoo Screenshot

I’m still not sure about this Internet time thing, but I think it was yesterday morning that Patrick asked me if I saw Cole’s post about mobile podcasting in regards to Penn State’s iTunesU setup. Since then I’ve gone from light-bulb going off, to frustration and the cursing of Atom feeds, to scaring Jim Groom that FeedWordPress was being broken (more about FWP later), to jubilation that the complete instant mobile blogging solution exists with an iPhone and UMW Blogs!

Sound intriguing? I think it’s a pretty big deal. As Cole says the “iTunes ecosystem” is coming together nicely, however, we at UMW do things in a “small pieces loosely joined” kind of way. This “ecosystem” is no exception. The epicenter of this instant mobile blogging system is a service called AudioBoo. They host the audio files, which are up to 5 minutes in length (so complete hour-long lectures are not feasible here). The other component of the AudioBoo service is the iPhone App (link is to the iTunes store). Essentially you start the app, hit the record button then hit Start, record your audio then hit Pause and then Publish. You have the option to include a single picture and the app will also geo-locate where you are recording from. After a short wait you have a page in your My Boos page that contains all those elements – recording, picture, and map.

Now we could just call it a day right here, because anyone can subscribe to the iTunes feed by clicking the button on the page where the recording lives. There is also an RSS feed button (actually an Atom feed) associated with the recordings as well. Now I need to do some additional research to see how many podcatchers out there support Atom feeds, or at least AudioBoo’s Atom feed, but I could not get it to work with Juice, nor could I get it to work with my favorite podcatcher on the iPhone, RSS Player ($0.99 from the iPhone App store). There are then several reasons to press on. One reason is that it would be nice to get a feed working with the RSS Player app because it will allow you to subscribe, with your iPhone, to a podcast feed that isn’t already in the iTunes universe. Yes, the regular desktop version of iTunes lets you subscribe to a podcast by clicking an icon, or pasting in a feed manually. However, the iPhone version of iTunes does not let you do this. Safari on the iPhone does not recognize URLs that begin with itpc:// and there is no place you can paste in a manual feed. RSS Player allows you to enter a feed manually, and if you create a feed with the prefix rssplayer:// you can create a link (or a linked image/button) to start the RSS Player app automatically from the iPhone’s Safari web browser.

The other reason we want to go a bit further is to re-publish the audio files in a space (or spaces) of our choosing, like say UMW Blogs. This is where Mr. Groom’s bestest, most favoritest WordPress plugin, FeedWordPress comes in. What we do with FeedWordPress is syndicate the Atom feed from AudioBoo into a WordPress blog. That will pass to the blog the author information, the picture, and the audio file. A nice Flash audio player allows the visitor to play the file from the blog. Setting FeedWordPress to publish “automatically” and “ASAP” allows us instantaneous (or virtually instant) podcasting. There is also a link to the nice AudioBoo page where you can see the map associated with the recording.

Now we take the RSS feed from the blog and plug that into the RSS Player app, and viola, we again have virtually instantaneous podcast publishing AND receiving. The great thing about the RSS Player approach is that there is no iTunes sync-with-your-desktop step to worry about. Once you refresh RSS Player, the file begins to download directly to the iPhone.

Now is where the imagining begins. For example imagine a class that goes out in the field (Geology, Geography, Biology, History, Historic Preservation, etc.,etc.) and does several recordings, and by the time they get back to class their podcasts are uploaded, published (in two, or more, places), and about to be/already received. This has the obvious side benefit of being drop-dead EASY. There isn’t much of a learning curve here, as long as you don’t need additional editing of the audio files. If you do there are several other audio recording programs available to the iPhone. I’ll be putting some screencasts together of all this stuff, but for now you can enter your weekend knowing that it all works right now, and it’s all very exciting thinking about the possibilities. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: The screencast, Produce an Instant Podcast from an iPhone, is up!

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