And He Blogs

Immediacy. This is the age we live in. I’ve got to have it now, especially information. Apple released its iPad yesterday. People couldn’t wait to find out what it was. People kid me about being an Apple fanboy. I don’t fret about that much. I’m a technology geek. I like and want to find out about all types of new gadgets. I like to find out all I can about gadgets and help to explain what they can do for people who are afraid of technology. Apple just happens to make a lot of cool technology. Notice that I said cool and not essential or good for society, or answer to all our problems.

Now that the iPad is released and the frenzy of what it IS is now over. Now it’s the question of “did it live up to your expectations?” Really? You want my answer now? It wasn’t a movie I just watched, it was a product demo. A device that hasn’t even shipped yet. No one but the earliest testers and Apple Event-goers have even got their hands on it, and the Internet is all “like, well, like what do you like think of the iPad. Dumb name huh?” Fill in your feminine hygiene product joke here. Seriously? When Microsoft released its text editor “NotePad” were people this silly about the name? This silliness will die down.

So now the Internet is rife with comments like “big disappointment”, “where’s this” “where’s that”, right along with “OMG, I gotta have it!”

Wait! Step away from your keyboard and slow the hell down! It will be in Apple Stores in 59 days. Then, go there, pick it up, play with it, and see if you like it, or don’t like it. Here’s some more advice. Make up your mind when you are better informed. Make a decision about whether it is worth it or not, WHEN IT SHIPS! Take your time. Read reviews. Ask yourself if it’s a device that does what you want. This doesn’t look like it’s a new computing device that’s good for creation of stuff. It’s a consumption device. If you want one of these already, sight unseen, you are definitely the type of consumer Apple is aiming this toward. This device is about gobbling up content. Video, music, images, books, podcasts, games, newspapers, magazines, and more stuff we don’t know about yet. Om nom nom. It IS a notepad. You’ll take notes, do some word processing, surf the web, read books, but it’s not meant to replace your computer. Having said that, the computer is not a good consumption device. They’re awkward on your lap (especially desktop computers ) They heat up to high temperatures and get uncomfortable. They have relatively poor battery life.

This device is a different kind of computer. It’s a giant iPod Touch. And that’s not a bad thing. As good as the iPhone/Touch is, I have wished for a bigger screen to interact with the content in more meaningful ways. The touch capabilities remain the most intriguing feature. I predict people will love using it. Just like I love using my iPhone. Apple made this exactly the way they wanted to make it. They’re not sitting back thinking “oh we forgot Flash”. Apple wants Flash dead. They want to kill it. It hasn’t hurt the iPhone. It would have been nice to have this or that (I wanted a webcam), but Apple did something un-Apple and came in at half of the price that people were predicting, and $100 lower than the lowest prediction I saw.

It’s also another closed system, very much Apple-like. Do it our way. We know best. You want open? Go see the other guys. No? You still want one? Well, go get in line.

I love Picasa, a free photo management tool, and Flickr, a great (also free) online photo sharing/storage service. Picasa, now owned by Google, does have its own photo sharing service and it is quite good. However, I give Flickr the nod because it has more professional features that I use and seems more mature in it’s development. So, if you’re like me, you want a way to integrate the capabilities of Picasa on your computer (it runs on Mac and PC) with your online Flickr account, there’s a solution. It’s a Picasa plugin called picasa2flickr.

If you watch the video above, you’ll see how to install and use it, but essentially it gives you another button allowing you to perform the uploading action on a given photo or photos. You will need to also have the free Flickr tool Flickr Uploader. Once Picasa and Flickr Uploader are installed, you can click on the picasa2flickr link and it will add it to the Picasa button along the bottom of the program’s screen. Now uploading photos to your Flickr account is as easy as finding them in Picasa and pushing a button.

Tags: Flickr, Imaging, picasa, picasa2flickr, upload

After my last post, you may be asking how I do an HD screen grab from a recorded TV show. If there is such a thing as a rabid fan of my blog, you may remember a similar post from back in the day (it was Feb 12, 2006!). That was back in my PC days and I did the digitizing via a firewire cable from my cable box to a firewire card in the computer. A program called Nero played the video and it provided a button to take a still frame from the recorded video. So what has changed in the 4 years?

Let’s start with the computer setup, which is a Mac Mini that has a Hauppauge HD-PVR. What this little beauty does is allow me to connect component cables from my FIOS set-top box to my Mac (via USB). Yes, I did say component and not composite, so I get full HD quality up to what the programming is broadcast in. I can get up to 1920×1080 pixels in an image from 1080i video. I can record any HD content from FIOS using the Eye TV software from Elgato. There is also more simple recording software (but not as feature rich) known as HDPVRCapture that could be used. For $30 you get basic recording from the HD-PVR, and conversions to QuickTime compatible files.

Once you have your Eye TV recording*, you need to transcode it to a non-proprietary format for the Mac, typically an h.264 QuickTime video. This is not a full blown conversion so it doesn’t take hours (like a Handbrake conversion). Now that the video is in a QuickTime compatible format, you open it in the VLC media player, play the video to the point where you would like to grab a frame, and then choose Video>Snapshot. This will save a .png image file on your desktop, ready for you to post to whatever website you choose.

Now the actual procedure that I followed was needlessly convoluted however. The Colbert clip was crashing VLC, and so I couldn’t even get to the snapshot step. So I decided to use a combination of QuickTime Pro, and Preview. VLC is definitely the preferred way to go because it is free, and as it turned out, upgrading VLC to the latest version fixed the problem. However, if you do have a registered version of QT Pro you can do it. You open the video file in QT Pro and then navigate to the frame of video that you want. Click on the File menu and choose Export… then select Movie to Picture. Unfortunately, no matter what you change in the Options area, the file will be saved as a .pct file (a “pict”). You should be able to open it with the Preview program and then save it out (File>Save As…) as a .jpg or .png. Then use it how you wish. However, a 64-bit issue read its ugly head. In Snow Leopard, Preview is a 64-bit program, but it gave an error (see below) when I tried to view the .pct file that suggested I open the file in “32-bit mode”. To force Preview to run in 32-bit mode you need to go into your applications directory, click the Preview icon and choose File>Get Info from the Finder menu. Check the box labeled Open in 32-bit mode and then close the window. I could now open the file and save it out as a jpeg image. There, that was easy wasn’t it.

* I have since discovered that the Eye TV software has a snapshot feature, so I just find the frame I want in the original recording and make a snapshot. In other words, never mind. Still, the feature in VLC to take snapshots is applicable to many other projects. As I stated in my post from long ago, Hi-Def television is a great resource for high quality images, keeping in mind copyright issues, of course.

Oh, and I fully expect people to comment on other programs that can play the video and take a snapshot from a frame, so let’s have at it.

cc licensed flickr photo by Tyler Howarth: http://flickr.com/photos/tylerhowarth/484208783/

Tags: eyetv, hd, video, vlc

Here’s another “what’s new” in the new year item. My two favorite late-night TV shows are now shown in HD – The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. In case you didn’t know the latter show is pronounced “Cole-BARE RAH-pour”, as both “T”s are silent. From this you might guess that the show is a little different than your average show. While The Daily Show makes fun of how the daily news is covered, The Colbert Report makes fun of, well, The O’Reilly Factor and shows like it.

The character that Stephen Colbert plays nightly is hardly humble or reflective. So with typical bravado, Colbert announced on his January 4th show that the Report was now in High-Def. “My opinions will be crisper, [and] my anger more saturated”, said Colbert. He proceeded to demonstrate that people watching in HD were getting 15% more show. He then chided those who watch in Standard Definition that they didn’t get to see the really cool stuff on either side of the screen. “Nobody tell the ‘Standard-Defs’ about what they’re missing”.

The larger point of this is that going High-Def does mean more picture on your screen. Previously, I was watching Colbert with black bars on the sides. Now I can see the coffee mug and the box of tissues, and it was so worth it paying for that new HDTV. But seriously, The Daily Show and Colbert were two of the final holdouts of the 4:3 screen ratio. Now the only thing that I watch with any regularity that isn’t in a 16:9 ratio is WRC-TV News from Washington D.C. Doesn’t sound like that’s going to change any time in the near future despite WRC having the areas highest rated newscast.

Tags: colbert, dailyshow, HDTV

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!

Tags: Technology

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.

Tags: ces, Technology

The Read Write Web brought to my attention the plight of a Russian police officer who, rather than surrender to the rampant system of corruption, decided to go public and expose it. Now, corruption in Russia is hardly a surprise, and one can imagine that in a world before Internet video, anyone who tried to speak out against the system likely went missing permanently. However in 2009, you can literally reach a world-wide audience with something like YouTube, and Alexei Dymovsky did just that. While he was fired from the police force (for libel), he is calling for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Russian President Medvedev to follow through on their promises to fight corruption.

I highlight this story because I continue to be amazed at the democratization that YouTube enables. Anyone with a video camera – in this case Mr. Dymovsky and his brother-in-law – can speak their minds and, hopefully, bring about change in the world, or at least in their world. To date, this video has been seen by a million or more people, a level that certainly qualifies as “viral”. It is also on the public record that is YouTube, and if Mr. Dymovsky does indeed disappear, it makes it more difficult to explain to the world what happened. If Russia is truly willing to change its corruption problem, he could be a true hero. The world is watching, and more importantly the world is now able to watch!

Tags: video, Whistleblowing

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!
• ResizeYourImage.com is one of 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. This one seems to be harmless.

Thanks to Twitter and my old friend Jim Greenberg, I now know who Alan Turing is. Thanks to John Graham-Cumming, who was on This Week in Tech #213, Alan Turing received an apology. Since I have worked in technology for many years, I know some of the key players in the development of modern day computers. I’ve read the writings of Vannevar Bush, and studied the contributions of the Gordon Moore’s and Robert Metcalfe’s. I have even stood in the same room as Alan Kay, and three feet away from Doug Englebart.

Alan Turing was not a name that I was familiar with, until Jim tweeted about an apology from the British Government. Calling the treatment of Alan Turing “appalling”, Prime Minister Gordon Brown acknowledged the life-saving accomplishments of Turing and his important contributions to the field of Computer Science. Why Alan Turing was treated badly in 1950’s England was because he was gay, a criminal offense at the time, and the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of. Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” and subjected to chemical castration (instead of going to prison). He committed suicide shortly thereafter.

By every account, Turing was an interesting, if eccentric, individual. You can get a glimpse of his life in his Wikipedia article. Two tidbits regarding his life are particularly fascinating. One is that he was a world-class runner. His best marathon effort was only 20 minutes slower than the world record for the late 1940’s and only 11 minutes slower than the ‘48 Olympic Games marathon winner. The other tidbit is an urban legend, but the story goes that the Apple logo, which is an apple with a small bite out of it, is a tribute to Turing who supposedly took his life by eating an apple laced with cyanide. Now you know.

cc licensed flickr photo by basegreen: http://flickr.com/photos/basegreen/2726029248/

Tags: computerscience, turing

An important, and long-awaited announcement from Flickr is their new iPhone application and it looks to be a good one. I literally started playing with it a few minutes ago and quickly grabbed some screenshots from the iPhone screen. The opening screen gives a nice slideshow of photos from your contacts. One of them, depicted above, is from our former DTLT student Serena Epstein. In short, it allows viewing photos already in your Flickr account, as well as uploading photos that you have just taken, or photos from your iPhone library.

I had been using FlickIt and AirMe to upload photos to the Flickr website, and another app called Darkslide to view my Flickr photos. However, the new Flickr app does it all, and seems to work quite seamlessly as it includes the ability to geo-tag photos. It is one of those iPhone apps that immediately feels right to use, almost like it was there from the beginning. The one downside is that uploads do not include the camera information. So far the only way to get that information included is to use the email to Flickr method. Let’s hope that an update will fix that shortcoming.

All in all, it looks like this program will be on the hallowed “page 1″ of my iPhone. It was worth the wait. Here’s the link to the Apple Store for the application.

Tags: Flickr, iphone, photography