Professor Michael Twidale from the University of Illinois came to talk with us this week. Professor Twidale is a very insightful and personable character with a unique perspective on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In the case of Illinois Wesleyan, we are interested in improving the usability of our website. We’ve spent considerable time and money converting our campus web pages into a content management system, and now we’d like to evaluate them to be sure that people are able to find and understand the information we present.
small Vista problem
Apparently Vista clients aren’t able to log in to the fileshares on our Mac OS X Server. And, coincidentally, I am the only Vista client with such an interest.
Doesn’t bode well for me!
Microsoft Expression suite: the answer to my problems?
I’ll be trying out Microsoft’s new suite of applications this week. The Expression Suite contains a couple of pieces that interest me. First is Expression Media, which is the rebranded successor to iView Media Pro. Continue reading
my recipe for an easy podcast
I’ve been saying for a long time now that the real power of blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking is not in the technology. The technology itself is rather trivial. The power comes in the user-centric nature of their interfaces. In other words, blogs make it really, really easy for a non-techie person to create a website with current, vibrant content. Podcasting is a little more complicated since it is basically a blog with some added audio bits. However I get it done in a short amount of time using only free software. So in the service of user-centricity I’ll describe my methods for my weekly comic-book discussion podcast that I post here. Continue reading
Videomaker DVD guides
The ultra-useful YouTube video toolbox guides I mentioned a couple days ago turn out to have come from a partnership with Videomaker magazine. It also turns out that some “essential guide” DVDs that we have at IT were made by the same people. I watched the DVDs today and was quite pleased. We have two 30 minute discs, one devoted to sound and one for lighting. They are concise and simple, and actually emphasize ways to make sound and lighting happen on a shoestring budget. In fact, I was so pleased that I went to their website and signed up for a free trial issue!
Battery recycling!
This post is directed to Illinois Wesleyan faculty, staff, and students:
I’m volunteering to recycle your batteries, old and broken iPods, and old and broken cell phones. I’m not doing anything special with the stuff, just delivering it to the right people to properly dispose of it. Bring the items to the IT House sometime during May Term and I’ll take care of it!
Windows Vista: Upgrade or Clean install?
When our copies of Vista arrived on campus I was anxious to try it out. My Lenovo desktop machine has plenty of RAM which made it the perfect candidate. Furthermore, all my work is in support of other people who do work in various departments – the world won’t stop if I back up my documents every once in a while to reformat my system. My big problem at this stage was that I didn’t want to wait around to reformat. I decided to see how smooth the XP – Vista upgrade path was.
The system worked fine after the upgrade. There were some annoying nag windows on boot-up which got old after a while but didn’t stop me from doing work. My TPM security chip didn’t function after the upgrade. I also noticed that a lot of hard drive space was taken up for no good reason.
Today I decided to try a clean install. I had planned on doing to Complete PC Backup (see my blog posts about that debacle) but instead manually cleaned up and backed up all documents and e-mail. I found that about 80GB of storage is now available which had been used in the upgrade configuration. Another small problem was the slow response of Internet Explorer in opening a new tab. Tabs are great, but not if you could open a new window in less time! Tabs are nice and snappy right now.
My advice to anyone wanting to test Vista is to use the Clean install option. You will probably have to boot to the CD and select an Advanced Drive options button in order to format or manipulate partitions, but it is worth it.
Next phase: downloading Lenovo apps to see if I can use the TPM chip!
making better digital videos
I talk to at least a few classes each semester about using DV cameras and iMovie to create very basic movie projects. Typically the students are placed in groups of 3 or 4 and given very general parameters (2 minutes long, must contain narration, must use a tripod). Unfortunately these movies don’t typically turn out very well. I could discuss at great length the shortcomings of student video projects. I consider most problems to be a simple by-product of not spending enough time on pre-production. These people should be storyboarding at the very least, but they are also apparently not viewing their footage at all before handing in final products. Lack of planning aside, my main two technical criticisms are sound and lighting. Students rarely use external mics. This should be an absolute requirement, especially when shooting outside. They also tend to do a bad job of lighting their scenes. This is not the fault of the students. We lack the equipment, time, and experience to teach a student these details in depth for a single short movie project.
In order to get these topics covered more adequately, we purchased a few training DVDs that cover lighting, sound, and linear editing. These are still too long and difficult to place into a course with a focus that is not film. As a result I’ve been looking for a short, practical guide to present to students who wish to make a quality video product. The best I’ve found so far is the YouTube Video Toolbox which provides an easy, basic series of guidelines for creating a decent movie project. I especially like the easy guide to varying camera angles and height. I think I’ll be providing a few of those links to interested students from now on!
Windows Complete PC Backup? Boo, Hiss.
Well, the experiment is complete. Notice that I did not state “The backup is complete”. The Windows Vista backup app choked on an I/O error after 12 successful DVDs were burned. There was no option to recover and reburn starting with #13 – all I could do was restart the process.
I do not recommend anyone use the Windows Complete PC Backup utility. Perhaps it would function better if set to create a disk image on a remote hard drive.
I suspect that some of my problems arise from the fact that this system was upgraded from XP to Vista. I’m now manually backing up my folders and e-mail in preparation for a clean Vista install. I’m also moving out of Outlook and splitting my calendar and e-mail functions between Meeting Maker and Thunderbird. This move is almost entirely so that I can access the web-based MM calendar from off campus. There is no such option for Outlook with no Exchange server on campus.
Backing up Vista, plus a bonus Opera update
So I’ve got a Vista machine on my desk these days. I’m going to try life Microsoft’s way and see how it works out. Outlook 2007 for e-mail and calendar, Excel, Word…Microsoft tools all around. The latest one I’m trying out is the Windows Complete Backup tool. This is a great idea – a foolproof full system backup. I have a DVD-R drive that is plenty fast so I thought, heck, let’s give it a shot. The upside: the process is supremely easy. The downside: I’ve now been feeding the system DVDs for 4 hours with no end in sight. I’ll report the final results whenever it is done!
I’ve continued to use the Opera browser/mail client combo. The e-mail app is sliding downhill in my estimation. It doesn’t always correctly report when messages have been marked as read/unread. The dynamic folder views don’t allow me to move messages around into folders – I wind up with duplicates. The last downside is actually a browser issue – the Luminis Portal here at IWU is not supported. There is no way we can support a product unless the Portal works. I’ll keep checking it out.