Ed's Tech Tips

The short answer is no. This is important because, like the ever increasing CPU speeds and McDonald's Super size meals, many people equate bigger with better, although that's not always the case that does not stop manufacturers from squeezing more megapixels into a camera in order to squeeze more dollars from your wallet. To paraphrase B.B. King, the great blues guitarist says, it's not how many notes you play, but how well you play them.

There are a couple articles online that illustrate this point. The first I read was by David Pogue, the technology columnist with the New York Times. I'd love to have his job. He enlarged a photo to 16x24 inches at three different resolutions:5, 8 and 13 megapixel. He taped the pictures to a window in Time Square and asked people on the sidewalk passing by if they could tell the difference. Only 1 out of 95 could. The one was a professor of photography. Someone who commented on the article referenced an a website by Ken Rockwell, an avid photographer.  He has an article that compares a a $150 camera to a $5,000 camera with photos that you can easily compare with each other. Guess which one takes the better photo? This is not to say that your new digital SLR camera is not worth it. However, it pays to shop, compare and eudcate yourself about digital photography.  Kodak has an excellent area on their website for helping consumers take better pictures. Start out by reviewing their Top Ten Tips.

Ken also has a helpful 2006 Holiday Camera Shopping Guide. Ken is prefrential to Canons. I lean toward Sony's because that is what I know. The new compact Sony DSC-W30 is great little six megapixel camera that is is availble for around $200. We have a new gallery of photos taken with the camera by Emily Weir while she was in Austraila and New Zealand.

 

Some of my co-workers have asked me for recommendations regarding new Mac computer models this holiday season.

As far as Mac vs PC (Windows), I prefer Macs. This is coming from a guy who has used Microsoft operating systems since the early days of DOS and has provided tech support for every variation of Windows. The Macs, although not perfect, are simply more reliable, secure, easier and more enjoyable to use on every level. Especially if you are going to use it primarily for photos and music. The iLife suite is superior to anything else bundled with Windows computers. I'm not impressed by the upcoming Windows Vista. It is more bloatware than anything else  with a shiny new interface that looks more like the Mac.  For more Mac vs PC, just search Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&q=mac+vs+pc&btnG=Search

As for this year's models, here are my suggestions:

For an iMac desktop model, I would not necessarily go for the least expensive model. Spend $200 more for a total of $1,199 and get the 8X dual layer DVD drive, twice the RAM and a better graphics card. You'll have a system that should last you a long time. A 160 GB is huge and 1 GB of RAM is very ample for Mac OS X. The Dual layer DVD will let you store over 9 GB on to a disk. $300 more will get you the 20 inch model with a 250 GB hard drive. The 24 inch model is extravagant, but has a great screen.

Some people may be concerned about the all-in-one design, because it is not as easily upgradeable, but they come with everything you would need. Adding more storage is fairly easy with a USB or Firewire external hard drive. Otherwise, I find most people do not upgrade components in their computers. For those that do, they should be looking at the Mac Pro line. However, the 24 inch model would probably be sufficent for many graphic and web designers. The pro line is more suited for video editing, 3D design and animation. A positive attribute of the all-in-one design is that it takes up very little space. There is no tower to get in the way. If you really want to eliminate clutter, opt for the wireless keyboard and mouse then you'll only have a single cable running out of the back of the iMac which is for power. Well, make that two cables, you'll need the ethernet cable for an internet connection, unless you go wireless with that too,  since it does have a wireless network card built-in. 

For a laptop, the MacBook is a good deal. Once again, I would recommend spending a little extra money on the next model up ($1,299) because you will be happier with it longer, because it has twice as much memory (1 GB vs 512 MB), a slightly larger hard drive (60 vs 80 GB, still half the size of the iMac's) and a dual layer DVD burner. Why do you need a DVD burner? You may not, but making DVD's of your vacation and holiday photos to share with your family and friends is cool and easy to do with iPhoto and iDVD - you do not even need video or to open iMovie. Plus, the dual layer DVD is great for backing up those photos and the music you convert from CD's or buy from iTunes along with your other documents, such as, taxes, resumes, recipes and so forth.

The 13 inch wide screen is smaller than the 17 inch of the iMac, but I like the portability of a notebook even around the house. However, to be wireless at home you'll need a wireless router, such as, the AirPort Express Base Station with AirTunes. However that costs $130. For half the money you could get a LinkSys, DLink or NetGear wireless router.

Both models have the latest Duo 2 Core processors and built-in iSight cameras and mics.

Some students and alums have asked me for advice on how to best develop a web site. I try to steer them toward some free open source tools, because many of the projects are for non-profits. The ideal tool is a CMS, which is short for Content Management System. A blog can be considered a min-CMS, but a blog is usually one component of many in a CMS which will usually also contain a calendar, multiple pages, multiple members, newsletter, forums, photo galleries, forms and anything else that helps to create a full fledged web site.

As I was doing some research for this post I came across an article that reviews the three most popular open CMS applications currently available: Drupal, Plone and Joomla used by three different web design companies that specialize in non-profit web sites. Since the article says the same thing I would and then some, I going to link to it instead of writing the same thing. Check it out at idealware.org. These three programs won top places in the Packt Publishing 2006 Open Source Content Management contest.

There are many more than the three CMS's listed above. To learn more and get some first hand experience, visit OpenSourceCMS.com which host a wide variety of open source CMS applications, along with blogs, forums, wikis, and galleries for you to try for free. This save you the time of downloading and installing the applications yourself. They only host applications written in PHP and MySQL. To learn more about other CMS's written in Java, Python, among other languages, visit CMS Matrix.

This brings up an important point of CMS's. They usually require a server side scripting or programming language, such as PHP, Python or Java and a back-end database, such as, MySQL or PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, some of the servers that students and departments have to host web sites on do not support server side scripting languages and databases. Therefore, web sites have to be built and maintained the old fashioned way with individually linked pages. However, using CSS, XHTML and Javascript the job can be made easier. Learn more about them at W3 Schools. You can control the look and feel and feel a web site from a single CSS (cascading style sheet) file. For some fascinating CSS examples, check out the CSS Zen Garden. Menus can be maintained via a single Javascript file. 

There is a free editor to help create and maintain your pages, called NVU. There is also a free graphics editor, similar to PhotoShop, called GIMP to edit your pages. To help give yourself a head start with the layout of your pages, check out Open Source Web Design. 

 

If you read through the articles posted on this blog you may notice a bias towards Apple computers. Why? Because they just work. Overall, they are just easier to use and maintain. I have been using Microsoft products since the mid 1980's with MS-DOS, then Windows-386, Windows 3.x, '95, '98, NT, Me, 2000, 2003, and XP. I was a technical support specialist for Sony Electronics and Yankee Candle, as well as, for a small computer store and as a freelance consultant. At home I do not want to have to fool with blue screens of death, freezing up, trojans, viruses, worms and so forth. A Mac is not perfect, but it is much more pleasurable to use than a Windows PC from the user interface, to the performance. 

 One of the long standing complaints about Macs was that there was not as much software available for them as there is for Windows. This is still true, but much less so than in the past. When Apple moved to the OS X operating system, which is based on BSD Unix (known for it's security) they opened the door to many more developers and porting applications from the open source Linux world, plus easier development of applications in general on the Mac platform. It helps that Apple gives away the Xcode programming tools for free, where as, a programmer has to purchase Visual Studio from Microsoft.

This brings me to free stuff for your Mac. There are numerous excellent free and open source applications for the Mac. In addition to programs, you can also find free photos and music. Check out FreeMacBlog.com and it's sister sites: FreeMacWare, FreeMacUnix, FreeMacMusic and FreeMacPhotos. This site offers a wealth of free applications, plus articles on how to better use your Mac, especially in regards to photos and the underlying Unix applications. Apple itself also features an extensive nicely organized catalog of Mac OS X applications on their web site.

For for those of you that are tempted, but just could not imagine giving up Windows, you can now run Windows within your Mac using a program called Parallels. See the photo above. Many Mac retailers are offering Mac and Windows bundles.

Here's the first of my bare bones audio podcast or audio versions of my blog articles. Nothing fancy, otherwise I would not be able to do it on a regular basis.

No electronic gadgets here. Although I have seen a Dremel electric carving tool and strobe lights. I like my Jack-O-Lanterns simple. I did not even use a pumpkin carving kit with the specialized tools. Just a pencil, sharp paring knife and a large metal spoon for carving out the insides. I got  a number of compliments on it. I was happy with it. It was inspired by the Pumpkin King from the Tim Burton movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Do you remember the prediction of "paperless offices"? It was made as early as 1975 in Business Week magazine and was repeated often during the early days of the personal computer in the 1980's. However, with the advent or word processors, laser and ink printers, photocopiers and fax machines we appear to have more paper than ever before despite the development of e-mail and the campaigns to save our environment and use less paper to save trees. 

Adobe's Acrobat PDF file format can greatly reduce our dependence on paper. It is a file format that has been around for years. It is based on Postscript, the printer language that is preferred by graphic designers, because it can render any image. PDF is supported on most computer platforms and preserves the look and feel of the original document.  Many applications and forms are available in PDF format

I have encouraged the Alumnae Association staff to use a program from Macromedia (now Adobe) called FlashPaper. It came bundled with Contribute, the tool we use to edit the pages on the Association web site. Anything that can be printed can be outputted as a PDF file. Fortunately, you do not need to purchase FlashPaper to do the same thing. If you have a Macintosh, printing to PDF is built into the OS X operating system. For Windows users, you can download a free open source program called PDF Creator. Here are the features which include some capabilities that FlashPaper does not support:

• Create PDFs from any program that is able to print
• Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
• Send generated files via eMail
• Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
• AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
• Merge multiple files into one PDF
• Easy Install: Just say what you want and everything is installed
• And the best: PDFCreator is free, even for commercial use! It is Open Source and released under the Terms of the GNU General Public License.