Ed's Tech Tips

 

On Monday Yahoo released a new web site called Shine. It is a web site targeted to a specific audience: women. Yahoo has targeted topics before, such as Sports and Finance, but not a certain demographic. It has a nice pleasant clean interface. It looks a like a collection of blog articles on a variety of topics. It is a combination of original articles with articles from women's magazines, such as, Redbook, Lucky and Cosmo. The site competes with the likes of iVillage.

Molly Wood on Buzz Out Loud, a podcast I listen to often, expressed mixed feelings about it. While she did find herself clicking on numerous items on the site, she was not sure if she would return to it or if the site was necessary. Her view is that content is content, does it need to be targeted to a certain audience? She doe snot like feeling pandered to. 

Since I work for the alumnae association of an all female college, I thought I would mention it.

 

 

In some previous posts I was critical about Twitter and I'll admit I should not have been so without actually trying it out for myself. I had thought I would not have had control over the messages that stream in, but I do. I can select who I follow and block those that I do not want following me. Also, individuals are not the only ones Twittering. You can subscribe or follow the likes of CNN, Google News, NPR and MacWorld.

What's Twitter you might ask? "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" Quick messages are short messages of 140 characteristics or less.

I do not need to access Twitter with my web browser. There are numerous Twitter clients that push or display messages on your computer desktop. At first I was turned off of the popular Twitterific, because it cost $14.95. I checked some of the free clients for the Mac, such as Twitterpod and a Dashboard widget called Twitterlex. They worked, but lacked some features, such as, an easy way to reply to messages, so I took a look at Twitterrific and determined that it is the better Twiiter client. The interface is really slick and you can use it for free if you do not mind the occasional ad displayed in the Twitter feed. 

You can view the tweets of those I follow in the sidebar. If you use Twitter, I invite you to follow me. 

Check out more Twitter related applications at the Twitter Fan Wiki. 

 

 During Easter week, Spring Break here at Mount Holyoke College, seven students, seven alumnae and two Association staff went down to New Orleans and volunteered their time with Habitat for Humanity to help rebuild homes in the area devastated by Katrina. I created a blog for them that you can check out here.

I sent along a notebook and a couple cameras in hopes that they could blog during the week and they did post a few articles. I had configured the ability to recieve posts from mobile devices, such as a camera cell phone hoping that someone could post directly from the work sites. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

By the way, you cannot use Sprint phones to send email with photo attachments. They force you to use their Picture Mail service which costs $5 extra a month. Not only that you cannot easily post plain text email messages because there is no means to create a carriage return, at least not on my Motorola Razr 3M phone. The user name, blog ID and password have to be on separate lines, but I could not figire out how to do. I even tried to do it using the Google Gmail client and it was not possible - at least in a method that was easily visible to me. Post from my Sony Ericsson with Cingular was very easy. Not so with Spint. But I am on a tangent...

I did help create a post trip blog posting and added some photos and videos to the article. Hopefully there will be more post trip reflection posts. I also uploaded about 155 photos to our galleries and Flickr. There were over 450 pictures I had to go through. Many were very good. They captured the beauty, as welll as, the desolation of the area. 

FLOSS stands for "Free Libre Open Source Software" and is one of many regular podcasts that are part of the TWiT network produced by Leo Laporte and friends. Leo was a host on the now defunct TechTV Screen Savers show and hosts a wide variety of weekly tech orientated podcasts. My favorites are This Week In Tech, MacBreak Weekly, Jumping Monkeys (tech and kids), Windows Weekly and FLOSS. You can easily subscribe via iTunes, which is what I do and I listen either while I am working or at home doing various chores around the house with my iPod.

The shows are both informative and entertaining, although I do get annoyed sometimes with all of the talk about Twitter which I think is really only popular among the commentators and pundits on the show and not with real people trying to get real things done. Who has time to read inane chatter? But when you talk about getting things done I think wikis (may favorite is Deki Wiki) are a great tool and the inventor of the wiki is Ward Cunningham. He wrote the first wiki in Perl  to help keep track of and share ideas with is co-workers back in 1995. Since then wikis have been written in almost every computer language and have given birth to one of the most popular web sites on the planet, Wikipedia. 

Not only is Ward the father of the wiki but is heavily involved in the extreme or agile programming movement. It is a software engineering methodlogy intended to lead to a development process that is more responsive to customer needs ( "agile" ) than traditional methods, while creating software of better quality. Deki Wiki is developed with the "agile" programming approach and features an update or release almost every month.  

Besides all of that, Ward comes across as a real down-to-earth humble nice guy. 

If you are interested in technology and like to listen to hour long conversations (ala Charlie Rose style) then check out TWiT. 

 

 

M.J., a faithful reader of this blog, sent me a "tech tip" and I thought I would share it with you.

Upcoming (upcoming.yahoo.com). It's a great way to list events (either public or private) and keep track of things you're interested in (either by checking "attending" or "watching". You can see who else is in each of these columns for events. I really like that you can export events to your calendar (iCal, Outlook, Google, Yahoo or 30 Boxes) with just a click or two. Upcoming also integrates with Flickr, since they're both Yahoo products. I haven't used this feature yet, but after an event everyone can link their photos of that event to the Upcoming listing.

I learned about this from my friends in London where it's used quite a lot. There's not much action in the US outside of big cities. Hampshire County has only about a dozen upcoming events. But maybe it will catch on here. It could be a useful tool for the Alumnae Association groups around the country.

Thanks for the tip M.J.

The latest version of Mozilla Firefox, version is almost ready for prime time. It is now in Beta 4 and there are some marked improvements:

One of the most notable improvements is performance and memory usage. Since version 2 of Firefox, after a while it would become non-responsive and I would have to force-quit or terminate the browser. I use Firefox on a Mac, but I heard the same complaints from Windows users. There were memory leaks in Firefox that were so bad it would eventually consume up 1.5 GB of real memory on my system and slow everything else to a crawl until I killed and restarted it. Grant it I am a heavy browser user. I always have multiple tabs open and a lot of extensions installed. I use my browser to access and edit wiki's, blogs, email, Flickr and Google Docs. The browser is the one application I start and end my day with and use all of the time. I started using Safari for sites that I did not need Firefox's javascript compatibility or extensions for, but it is cumbersome to be switching back and forth between browsers. Firefox 3 appears to be handling memory usage much better, as well as, just rendering web pages faster.

The new full page zoom is a great accessibility feature. From the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the entire layout, including text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site. Previously, you could increase text size, but if the layout was not fluid, it could get distorted. 

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Apple released the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the iPhone/iTouch last week. It is a pretty much a complete package. It is based on Xcode the same development tools used for Mac OS X. It gives you access to all of the hardware of the iPhone including the camera and accelerometer - the device in the phone that responds to tilting the phone. There is even a iPhone simulator so that you can test your apps on a virtual iPhone which allows you to develop for it without having to own one. It even allows you to simulate the pinching touch feature. This opens the device to some cool gaming possibilities.I won't go into detail because other sites have done that, as well as, Apple's own pages dedicated to the SDK. I'll just relate some issues from my personal experience.

First, why is this cool or important. Well, initially it appeared that Apple was not going to open the platform for outside developers, but now it has and it opens the door to thousands of applications. If you have used a Palm you know that there are many possibilities for small applications on a portable device and even more so on the iPhone because of it is screen resolution, multimedia playback capabilities, touch interface and connectivity to the Internet. Applications will range from currency converters to pharmacological encyclopedias and beyond. ReadWriteWeb offers some more sophisicated possibilties.

Also, the cost of entry is fairly low. The SDK is free. It is a 2 GB download that expands to take up 5 GB of space. It is not compatible with PowerPC processors, which I'm a little miffed about. It  only works on Macs with Intel processors. Like other features in Leopard, the PowerPC processor is not fully supported, but that was inevitable with the move to Intel's dual core technology. The G5 and lessor PowerPc chips just cannot keep up with the demands of the newer software. But, I'm on a tangent...

While the cost of the software is $0, the developer program cost $99 and $299 for proprietary, in-house developers. Applications can only be made available through Apple's App store which will be available on the iPhone and iTunes.  The developer sets the selling price. Apple takes it cut of 30%, but handles all related costs of distributing the application, including credit card processing and bandwidth.If you are giving away your application there is no cost beyond the developer fee. I think it sounds like a pretty good deal, especially for small developers to get their products in front of thousands of potential customers.   (More)

March 14 is Pi day. No we are not talking about the Apple, Pumpkin and Pecan flavored "pies", but "Pi" the number: approxitmately 3.14159 or more exactly "the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter in Euclidean geometry, which is the same as the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius." Pi itself has an infinite decimal expansion; because it is an irrational number, its decimal expansion never ends and does not repeat. It has been calculated to 1.26 trillion digits. Learn more on Wikipedia.

There was a Pi Day celebration in San Francisco.

There is even a Pi song:

 

 

On the weekend of February 29 - March 3, Mount Holyoke College was host to the Future in Communications 2008 Conference where 65 alums and 25 students gathered together to discuss the future of careers in journalism and communications. You can read more about it on the College's News & Event page. I attended the keynote speeches, because I was asked to record the audio but I had wanted to hear Elizabeth Spiers anyway. She has been involved in a number of successful blogs, including being one of the founding editors of Gawker. I am glad I was able to attend despite having a horrible cold because the talks were very interesting.

I borrowed a Marantz digital recorder (PMD660) from the Communications department. It is the same model used by NPR field reporters. It has a variety of options and recorded straight to MP3 format. I was able to plug into the sound system at Gamble auditorium for the first speaker,  Priscilla Painton ’80, and get a perfect signal. Unfortunately, we did not arrange for microphones for the audience during the question and answer session. The questions could not be heard and they were not repeated so I had to cut out that entire segment of the presentation. I probably could have plugged my ac Book into the sound system and recorded straight into Garageband. Instead I connected the recorder via an USB cable and copied the files over which I edited in Garageband '08 which includes podcast specific features. 

On the second talk I was not able to  plug into the sound system at Willits. Instead I set up a microphone next to the podium alongside the  sound system microphone and that worked out great for the most part, too. We still had the same problem with the Q&A session at the end of the talk where we had no mics for the audience. There were not as many questions, but the answers that the speaker, Elizabeth Spiers, gave pretty much stood on their own so I left them in. She spells out her recipe for a successful blog. It basically boils down to finding your niche that you are passionate and knowledgeable about because you are going to have to write 6-10 relevant articles every day. 

The audio files are hosted on a separate page on the Alumnae Asociation web site. You can use the audios players on the web page or download the files to your MP3 player.  If you have any interest in journalism or web communications I think you will enjoy the speeches.

 

 

How many times have you taken a photo that is over or under exposed? Either the highlights are blown out and it is too bright or there are too many shadows and the image ends up too dark. This especially happens with sunrises and sunsets or when taking photos indoors during daylight near a window or open doorway. You usually cannot capture the details in the shadows and the highlights at the same time or at least not in the same shot. This is where those exposure and bracket settings on you digital camera come in handy.

Most digital cameras have a often overlooked bracket feature which when set, will allow you to take three or more quick successive shots when you press the shutter key where one image will be underexposed (dark), another will be moderately exposed and the last will be overexposed or too bright. You will want a steady hand or a tripod when using this feature. This can be a useful option to use when you are not sure how the camera will interpret a scene or when you want to insure every bit of detail is captured at a variety of exposures to be combined together later in a single tone-mapped image that is a combination of the original three photos.

Do a search for "tone mapping"  on Flickr for a variety of images which are either hyper-realistic or on the other extreme dreamlike or surreal. This photo of sunflowers almost looks like a painting to me:

Here is a example of an interior of a church. With tone-mapping, the detail of the wood work and the stained glass is captured in a single image that originally started out as six seprate images:

A digital camera can only capture a limited range of lights and darks from the full spectrum that we can perceive. Even the monitor that is displaying the words you are now reading can only display a limited range. No matter how many mega-pixels your camera has or how fine your camera lenses are, your camera is no match to your eyeballs.

You could compensate for the limited dynamic range by using extra lights and reflectors to reduce the shadows, but it is not always practical or feasible. Fortunately, through some software trickery or complex algorithms, there are programs (some free or not too expensive) that can combine your multiple images of various exposures into a single image. You can do this to a certain extent with Photoshop by combining or blending the multiple exposures in multiple layers. See this technique explained at Luminous Landscapes and Eric Krause's web site. Now there are free or inexpensive software applications that you can use for this specific purpose without needing to purchase and learn PhotoShop:

• Bracketeer: A Mac OS X only application that cost $19.95. Just drag and drop your images into the program and let it do it's magic. This application is actually a graphical front-end for thefree free command line utility called Enfuse. Bracketeer always outputs a loss-less TIFF file. Bracketeer is for Mac OS X 10.4 or later. It is a Universal Binary application, so it runs native on either a PowerPC or Intel based Mac. You an almost instant preview of the image before it is rendered.
• Xfuse: This is another Mac OS X only graphical front-end for Enfuse. It is not as polished as Bracketeer, but it is free and offers some more control over the process. You can save in JPEG format and import more than 6 images, the limit of Bracketeer. Like Bracketeer, there is no auto-alignment so you do need to use a tripod to shoot your images. Even with the SteadyShot feature on my Sony DSC-H1, the final output by hand was blurry.
• Hugin: This free open source tool is primarily a panorama photo stitcher, but does integrate Enfuse as well which is appropriate when you think about trying to capture a panoramic scene and balance the exposure of the image. It has options to help align your images if they were shot by hand instead of using a tripod. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing there was not a stable version of 0.7.0 for Mac OS X. 
• Qtpfsgui: This is an older multi-platform (Mac, Windows and Linux) free open source program designed for processing and developing HDR (high dynamic range) images. It supports more image formats and offers even more control over the process, however, it is  about 5x slower than Enfuse and the results may not be as desireable without some considerable tweaking. See the article on Linux.com for details. You also need QT4 installed which makes installation more of a hassle.

If you have some money burning a hole in your pocket there are some commercial applications that are specifically geared toward tone-mapped and HDR images and are more complete packages than the above applications. Although these cost upwards to $99, they are still less than PhotoShop or a set of lights and tripods and may offer more support and hand holding than the open source applications. 

• EasyHDR: This is a Windows only application available for 30 euros. They sponsor a EasyHDR Flickr group where you can see numerous HDR images created with EasyHDR.
• Photomatix Pro: This $99 program appears to be the higher end HDR utility which is available for both Mac and Windows. The site features numerous examples, FAQ and links to resources. The same company offers a PhotoShop plug-in. There is a free trail version to check out if you want.
• Hydra: Briefly mentioned in the April 2008 issue of MacWorld, this is probably the most elegant HDR program I have seen with a slick interface that integrates well with Apple's iLife suite. Like PhotoMatix and EasyHDR, this prgram also attempts to line up images that may not perfectly match up if the camera was not on a tripod.  The cost is $59.95 and it requires Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5. You can download and test drive the program for free which is what I did. The alignment feature worked very well. You get an instant preview of the HDR image. It saves in JPEG and TIFF. However, I thought the output of Xfuse was better as far as contrast and color, but the image was not as sharp. I'm looking forward to a stable version of Hugin to how well the alignment feature works. 

Here is a video posted on YouTube that provides a succinct explanation of HDR with some examples that were processed with Photomatix:

Hopefully, this inspires you make a little extra effort to take better photos and make your family think that you took a photography class.