CogBlogged from ‘October, 2006’

One of the long simmering blog posts not yet written has to do with the settling on of some personal self defined rules of their own blog. If you keep at it long enough, you settle into a self defined rule set, maybe not even knowing it. One of mine is that I do not make posts about politics- not that I lack string feelings or opinions on our [pathetic] system, but that I choose not to make it my focus here. I write about technology, education, media, bad experiences with companies, dogs, etc, but keep a number of things off blog. That’s just my choice. So consider this one less about political punting but more about the forms of media we are pummeled with leading up to the November elections. I am insulted by the incessant avalanche of really poorly thought out media campaigns that say, “Vote for me [...]

I think this came via TechCrunch- PicLens is a web browser plugin that allows you to view photos form several services ( Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket) and image search results from Google, Yahoo, and Ask.com in a full screen mode, that keeps a record of images viewed (an icon strip below). Right now it is available only for Mac OSX and Safari, but it says a Windows version is coming soon. So on any of these sites, PicLens availability is indicated by a special icon superimposed on an image: which can be a single image as shown, or an entire set on flickr. Clicking it pulls up the full screen viewer, previous images are stored at the bottom, and a slide show mode is available: Okay, I am not sure what I might use it for, but it has some potential… I have done some presentations where rather than stifling the [...]

Thanks to a del.icio.us for:cogdog tag from Scott Leslie, I took a quick peak at the Levelator, a free tool offered from GigaVox Media. It’s a tool developed and applied by the pros at ITConversations, designed to adjust audio levels common in interview situations where one person’s audio levels are much higher or lower than the other: Do you believe in magic? You will after using The Levelator to enhance your podcast. And you’ll be amazed that it’s free (for non-commercial use). … It’s software that runs on Windows or OS X (universal binary) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file [...]

I guess I’ve had nothing to write. Actually, my attention has been corralled elsewhere, with multiple daily posts for the NMC Campus Observer with our 12 day Second Life Symposium on Impact of Digital Media. I’ve been recording all of our streamed live audio sessions, making sure chat transcripts get posted, taking tons on in world photos… the candle feels not only burned at noth ends but right up the middle. The big ramp up continues tomorrow with a live video stream from the MacArthur Foundation’s public launch of the big digital media series that these activities support. And then… even more… on Saturday, the NMC Second Life Campus features a live, in world keynote by Howard Rheingold on Pedagogy of Civic Engagement. Earlier in the week, we had Howard in world to test audio and the slide controls– he’s definitely in the camp of having a spitting copy avatar: [...]

Is it just me or is anyone else having trouble accessing their Wikispaces sites? I am scrammbling to post content for a session I am doing next week for the K12 Online Conference, and for the last few days, Wikispaces is unable to keep track of any of my wikis- in editing, I am asked to continually log in, and 9 out of 10 times, I am diverted from connecting to ANY Wikispace site to www.wikispaces.com. I’ve been dumping cookies and taking out the cache, but it continues to behave wonkily. It has repeated this behavior on 2 different computers. Just trying to figure out whether it is my own computer/connection issue or if is is happening elsewhere, but am in a bind and may need to set up wiki camp elsewhere. ?? Update: It appears to be an issue with my Hughes satellite connection (what a surprise?). I wrote [...]

I was doing some very short video editing last week using iMovie, and could not figure out why I only had 4 Gb of space to import from my DV camera (which shrank to 1.5 after grabbing 10 minutes of content)– until I looked at the info on my MacBookPro– and saw that my 80 Gb hard drive had 78.5 Gb of stuff! Running that low on HD space is not cool, so I began moving old files to my 400 Gb external hard drive. Like 4 Gb of old photos. Cleaned out a bunch of iTunes songs (I maintain my library on my other laptop). Dumped some un-used apps. Found a pile of original audio files that had been processed into web ready MPs (another 4 Gb). My small iMovie project had gobbled up 18 Gb! There was something like 2.5 Gb of Second Life snapshots– zap! moved to [...]

Leaves are falling (somewhere) and it’s time to get the luggage out and truck off to an educational conference. Or not, stay at home, put your feet up, and jump into an online conference! This dog’s bowl is a bit full the next few months of conference, and conference-like activity. Sorry, but I am likely the one ed tech NOT going to the EDUCAUSE annual conference in Dallas. Eeek, crowds of 10,000 scare me. Maybe someone can send me a conference bag or some Blackboard swag.. No, there is too much going on, and the big show is… well so big. So let me toot some horns for some other events, especially ones I am associated with ;-) The NMC Online Conference on Digital Media October 24-25, 2006 is associated with our work for the MacArthur Foundation’s Series on Digital Media and Learning, a project involving the heaviest of heavy [...]

Very cool– after reading on TextCrunch about Introducing SlideShare: Power Point + YouTube I checked out the site to see its one of those betas. But you can ask to get in, adn I got an account before I had finished lunch. TextCrunch is right- this is YouTube for PowerPoint, even the interface is a dead ringer for the popular video sharing site. You upload those heavy, creaky, bullet laden PPTs (20 Mb limit), and Slideshare converts it to a Flash format, that can be embedded in a page (see below), direct URL linked (once the site goes public), tag shows, share them, and all the now run of the mill groovy social software stuff. My “slidespace” showing slide shows I have uploaded As you search, browse tags, and look at a Slideshare page, it is just the same function as YouTube: And from here, you can thumb through the [...]

It’s easy to blog about bad tech service/support and even easier to glaze over when it goes the opposite way. I’ve had flaky experience with my satellite internet connection at my cabin (the last time I even tried customer support, I was 2 hours on hold before expiring from fatigue). So I was ready for more of the same when my connection got creaky slow, and virtually no speed for upload or sending email. The darn speed test from Hughes borked as usually on the upload test, and trying an outside service (http://dslreports.com/) that uses the same darn applet, I got a result…. 619 KBs down and a paltry, limping pigeon 11 KBs up (the rates I pay for are 1000 down and 200 up). And just got wonkier into my second day here. It was so bad, when I tried to use their online chat tech support, I could [...]