pear note: take notes synced with audio, video or slides

Do you sometimes have trouble understanding your own notes? Miss a point or two in a crucial meeting? I know I do. And I know that I definitely want to check out Pear Note: “A note taking utility” (how unsexy sounding for something so tempting)…

Pear Note records audio and/or video while you take your notes, so later you can find what was being said when you typed something. You can play back an entire recording, or jump straight to the point you need. Watch this short video to get the full picture.

From a learning theory point of view, having to take notes in class is a serious dump o’ cognitive load (yo’ po’ brain is doing double duty trying to understand and trying to record it all for later). So being able to take down the very minimum and know that you can go back and hear critical parts without hunting could be a real relief for students sitting in a lecture hall. Or for anyone sitting in any meeting room.

You can listen better, so you can understand better and participate more effectively.

Pear Notes is only for Macs running Leopard (10.5) with an update for Snow Leopard (10.6) in the works. This might finally get me to update from Tiger. Finally…

P.S.  Assuming he’s been correctly quoted I can’t help passing on this quip about face-to-face teaching from Open University’s James Fleck:

“[...] It’s a process whereby the notes of the lecturer are transferred to the notes of the student without passing through the brain of either [...]“

help with online color schemes

For those of us who like great design, but have no idea where to start when it comes to colors:

http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Color schemer is an excellent resource for getting a whole color scheme together or even just for finding a lighter or darker version of a single color.

And here’s a nice page that helps with those pesky html color codes:

http://html-color-codes.info/

convert wmv to m4a, mp3, etc

This one is so satisfyingly easy I have to jot it down. To quickly and simply convert wmv video get EasyWMA. Ten bucks, it’s worth it, just get it.

I’m reading a book, Efficiency in Learning by Clark, Nguyen and Sweller (highly recommend it) that comes with a CD. Among other goodies, the CD has video interviews with one of the authors, John Sweller. Since I don’t read books at my desk and would prefer to just listen to the interviews on my ipod anyway, I went looking for a converter. (The video files are wmv format.)

I tried Handbrake, but it didn’t want to recognize the wmv files and the latest version is for non-ludites who’ve updated their mac to leopard. Alas.

Fortunately I came upon a forum post recommending EasyWMA. The demo version lets you try it out, but will only give you 15 seconds at 128 bits. The demo is very convincing: conversion is fast and as simple as dropping the wmv file onto the app. EasyWMA is busy converting 37 files as I type. It will be done before I am. Yup, there they are. Lovely.

Off to add them into my iTunes library and I’m all set for the train ride tomorrow. Happy Ending.

rethinking photo storage and sharing at home

Yippeee, just got a new camera, a lovely Panasonic Lumix LX3. Happy happy happy.

Now I’m thinking about reorganizing how I store and backup my photos. It has to be quick and easy, since I barely keep up with it as it is.
So far I’ve stored them on my computer, but disk space is getting limited and the photos keep growing. Time for an external disk me thinks.
And while we’re at it, better make that an external disk that we can share across 2 home computers.

I’m hoping to get some info about Drobo and getting drooby through Scott Bourne and Andy Ihnatko’s new site Managing Your Digital Life. I’m also hoping that they’re not too too Drobo centric – other options do exist and I’ll need to learn about them too.

narrate your powerpoint slides using profcast

I experimented with Profcast some years ago and really liked it’s easy to use interface. Just came across a YouTube video explaining how to narrate your powerpoint slides and then export it as  a QuickTime movie. Plus you can provide navigation easily. It’s still a nice product.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I6o2AZ7DN8

launch windows apps with quicksilver

Another post-it note to self…

Yeah! It’s possible to launch a windows app (in vmware fusion) from your mac using quicksilver. Thanks to Shayne at http://shayne.powerlot.net/2008/07/23/vmware-fusion-apps/

The only app I’m accessing like this so far is Flash Develop.

blueharvest plays well with windows server

Yes! Clean ‘em up!

I’ve been trying out BlueHarvest, a little preferences panel app that allows you to keep mac junk off a windows server. Today I discovered that I can clean up a volume where I left a bunch of ._DS_Store and ._filenamegoeshere clutter before I got BlueHarvest. (Very easy: right click the volume, choose clean it  up with BlueHarvest and that’s it.) The really satisfying part is when I opened the log and watched BlueHarvest deleting them all… and there was a lot.

As long as I’m working from one place on a Mac, saving files to a Windows server, and then accessing the server with a Windows machine somewhere else, I’ll be quite happy to have BlueHarvest keeping those pesky resource forks out of the way. Well worth the $US 12.95.

mac clutter on windows – getting rid of ds_store and resource fork files

If you work on a Mac in one place and on Windows in another, and use the same remote file server, you may have noticed some pesky little files getting in the way on the Windows side. Does ._DS_Store and ._myfilename look familiar to you? If not, no need to read further.

If you have seen files like that, then maybe you know what a pain they are. They’re invisible on a Mac, but on a non Mac they are very visible. And very useless. (Some would argue that they’re useless on a Mac too, but that’s a different bar brawl.)

Here’s what happens: let’s say you work on a Mac and connect to a file server via, say WebDAV or SMB share, and you move some files from your Mac to the server. Then the next day you go to the other office, connect to the same server from a Windows computer. Then you see a bunch of files that look kind of like duplicates: little 1KB files with a name like ._therealfilename magically appeared in the directory where you moved some files from your Mac.

These pesky little files are called resource forks. The other clutter bugs show up as one file per folder named .DS_Store. Apple has a solution that prevents those from getting copied over, requiring a very simple one-liner in the Terminal (necessary for each user account on the Mac, if desired):

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

Apples’s “solution” for getting rid of the resource forks (._myfilename files) is, well, get rid of them. That is, they suggest you delete them from the server. Gee thanks.

Blue Harvest cleans up the clutter

Another option is Blue Harvest shareware, which uses a preference pane to get rid of the pain. (Sorry.) I’m really looking forward to checking that out and getting rid of this problem.

Thanks to Low End Mac for the info!

Update: BlueHarvest does the trick!

convert video podcasts to audio only

Some podcasts come in video format only (like Flash Game University), but my lovely old Nano is not video capable. Sooooo, I’m going to try this out very soon:

http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/03/10/how-to-convert-a-video-podcast-to-audio-only/

Update 11 august 2008:

Looks like the suggested software, MediaCoder, is mainly available for Windows. By “mainly” I mean that you can jump through a dozen hoops to get it working on OS X, but why bother? Instead I’m off to try this out with VMWare and Windows XP, see how it goes…

Media Coder

Yes! This works just as in the instructions from andrew, nice. Only one file refused to be converted, no idea why. But watching one video while sitting at the computer won’t kill me. And I have a bunch of audio that I can listen to on my ipod. Excellent.

check your dns at doxpara research

Thanks to one of my new favorite podcasts, Buzz Out Loud, I found out about a serious vulnerability of internet DNSs, domain name servers. (Those are the servers that translate the text address of a website, like www.mywebsite.com, to its IP address, like 12.345.678.90.)

You can check your Internet Service Provider’s DNS at DoxPara Reseach: just click the button at the top right that says “Check My DNS”. You can read more about the vulnerability there too.