Category Archives: Computers

Star Trek, social media at work and Google Reader replacements

May 24, 2013 11:11 pm \ Leave a Comment \

Star Trek Into Darkness
I’m going to have to let this simmer for a bit and see if I still feel this way tomorrow, but I just got home from Star Trek Into Darkness and thought it was completely fantastic. At first blush I get why the hard-core original series Trekkies would be displeased, but if you’re not in that camp it’s difficult to see what there is to not like about this movie. Fabulous.

Social media
Pinterest’s announcement from Monday about “more useful pins,” with added capabilities to display information about movies, recipes and items for sale, has had me thinking again about how I’m using social media for Bemidji State.

When I read announcements like this, my mind always immediately starts going to “Ok, now how might I be able to twist this and use it in ways that they’re not explicitly announcing support for?” This Pinterest announcement was the same way. What sorts of things to we do that aren’t movies, recipes or items for sale that might be able to make use of some of that same functionality? There are a number of things I immediately glommed onto for athletics marketing — ticket sales, merchandise, etc., and there might be some clever things you could do with the live-update data for game coverage. That’s all just ideas in my head without doing much initial exploration into how any of it works though. But there are some cool possibilities there, particularly given the certainty that Pinterest will be expanding this functionality in the future.

Still, it again raises a question of how to roll new things into an overall strategy. There’s already so much to keep track of, and despite what I feel is a pretty successful social presence for the university right now I still realize we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. We need to start making use of Pinterest; we need to start making use of Instagram; we need to start expanding what we’re doing with Google+; we probably should have a Tumblr strategy. I want to make the time this summer to really dive into this and try to put all the pieces together; ideally I’d like a clear calendar for about two weeks to just hammer away at this. I think I could put together a compelling package; right now I’m just experimenting with toys, but those toys could quickly become pretty powerful tools if I took the time to learn them properly.

Google Reader
I’ve been a bit slow to identify an alternative to Reader since Google announced in March that it was going to be shut down. Given that it will still be alive and well for another month, I figured there was time.

I had been using Reeder, which I liked; there wasn’t anything amazing about it, it just did the job of letting me manage my feeds and keep read status synced between my laptop, iPad and phone. Although its devs have announced that it will have a future after the shutdown, right now it’s a Reader client and only a Reader client. So I suspected that I would need to find an alternative in the event that the revamp wasn’t ready when Reader shut down.

I bounced around to a couple of the different alternatives that were initially discussed after Google’s announcement, but I think I’ve settled in with Feedly.

Visually, Feedly has some significant differences from Reader that I like; I follow a lot of feeds that are primarily photo or graphic posts, or have graphics as a significant element in most/all posts, and Feedly has a display option to include a thumbnail image of the graphic along with the headline and a post snippet that is large enough where it’s sometimes not even necessary to click through to the post to get the content.

But, the biggest difference for me is the visual cues that Feedly has built into the “look at all posts from all feeds chronologically in one list” view. Feedly puts some breakers in like “today,” “yesterday,” etc., that make it pretty easy to scroll through a list and catch up on the most-recent things. Particularly if I haven’t checked a particular feed for awhile, Feedly’s layout makes it pretty easy to decide to skip everything older than a week or two.

It also breaks out three “featured” posts that it identifies by running some traffic analysis on whatever feed you’re viewing and pulling out the three posts that are getting the most number of shares or Facebook posts, etc. It’s interesting, but I’m tempted to turn them off because I’m not sure how helpful they are.

Return of the Jedi
Tomorrow, May 25, is the 30th anniversary of the theatrical release of Return of the Jedi. I have a story. I’ll share it tomorrow.

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day, Music and Movies, Social Media, Software

Workflow, updated

May 23, 2013 8:42 pm \ Leave a Comment \

Of course, one day after my little treatise on workflow and the various to-do apps I have tried, Evernote launches a reminders feature. There doesn’t appear at first glance to be enough functionality to replace Wunderlist, although I will have to explore that, but it does seem as though it could potentially compete with Trillo as a potential candidate to manage story assignments with my writing team.

Now to play around with this and report back later…

Posted in: Software, work \ Tagged: , , , ,

On workflow, drawing and the new Flickr

May 22, 2013 8:53 pm \ 2 Comments \

How I’m Working
I’m putting some renewed effort into examining my workflows, particularly with respect to project management tools and ways to keep a “digital brain” in order to track the bajillion things I have on my list of things to do at any one time.

I initially started with Apple’s Reminders.app; it was easily available and uses iCloud to sync between my MacBook, phone and iPad. It has steadily improved since its first release, and the iOS6 version was pretty nice, but ultimately it was just a checklist. You made a list and added items that you could check off and move to a “done” list. The end. I wanted something a little more sophisticated.

My second attempt was to use Behance’s Action Method system — again, it used iCloud to offer seamless syncing between my various devices, but had significantly more features than Reminders. You can add color codes and make items orange, teal or gray; there’s a separate notes section where you can add long form written items that are organized by date (although the functionality for moving between notes from different days was pretty awful), and although I never got around to using this feature very much it had the option to delegate tasks to other Action Method users. I used Action Method for quite a while, until the pile of nagging little issues I was having with it (primarily, the iPad app was astonishingly crash, and the desktop app was written in Adobe Air, which meant more-frequent updates than I felt like messing with) reached the point where I wanted to seek an alternative.

After looking into a couple of different things I settled on Wunderlist, and right now I like it quite a bit. The app is just flat-out attractive; the devs are putting a lot of emphasis on look and feel, but in a way that supports usability of the app and isn’t just for show. It’s very Apple-like in that way. It really works for me; adding new items is amazingly fast, I have made excellent use of the ability to add task checklists to individual items on a list (for example, to build a checklist of distribution outlets for a news story’s to-do item), and there is a free-flow text area for adding long form notes to each to-do item. The one thing I miss from Action Method is the separate note-taking window for the long form notes, but in all honesty I should be putting those notes into Day One anyway, so they can be tagged and searched (I am dramatically under-utilizing the quite fantastic Day One, but that’s a post for another day).

Wunderlist is still pretty new, and the biggest issue I have with it is the lack of feature parity between the different existences of the service — the web app can do some things that the desktop app can’t do, which can do some things that the mobile apps can’t do. The developers seem to be working hard to keep the system updated, and this is still relatively new software, so for it to be as perfectly functional as it is right now is actually a solid achievement.

I discovered Trello today; our web team was using it for a demo they were giving us today. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with it yet, honestly, but what I’ve seen at first glance is pretty nice. The app allows for simultaneous views of a number of lists, but its very clever feature is that those lists can be expanded into a separate view that includes dramatically more information. Trello quite properly calls this piece of information a *card*. On the front, a quick overview of the to-do item – name, number of items completed and total number of items on a sub to-do list, little tabs showing the item’s color codes, number of messages that have been added to that item’s activity log, etc. On the back, a full view of everything associated with that item – a to-do list, a view of team members who have been assigned to work on that particular item, a list of actions that can be taken and logged in the activity list, item-specific attachments, a list of the labels and associated color codes attached to that item, etc. At first glance what Trello has done is impressive.

I also used Basecamp this year to try and manage my student writers, but honestly it was only marginally effective. It could do the very basic things that I wanted to do, which was give the students a framework for checking in with me and giving a “this is what I did during my shift” report for me, and as a handoff to the student taking the next shift, and to give us some rudimentary discussion boards for us to share screenshots and talk about how to handle certain social media situations that came up during the course of the year. But it just didn’t seem to be that robust; I couldn’t even tell you offhand what I wanted to do with it but was unable to do (I suspect because I sensed its limitations early on and didn’t even try), but I was only marginally pleased with it.

While Trello may not (will probably not, in fact) replace Wunderlist as my personal project management tool, it’s got a pretty good chance to replace Basecamp. I just need to kick the tires on it a bit more and see what it can do. But its expanded features for teams – Trello’s “pro” version, essentially – is only $200 a year. It would be a pretty cheap experiment to run student assignments off of it next year.

I want to get to the point where I stop experimenting with things and settle in on a set of tools that help manage my often overwhelming workflow and get me to a place where I’m more productive. With my current trio of Evernote, Day One and Wunderlist, I feel like I’m pretty close to having what I need. The only remaining task is to seriously refine how the tools are used and for what purposes, solidify how they work together in my routine, and account for the few outliers that I’m still monkeying with (like iA Writer) – which I really, really like, but it seems like the work I’m doing there for story drafts could be moved to Day One).

What I’m Drawing
About a week and a half ago, I started this; it’s my attempt to copy a photo of Megan Fox that accompanied an interview with her in Esquire a few months back. I have mostly been working on it in 30-minute bursts over my lunch hour, which has been a fantastic way for me to recapture some creative energy that tends to get expended pretty quickly in the mornings at work.

I struggled with a couple of little things early on – her chin wasn’t right, I worked and reworked her cheekbone a few times until I got it where I wanted it (and then discovered that a little fix around her eye that I initially didn’t see was enough to cure a lot of other ills), and her right eye took me probably seven attempts to get properly placed and sized. But I worked through those, and right now, I’ve gotta tell you, I’m pretty happy with the way this is progressing. In terms of size, this is the biggest drawing I’ve attempted in 20 years, and if it keeps going the way it has started, it’ll be a keeper.

Flickr’s big update
In conjunction with its huge announcement that it had acquired Tumblr for just over a billion dollars, Yahoo! on Monday also re-launched a totally overhauled [Flickr. Flickr has been one of the sad sacks of the social media world for a long time; it’s the grand-daddy of photo sharing communities, but Yahoo allowed it to languish and mostly ignored it. Photo-sharing features were implemented poorly and quite slowly, and over time it simply faded into “who cares?” territory for all but the hardcore pro photographers who continued to hang out there — most people simply shifted the destination of their camera-phone photos to Facebook or Instagram or something similar.

But this new Yahoo under Marissa Meyer seems to be serious about becoming a competitor to Google in the web services arena. The new Flickr is amazing; the redesign is beautiful and offers some genuinely attractive ways to interact with your photos. They’ve also added the now-ubiquitous cover photo to your profile page, are allowing high-res avatars, etc. It’s nice to look at.

The biggest news, however, is that every single user of the site – every one of them – has, entirely for free, one terabyte of image storage. A terabyte. Compare that to the five free gigabytes you get from Google Drive or Dropbox or the seven from Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Granted Flickr is only for images and three-minute-or-less videos, but still — a terabyte of storage. For free.

I put that into some perspective on Facebook Monday night. I recounted a story about driving from Manhattan, Kan., to Circuit City in Topeka when I was in college so I could spend $225 on a 1.1-gigabyte hard drive for my Xeos-brand 486 running Windows 95. That was a huge hard drive at the time; I think you could get them in the four- to six-gigabyte range at retail for several times what I paid for my single gig. Yahoo gave a terabyte of storage away for free on Monday; had I wanted to acquire one terabyte of storage space on the day I bought that hard drive, it would have cost me $210,000. That’s an amazing window into how much – and how quickly – technology has changed in the last 15 years or so.

It’s incredible. Legitimately, amazingly incredible. And comparing the price of that 1.1-gigabyte hard drive to a free terabyte of storage makes me wonder what astonishing things I have today will seem equally ludicrous in terms of their price-to-performance ratio in another 15 years.

Posted in: Art, Computers, Events of the Day, work

Finally bought a light for my drawing table

April 13, 2013 11:36 am \

Melissa went to the gym this morning, so I had some kid time out in town. We went to Rafael’s for donuts, which is always fun, and then went to return the lights we bought for the kitchen at Menard’s. They had restocked their swing-arm magnifier lights for craft tables, which I’ve wanted for a long time but have never pulled the trigger on; empowered with birthday cash from my parents (thanks, parents!) I finally picked one up. It’s not perfect — but for $40 I wasn’t really expecting perfect — but it should provide a significantly better lighting situation at the drawing table in my office. Better to the point that I might actually use the drawing table.

I like the track lights I installed in here quite a bit, but they’re seriously useless for providing lighting to work, and the six-dollar desk lamp I bought from Target to provide a close-up way to fill in the shadows I was getting from the overhead lights was barely functional.

I want to try this setup out this weekend sometime; I’m so, so, so far behind on my postcard project, and it would be really fun in May between the end of the semester and the start of summer school / getting Megan up here to get caught up on that and churn a bunch of these out for my friends. They’ve been waiting long enough…

What I’m Listening To
I started a Daft Punk station on Pandora this morning on my phone, and I’m not gonna lie it’s pretty great. I’ve never listened to much electronic music at all (really, my only experience with it has been Daft Punk’s work on the TRON: Legacy soundtrack and the tremendously great Deadmau5 concert on Netflix), but it’s proving to be excellent background music while I’m trying to get some stuff done in my office today.

What I’m Shopping For
Just for fun, I have been pricing out a wide variety of laptops at Apple’s online store — five different laptops ranging from a 13-inch Air to a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, ranging in price from $1,400 to $2,280. I’d really like to have an Air just for the insane portability (but I wonder if most of what I could do with an Air I could also do with an iPad and a quality keyboard case), but the 13-inch MacBook Pro is pretty compelling at only $1,400. I would totally love to have a tricked-out 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, though — 16 gigs of RAM, etc. Big difference between the compelling 13-inch Pro and the $2,280 I’d drop on the 15-inch Retina Pro I specced out… Ah, well. It’s only window shopping at this point!

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day, Music and Movies

Mountain Lion progress

August 26, 2012 2:29 pm \

Exchange support on my MacBook Pro to use work email has been an adventure for the last year or so. Exchange support in 10.7 Lion was a disaster; it would take Mail.app at least 30 minutes most mornings to connect to the server and get my mail updated for the morning, and I consistently encountered message flag errors that caused freezes that necessitated force-quitting and restarting Mail.

MacOS 10.8 Mountain Lion this summer fixed the freezes associated with Mail.app changing flags on messages, but a new problem was introduced — I was entirely unable to check my email from home. It wasn’t a server issue — I could check my account perfectly fine using a webmail interface or by using Outlook, but Mail.app refused to connect to the account from my house.

10.8.1 came out this week, and that problem is now solved as well. That really cleans up my major gripes with MacOS lately — and, really, that wouldn’t have mattered much either if BSU wouldn’t have switched to Exchange. :)

My only other current annoyance has to do with iCloud and how it handles documents. I’ve been using Pages to write news release drafts and saving them into iCloud. If I open a document and wait a bit to save it, I end up with “Untitled.pages” documents on iCloud that aren’t deleted automatically when I finally save the document and assign it a filename. So a couple of times a week I go into iCloud and delete a bunch of stuff that looks like “Untitled 2.pages.”

Still, even with that minor gripe, so far I’m enjoying Mountain Lion very much.

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day

It’s been one crazy day

July 3, 2012 6:57 pm \

Storm of the Decade
Last night, Bemidji got crushed with the worst thunderstorm I have seen in the 11 years I have lived up here. It was intense even by Kansas standards, which have barely been approached in the decade I’ve lived here. It had everything – the ominous green sky, rolling thunder that continued uninterrupted for around 30 minutes and was enough to keep the house constantly vibrating, lightning that tore through the entire sky, 80-mile-per-hour straight-line winds, and torrential rain. In short, it was awesome.

Mostly, it was awesome because we escaped basically unscathed. We had some decent-sized branches down in the yard, but nothing that was too big to just pick up and drag to a pile, and the only tree we lost is in the very back of our yard and fell over into a brush pile anyway — so honestly we may not even mess with it for awhile. And we lost power around 7:30, but had it back by about 3 a.m. this morning. Some people are still without power, now about 25 hours after the storm started. We got incredibly lucky. There are thousands of trees down in town, reports of more than 100 downed power lines, and the police had a curfew from 11 a.m. until 6 a.m. (and apparently arrested a huge number of kids who were out trying to loot — which is great. I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who chooses to take advantage of a disaster situation to steal from people).

I did some work covering the storm for Bemidji State’s social media outlets, and overall I think we did a pretty good job with that. Coincidentally, we had just last week talked as a staff about how we might approach a situation like this after discussing how schools in Duluth reacted (or didn’t react) to the massive floods that wrecked that city a couple of weeks ago. So we already had in our heads an idea of what we’d try to do. I won’t go into much detail about what we did; I’m working on a timeline for how we covered the story over on Storify, and that pretty much sums up how the day went.

In short, social media proved its worth in this situation. We reacted quickly, had pictures of damage on campus out to people who were curious to know how the storm impacted the university within maybe two hours after the storm ended, and were continually updating with new photos and new information throughout the morning. There are things I wish we’d have done differently, but they were mostly minor things regarding timing of some of the information we posted. But, especially when you consider that we were running the immediate reaction type information regarding the storm with power out in the entire city, meaning we were limited by the life of our cell phone batteries, I think we did a really good job covering this event for the campus.

Work on home office/studio space
I finally took some time on Sunday afternoon to spend about two hours in my upstairs office at home and get it back into a condition that’s fit for human habitation. It was a mess before, to the point that it was very difficult to be in there to do anything. I bought a drafting table last year out of some guy’s garage for $50, and this weekend was the first time it’d ever been set up anywhere in my house. Everything is set up now, and I’ve got two really nice surfaces to draw on now; it’s a pretty solid studio space. I still have some work to do on lighting in there — it’s horrible — but in terms of how the furniture is arranged things are as good as they’re going to get until I get my ancient PowerMac G5 out of there.

G.I. Joe Retaliation at Retail
Thanks to Apple’s new Podcasts app, out just a few days ago on June 26, I finally have taken the plunge and started listening to podcasts. Podcasting is one of those things that I really could not tell you why it’s taken me so long to get into. It’s one of those things that seems like it should be right in my wheelhouse, and the subject matter of a vast majority of podcasts are things I’m into — computers and nerd stuff. But, the delay is over, and I’m now subscribed to a whole bunch of stuff.

One of the things I started listening to is a G.I. Joe-related podcast put out by a bunch of guys I follow on Twitter called “What’s On Joe Mind?” They did a couple of wrapup shows for the annual JoeCon collector’s convention, which was in New Orleans over the weekend. One of the wrapups featured a group of designers from Hasbro, who were talking about the direction they’re taking the toy line, providing some more insight into some of the things they had on display at the convention, etc.

The discussion turned to the toys for the G.I. Joe Retaliation movie — which was supposed to come out on Friday the 29th, but just a few weeks ago was pushed back to March 2013. The first wave of toys to support the movie was scheduled to come out just a couple of days after the announcement was made to push the movie back, so there was a lot of speculation about the toys being recalled, etc. But the first wave of toys did make it out with a full retail release, and one of the Hasbro reps, when asked how it was selling, said something along the lines of the toys “doing very well at retail” and that Hasbro hopes to use that success as a springboard for further retailer traction when they “re-release Wave 1 in the spring” when the line ramps up to again support the release of the movie.

Re-releasing Wave 1 is a move that seems like it could backfire. The big fear with movie-related toys is that retailers go all in right away, and end up ordering more of the early waves than they can sell. That leaves shelf space full of old figures, which leaves them no room to put out new releases, which makes the new releases difficult to find (the toys for the first G.I. Joe movie were a textbook example of this; retailers massively over-ordered waves 1 and 2, and the subsequent figures became challenging to track down). Hasbro has a situation where Wave 1 has already been at retail, and as it is by their own admission selling well, putting that same product out a second time is taking a pretty big chance that next spring there will still be people who want to buy those toys who haven’t already purchased them.

Hasbro has a lot of great product in the pipeline for 2013, and hopefully sales of the early Retaliation stuff will justify them putting in the effort to get it to market

Grad School
My second summer school course is underway. I’ve got a forum discussion to participate in this week already, and I probably need to get my work on that done tonight to the extent that I can with tomorrow being the 4th. No word yet on grades for the course that wrapped up last week. I think I did well enough in that; I’d like to think that I’ll get an A and keep my 4.0 going, but we will see. There were no grades posted during the course as updates for individual assignments, so everything will be posted all at once. Not having feedback on the progress of my grade during the class is the source of all of my anxiety about this class, I’m sure, since the only thing I’ll see will be the final grade.

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day, Geekdom, Grad School, Social Media, work

This week’s Bento update, Silk Spectre, Grad School, and other stuff

June 21, 2012 9:32 pm \

Software I’m Using
Yesterday, FileMaker announced a major upgrade to the iPad version of its Bento personal database software. I’ve been using Bento for a couple of years now; it’s a simplistic database to the point of almost not being a true database, but it has worked really well as an archive of news clips for work. I have had the iPad version for awhile as well; it allowed for some rudimentary data-entry tasks into existing libraries, but wasn’t much of a from-the-beginning creation tool. And, it only would sync with the desktop version via WiFi — and Bemidji State’s wireless network doesn’t allow device-to-device WiFi connections. So, essentially, the iPad version of Bento was useless to me unless I remembered to sync the iPad at home (which, of course, I basically never did).

The new version changes everything; it can now be used independently of the desktop version, meaning it’s a completely self-contained database creation solution, and it also offers over-the-air sync with the desktop version so the Wi-Fi issue at work would be a non-issue. It’s a very compelling upgrade.

But, FileMaker didn’t release it as an upgrade to the existing version. They launched it as a new app. Which means all existing users have to pay for it if they want the upgrade. So I feel like I paid $10 for something that ultimately turned out to be worthless, and now that they’ve finally gotten around to making it functional, they’re wanting another five bucks out of me. Honestly, I’ll probably do it, but man, it seems like a raw deal to deliver to your customers.

In FileMaker’s defense, this could also have something to do with a common complaint about Apple’s App Store — that there is no mechanism available to offer free upgrades to existing customers and make everybody else pay for a major new version of an app. So they can discount the app during a launch window and hope enough of their existing customers upgrade during that initial window to effectively give them a discounted upgrade.

And, to twist the dagger even further, for some asinine reason it’s not a universal app — which means FileMaker wants to charge you five bucks to upgrade on your iPad, and another five bucks to upgrade get the app on your iPhone**. With the current state of apps and how easy it is to have one app run on both platforms (I have auto-downloads for apps turned on, so I frequently find stuff on my iPad or iPhone that I downloaded for one and not the other and had no idea , there’s not remotely an “in FileMaker’s defense” for this. It’s just awful.

** UPDATE: Double-checking, there is no Bento 4 for iPhone. They simply updated the existing iPhone app to work with the Mac and iPad versions of the app. Basically, they’ve splintered their version numbers — iPad and Mac at version 4; iPhone at version 1.2.1. This actually makes the fact that the iPad app isn’t universal even worse, because FileMaker clearly has both mobile applications on separate development paths. That makes no sense.

What I’m Reading
I’d meant to check in last week and rave about the second installment in DC’s controversial Before Watchmen event, the first issue of Silk Spectre. It was written by Darwyn Cooke, who also wrote and illustrated the launch issue for the event, Minutemen, with art by Amanda Connor. I wrote last week that I wasn’t terribly impressed with Minutemen; I had the exact opposite reaction to Silk Spectre. In short: I loved basically every page of this book. Whereas Minutemen was a smashed-together mess of two-page vignettes on a huge number of characters that never felt like a cohesive comic book, here Cooke got to open the throttle a little bit by focusing only on one character and the difference is remarkable. To top it off, Connor’s art was absolutely magical from start to finish.

I had a sense going in that what DC was doing here wasn’t going to be completely terrible, nor was there any chance it was all going to be brilliant. There were going to be hits, and there were going to be misses. So far, for me, Minutemen has been a miss and Silk Spectre has been a huge hit.

I passed on this week’s series launch, the first issue of Comedian. The Comedian wasn’t one of my favorite characters in the original Watchmen series; his death in the series’ opening sequence was the first shot fired in Ozymandias’ scheme, and his story was told entirely through flashbacks. Giving him a standalone series that is yet another flashback seems entirely pointless. I’m just not sure what more there is to say about his character.

The only thing I bought this week, in fact, was Snake Eyes & Storm Shadow #14. I wrote about that last night.

What I’m Buying
Today, I bought Volume VII of Bullett magazine, which I’ve been picking up for awhile now. I’m the farthest thing in the world from their target audience, I’m sure, but I’ve enjoyed the photography and many of the interviews they’ve done. This issue has Alexander Skarsgard from True Blood on the cover; I’m pretty sure I got knocked up just by buying something with his picture on it.

Wrapping up grad school
Final paper for my educational assessment summer school course is due on Monday at midnight;  I’ve got a ton of work to finish it up between now and then, but I’ll make it. This has been a strange class for me — the most-difficult of the five grad school courses I’ve taken so far for me to feel like I’m engaged with. Part of the problem is that the course is compressed into a block of just more than three weeks; the sprint hasn’t given me much opportunity to feel like I’m at all involved in anything that’s going on. The format of the course has been difficult, too; it’s had nine hours of interactive television component, but it’s set up with the idea that there’s one group of students in one city and one group in another. Which is true; but there’s also been me, by myself, in a third city. So the course has included numerous “break into groups for discussion” opportunities — for, of course, everyone but me. I think that’s a big reason I haven’t felt engaged. I’ve been on an island. But, so far I think I’ve managed to do the work that has been required. I’ve got a second summer school course starting in July; it’s another three- or four-week blitz, but it’s purely online. That one should be fine.

Posted in: comics, Computers, Events of the Day, Grad School, work \ Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

Our local media

May 7, 2012 9:42 pm \

This morning on Twitter, I linked up a very interesting pair of stories from our local media outlets covering Friday’s commencement ceremony at Bemidji State. The first was from our local television station; it featured basically no males, other than having some walk through group shots. Both of the interviewed students were female, and the isolation shots of students during the ceremony were predominantly female as well. It really jumped out at me as being an odd way to package that story.

The second was from our local paper; it had a brutal typo in the headline. Instead of walking across the stage on Friday, apparently 950 of our graduates walked across the state. That’d be a good trick.

Other stuff I read
Apparently you cannot play DVD or BluRay movies with the default installation of Windows 8. That’s going to go over well… They seem to be betting heavily on users being savvy enough to download a paid addon to Windows after installation to get them the necessary codecs, and not having those users go immediately into Rage Mode.

Also, Evernote bought Penultimate. I looove Evernote, and while I own Penultimate it’s not something I’ve ever used very much. Due to limitations with mushy-ball styluses I’ve tried, writing by hand on the iPad sucks; you can’t take notes on it during a meeting very well at all, because there’s no accuracy with the pens. Still, this could be a remarkably powerful combination; since I use Evernote all the time anyway, with an acceptable way to write with a stylus on the screen, I could conceivably never use paper at work again.

Finally, a Washington Post blog post claims that the amount of money being spent every year by the military on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan could fund 2/3 of the cost of free college at public universities for every America. It’d be really interesting to fact-check that claim; if it’s true (and it probably is), it’s a pretty damning indicator of where our priorities lie as a nation.

That’s basically all; quick update for tonight.

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day, Writing

Experimenting with iBooks Author

January 23, 2012 12:45 am \

I spent about two and a half hours playing around with iBooks Author tonight, trying to figure out various things about how it works. For 1.o software, it’s actually not bad at all. What is implemented works and works pretty well, but there is plenty of room for expansion. Right now, I have nine pages of the latest issue of Horizons, in iBooks on my iPad, and to just be able to push a button and make that happen is pretty sweet.

• Tables of Contents are auto-generated for each chapter when you add a new chapter to the document. Author is built specifically for textbooks, so you’re forced into preface/chapter/etc. terminology with no apparent way to change it for publications where those sections make no sense, like a magazine or a catalog.

• The Table of Contents pages for each chapter are difficult to edit, mostly because there is a photo for those pages that you cannot delete. If you don’t want to use a half-page vertical photo for each chapter, you have to move the photo box off of the visible area of the page. You cannot just delete it.

• There doesn’t seem to be a way to automatically generate even a starter layout (your elements, but obviously not positioned correctly) for whatever screen orientation you don’t start with. The program defaults to landscape; so if you want to support both orientations and also have a portrait mode for your publication, you have to build it entirely from scratch. So to support both, you’re essentially forced to build two completely independent books instead of one.

• There is no support for creating or importing custom colors. The only available colors are obtained from the system-level color picker.

• You cannot link text boxes and flow text in between them. If you have text that requires multiple pages, you have to paste the entire story on the first page and then cut off the bottom, then paste the entire story on the second page and cut off the top. This is a huge drawback when you consider having to build portrait and landscape modes entirely separately, especially if you’re working on a document of any size at all.

• Custom shapes are a pain; you are limited to picking points with a pen tool. But, once you’ve created the shape, there isn’t a hollow-arrow type cursor that lets you select individual points to edit each of the shape’s vertices. You’re stuck resizing the entire shape with the regular cursor. This is a page layout program with word processor-level controls; Apple will need to add some pro page layout features for this to really take off.

• I didn’t see a way to customize the appearance of the widgets. For example, the chrome around the photos for the gallery widget is enormous and, beyond deleting the text so those areas are all blank, there didn’t seem to be a way to get rid of the chrome entirely or pick an alternate chrome that allowed more space for the photos. As it stands right now, the chrome takes up a ton of space. It’s probably OK for very large photos, but for smaller photos it really takes away valuable space that should be afforded to the actual art.

Lots of little nitpicks for 1.0 software, I know; I don’t want to make it seem like I’m down on it either, because I’m not. What I was able to achieve in just a few hours while I was mostly just trying to learn to navigate the software is pretty remarkable, I think. I have nine pages of this magazine running in an eBook version on my iPad; on Friday, any notion of an “electronic version” of Horizons began and ended with “well we have a PDF version.”

There is a lot of initial work to get going here, but I suspect that once I get the hang of the software I can build a custom Horizons template and use that to save a ton of time in the future. It’s like anything else – do a ton of work up front to save yourself time in the future.

There will be some hacks who put publish terrible stuff with this – you’re going to see a lot of “magazines” coming from schools that are just full-page JPEG images dropped into Author and uploaded, which will be horrible. But there will also be some phenomenal work done with this as people get a chance to get used to it and discover how to push the boundaries of what the software can do. This is really exciting, and there really is unlimited potential for very cool stuff to come from this ecosystem.

Now the fun part will be to wait and see how often Apple issues updates for iBooks Author. They should be in possession of a significant list of feature requests for future releases, and I wonder if the speed at which Apple is able to release updates and add new functionality to the software will be an indicator of how seriously they’re really taking this project. Are we going to see frequent updates and lots of activity? Or will this be relegated to “hobby” status for Apple, like the AppleTV used to be? I suspect the former, so the wait is officially on for the first software update.

Now to plan my next iBooks Author projects — a completely unauthorized encyclopedia of IDW’s G.I. Joe comics. That’ll be fun. :D

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day

My history with Apple

October 4, 2011 3:11 pm \

Earlier today, Apple announced its next iPhone, the iPhone 4S. To me, the most significant part of this announcement is that the iPhone is finally coming to Sprint. Melissa and I have been on Sprint for many, many years; and she longer than me. I only had a work-provided cell phone until we added a line to her plan somewhere around 2005. Since 2005, I have had a long list of cell phones that I have absolutely hated, culminating with my current Samsung Intercept. My Intercept is an Android-powered phone, and it often crashes when I try to use the slider to answer a call, or gives me messages like “android.app phone dialer has unexpectedly quit” or just turns itself off for no reason whatsoever.

So, with today’s announcement of Sprint getting the iPhone 4S – which all but guarantees that Melissa and I will be shedding ourselves of these damnable Intercepts and getting said iPhone 4S at the earliest moment available to us – I thought it might be fun to recap my history with Apple products.

I started using Apple computers at work around 1996; I used a Performa to do page layout for my tennis media guide that year, even though I had a Windows 95 machine on my desk. I finally caved to my boss and replaced my Windows machine with a Mac — a Power Macintosh G3 desktop model running MacOS 8 — in 1997. I also had a Dell Inspiron laptop that I took on the road and used for in-game statistics, which I actually liked quite a bit. I upgraded to a Power Macintosh G4, which I still think had a pretty awesome case, in 1999 when I became the Internet coordinator at K-Sate. I also bought a G4 for the house in 1999, as well, to replace Laurie’s Performa.

I moved to Bemidji to become the head SID at Bemidji State in 2001, and had one of the fantastic new titanium Powerbook G4s waiting for me. I used my first Powerbook G4 for three years and beat the absolute hell out of it, and it just kept right on ticking. I got a new one when our school’s laptop program rolled over in 2003; I had the new one for a year, then passed it down to my assistant and bought a new one for myself when his computer quit in 2004.

Also in 2003, I went insane with a sense of post-divorce euphoria and sprung for a dual-processor PowerMac G5 with the 24″ Cinema Display. I had absolutely no business buying that computer, but I did it anyway. And y’know what? I still have it, and I still use it multiple times weekly (if even only to move files back and forth from it to my laptop). It’s been a fabulous machine.

I got a MacBook Pro through work in 2006 and replaced it a year or two later when I again passed it down to an assistant who needed a new machine and got a new one for myself. I changed jobs and left sports info in 2007, and had an iMac to use on my desk. It was the first time in more than 10 years I didn’t have access to a laptop, and I didn’t much like it. :) I traded my plastic iMac in for one of the beautiful aluminum models in 2009,  but only had that for a year before I moved it to one of our design students and got a MacBook Pro again. I’ve had this computer for two years now, and it’s pretty great. I would imagine I’ve got another year or two on it, and I’ll trade it in for a new MacBook – by that time, I’m hoping they have a 15″ form factor for the MacBook Air.

So, to recap; here’s a timeline of my usage of Macs and other Apple products; in total, since 1996 I’ve had at least 14 Macs that have been “mine” either personally or through work, and I also have an iPod and an iPad; additionally, I’ve bought an iPod and a 14th Mac for Melissa. Beyond that, I’ve probably approved the purchase of several dozen other Apple computers in the last 15 years through work; for example, we have 18 Apple computers in our office and in our Athletic Media Relations office, and I believe I have been involved in the purchase of every one of them — there may be one exception.

• 1996-99: Performa
• 1997-99: Power Macintosh G3
• 1999-2001: Power Macintosh G4 (at work)
• 1999-2002: Power Macintosh G4 (at home)
• 2001-06: three Titanium Powerbook G4s
• 2003-present: Power Macintosh G5 (this beast still sits in my office at home and I use it pretty frequently as a file server)
• 2006-08: two MacBook Pro 15″
• 2008-09: Intel iMac, white plastic case
• 2008: bought Melissa an iPod Touch for our anniversary
• 2009-10: Intel iMac, aluminum case
• 2009: bought Melissa a 15″ MacBook Pro for her birthday
• 2009-present: 2007-model MacBook Pro (Melissa’s hand-me-down)
• 2009-present: MacBook Pro 15″
• 2010-present: iPod Touch 2G
• 2010-present: iPad

Posted in: Computers, Events of the Day, Geekdom
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