DV for Teachers

There are lots of podcasting tutorials online (and I’ve linked to some of them). O’Reilly’s Killer Interviewing Tips for Podcasters, Part 2 offers one of the best I’ve seen, with several screenshots and painstaking explanations of how and why to edit your interview. Exceptional.

In the first half of this article I covered how to invite a guest for an interview, prepare and record the interview, and manage the interview to keep it on track and interesting. In this part I’ll show you how to edit the interview audio on your computer, and share some tips from the pros that you can use in your own interviewing.

There’s also a sidebar about how one audio editor has created an online database of political speeches which can be edited to have your favorite politician say almost anything. More mature students could use it to understand the power of editing and the responsibility that goes with it.

Ken Stone has posted a thorough look at Authoring in iDVD 6, with dozens upon dozens of screenshots to explain new features and capabilities. From his conclusion:

iDVD 6 is filled with new features [....] The best news of all, it just works.

I love hearing that.

Bruce Fries writes a great technical article about how to Free Your Music: How to Convert Digital Audio Files:

Any audio that you can hear on your computer can be converted to another format. How easy that conversion will be depends on whether the files are copy-protected. If they are, you won’t be able to convert them directly. However, you can use one of the indirect conversion methods described later in this article. If the files are not copy-protected and are in a format supported by your jukebox or audio-editing program, it’s fairly straightforward to convert them to another format, and I’ll cover that too.

Tips, advice, explanations, and screenshots, for Windows and Mac, with inexpensive applications. A very useful article. Bruce also wrote the informative Seven Steps to Noise-Free Digital Audio.

Daring Fireball points to news of a “trojan” for Mac OS X. Key exceprts from the Ambrosia Software Web Board -> New MacOS X trojan/virus alert where the news was posted, by Andrew Welch, president of Mac software developer Ambrosia Software:

• You cannot simply “catch” the virus. Even if someone does send you the “latestpics.tgz” file, you cannot be infected unless you unarchive the file, and then open it
• This should probably be classified as a Trojan, not a virus, because it doesn’t self-propagate externally (though it could arguably be called a very non-virulent virus)
• It does not exploit any security holes; rather it uses “social engineering” to get the user to launch it on their system

  Please go and read it; some of it is technical, but it’s worth trying to understand. The fault here is less the Mac operating system than naivete or misplaced trust. Don’t open it if you don’t know what it is and what’s in it. Andrew Welch summed up the discussion thread (as it stands at this point) this way:

  Regardless of anything, explicit user actions are needed for anyone to become infected by OSX/Oomp-A—if you don’t download, decompress, and then double click on the file, you can’t become infected by it. It tries to fool the user into doing this, because it is at its core a rather simplistically written program.

A podcast inquiry led to a How to Podcast page on a wiki from Voxmedia. I hadn’t heard of Voxmedia; it’s primarily the work of an enthusiastic Hawaiian blogger and podcaster. Very good links; like all wikis, this resource is only as good as its contributors. Bears watching.

A search for info about our new digital recorder pointed to a page on Robin Good’s site about a the Windows Sounds Symphony, great little Shockwave movie made entirely with Windows screen captures and system noises. It’s clever – it reuses the familiar in unexpected ways, and for me, that makes it art. It’s a small file, and only lasts a couple of minutes.

If you’re a Mac user seeking federal grant funds, there’s more on the Grants.gov issues at MacInTouch:

The reader is correct that all of Grants.gov’s instructions for using the Citrix solution are wrong, that the Citrix client configuration file doesn’t even work by default (and the fix also isn’t documented), and has serious aesthetic problems, such as being set to 800×600 resolution by default, which is almost unusable for submitting a grant application package. [...]Also, the Grants.gov solution also requires the user to download and install the Citrix ICA Client separately on their own. The download is a zip file, which needs to be uncompressed to a dmg, then opened, and then a package installer requiring administrative privileges needs to be run. Some users can’t easily follow all of these steps, and may not have the permissions on their machine to do so. Additionally, since the client file and documentation is all wrong or misleading, the solution is unworkable for most people, and the CIO of HHS itself has even said as much.

The University of Wisconsin’s solution uses the Grants.gov Citrix server, but is correctly documented, with proper screenshots every step of the way….

More about this yesterday.

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball points to MacNN’s Package for using ‘grants.gov’ on Macs

Following reports of the new Mac-incompatible grants.gov electronic service, the University of Wisconsin has released a standalone package for using Grants.gov on Mac OS X as a service to the community.

I got a degree at UW. As John says, Go Badgers!

Scott Moschella give us his Top 10 Things All Switchers Should Know at his site, Plastic Bugs. Clever, well explained, and good info even for an experienced Mac user.

O’Reilly, the publisher of books and websites about technology, offers a What Is… page of links explaining several technologies:

Welcome to the O’Reilly Network What Is site – the dedicated home to all of our “What Is XYZ” articles. The “What Is XYZ” article is part of a new series we’ve started across all of our O’Reilly Network websites. Our goal is to answer this question for a number of technologies – the killer apps and hot new technologies of today, as well as the tried-and-true, foundational technologies – with high-level overviews.