DV for Teachers

I link to various DMN sites often; there’s lots of good information, though the various sites publish each other’s stories and there’s way (way) too much animated advertising. Today they announced that FCP Training textbook author Diana Weynand will join DMN as a writer and FCP Forum moderator. She’s one of the top trainers, so this is a nice boost for DMN. And us, its readers.

Will Richardson is a vanguard edublogger, and I discovered (in an overdue visit to his site) that he’s converted to WordPress. Yet another high-profile blogger converts to this excellent open-source system, with a phenomenally active and (critical, this) newbie-friendly community. So much easier to find guidance and examples than it was with Manila. I’ll endlessly repeat my gratitude to Userland for the five years of free hosting that got me started in blogging, but their product just hasn’t kept pace.

Dave Nagel on MacBook Pro Benchmarks: Final Cut Studio 5.1

When I set off to benchmark the MacBook Pro, the question I wanted answered was how close the MacBook Pro could come to matching the performance of a common G5 tower. That it matched or exceeded the performance of the G5 in the vast majority of tests was quite surprising to me. Even though the MacBook is rated slightly higher in GHz than the G5, it does use a mobile chip, which you wouldn’t expect to match the chip in a desktop system.

Oh boy. These Mac-on-Intel laptops really fly on everything, he says, except the HD and H.264 encoding, and this is just the first release of the Final Cut suite for Intel. Oh boy.

Why this is a good day, a good place to live, a good place to work:

• It’s a cool, upper-40s morning with perfectly clear skies and almost no wind.
• The azaleas and dogwoods are fighting for attention; despite being one of the most pollenated cities in America, all these spring blooms make Atlanta look gorgeous.
• I caught the earlier train in, could read through most of my email and get downtown almost half an hour early.
• Walking to the office this morning was great. It’s a couple of blocks from the Five Points Marta station to the ITC, and on the way I heard a Marta guy giving directions to a rider about the new Breeze fare system in an accent from south Asia. In light of the demonstrations yesterday over immigration law, I love how the definition of who’s an American is constantly shifting.
• A moment later I passed a street vendor calling out a continuous stream of friendly greetings: “Good morning, A-T-L, I’m waiting on you, A-T-L! Good morning!”
• I had time to stop and get a coffee from the “Heavenly Cafe” across the street from the College of Education building.
• I’m doing a workshop today on the free, open-source, and remarkably easy-to-use Audacity sound editor. I thought of good ideas for the workshop based on the great tutorials linked on this page, especially this basic one.
• I have another workshop late this afternoon on image scanning and basic digital photography – composing, shooting, downloading, cropping, compressing for the web – and that will be fun.
• I got an assignment last week to tweak a presentation made in Flash, so I get to learn more about that.

  Lots to do, lots to enjoy doing. It’s a good day.

It’s turning into X Lab day, with two posts in a row. Looking around their site, I found their tips for Playing AVI and DivX Files on Macs:

This chapter from our book Troubleshooting Mac® OS X discusses why some Audio Video Interleaved (AVI) multimedia files do not play in QuickTime and provides methods for playing AVIs on Mac OS X.

A thorough explanation I found useful in this too-many-media-formats world.

The X Lab on The Spinning Beach Ball of Death

The “please wait” progress indicator — where your mouse pointer changes from an arrow to the rotating color wheel or “spinning beach ball” seen at right — generally indicates that your system is engaged in a very processor-intensive activity.

If you’re a Mac user, this will help you understand when and why this little understood and feared object appears, and what you can do to limit its appearances.

Frank Moldstad at MacAudioPro reviews the Snowball microphone from Blue. We have a couple of their Baby Bottle mics, and they’re very good.

I’m on a short vacation, but some Mac reading is always on time. I just came across this via Macintouch:

Lava Software’s PC-Mac-Net FileShare is a fast and efficient file sharing, data backup and remote media playback controller which operates over LANs and the Internet. Versions are available for Windows, MacOS X, MacOS Classic and Linux.

This could solve a lot of problems inexpensively. (I could use it at home this weekend… if the Windows machine wasn’t in the shop having everything reinstalled because of virus and trojaon contamination.)