newquisk's blog

Dan McDonald '10 created a promotional film for Easton. Check it out.

There's going to be a "cupping" at the Cosmic Cup Coffee Co. over on March Street at noon on Friday, 9/21. It's a chance to try out some new coffee, so be sure to stop by.

ProfCast looks like it could be a useful tool for podcasting PowerPoint and Keynote presentations on the Mac. I'm looking to try it out later this week; I'm most interested in seeing how large its recorded files get (trying to do something similar with IShowU created 1+ GB files for one of our testers, which far exceeds the 500 MB size limit for uploading to iTunes U).

Update

I did a sample recording the other night, and it looks pretty good. The slides are readable, and the audio is decent. The file size is also good; about 1 MB per 2 minutes of recording using the default setup. I've attached the file to this post; it's 2MB, about 5 minutes long, and recorded as an M4A (so it'll play in iTunes as an enhanced podcast). The program also h

For a while, it looked like the Unconference was going to live up to its name: while Podcamp Philly had a list of proposed seminars, we didn't get a concrete schedule until Wednesday. No worries though -- Podcamp's organized chaos congealed at the last moment, providing a rambling structure to a Saturday full of podcasting goodness.

The chaos lurked just behind the corners as folks tried to use the guest ids scribbled on  whiteboards around the Drexel University classrooms to log into the wireless network … at least until they figured out that the IDs only worked on the lab computers. Wired connections for the wandering bands of Mac, Windows and Linux laptop owners were scrounged however, giving rise to deep-sea scuba-like drama as people swapped Ethernet cables back and forth to share net connections.

There's a cool post up on Drexel's CoAS E Learning blog about biology and chemistry poster sessions on Science Island in Second Life.

On a related note, I didn't et to see much of Drexel Island yesterday because the Second Life session ran out of time, but I'm going to wonder over there today to see what I can see. I'm very curious about what they're doing with it.

Presented by Rick Glasby, Crashbang Digital, who discusses what mic to use, where to record, and how to tweak your audio setup.

Presented by Rob Safuto, RawVoice and the New York Minute Show. Talks about gathering all sorts of different statistics for your podcasts, from downloads to web statistics to community feedback.

Presented by Mark Blevis, Electric Sky and Canadian Podcast Buffet.

The workshop's popular enough to push us into an overflow room. That means we can't interact with the presenter, but we do have wired connections and power! Mark is using Cubase on the Mac. Starts off talking about the ancient old days of tape editing, then transitions to digital editing.

First up, the clean cut, doing simple editing of clips with little background noise.

Second, editing clips from a coffee ship with heavy background news and some uhms. Talking about using crossfade to edit clips with busy ambiant backgrounds. Audacity can't do crossfades built in, so you have to separate into two tracks, fade one out and fade the other in.

I'm at Drexel University today for Podcamp Philly. First up is a discussion of Second Life and how people are using it. On the geek side, there are audio book examples for J.C. Hutchin's "Proto-Womb" for Seventh Son and a game field for Scott Sigler's The Rookie. In education, there's Drexel Island.

Concerned about how Wikipedia's open nature affects the trustworthiness of its entries? So is Luca de Alfaro of the University of California, Santa Cruz. He wrote software to analyze the wiki's extensive revision history to try and determine who the most trustworthy contributors were, based on the assumption that those edited least were likely the most trustworthy. The assumption may not be perfect, but it is an interesting experiment. Read the full story.