Eric’s Journal

Yesterday, LeAnn and I adjusted a setting on her firewall that opened up some features on her TiVo that we previously had not been able to access. This includes a few games, movie previews, and a built in podcast player. Of course, the first thing I did was tap in the feed url of my blog on the remote, and it found my one and only podcast post. There is also a directory of feeds similar to ones that top the charts at the iTunes Store.

I think this is cool feature heading in the right direction, but the usability still has a long way to go. First, typing in a long feed url letter by letter into the remote is a pain, and once the url ran off the screen so we could not read what LeAnn was typing. Second, and surprisingly, playback lacks the ability to pause and bloop-bloop (rewind/fast-forward) that you would expect to be the same as watching TV recordings. Third, I couldn’t get it to access this video podcast, but I’m not sure if this is due to the fact that the site uses Feedburner.

Still, I think this is great step in bringing web 2.0 into the living room, and from what I’ve heard the Comcast DVR doesn’t yet have anything like this.

Filed by Eric at 5:54 pm under Arts and Entertainment, Life in General, Technology
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Today when I checked out New Music Tuesday at the iTunes Store, I discovered that labels were displaying in German (view screen shot) and the currency was set to Euros. I have no idea what set the language, but after poking around for awhile I realized I could scroll down to the bottom of the store and set “Mein Store” back to “United States”.

Filed by Eric at 11:45 pm under Technology
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Here are two handouts I made for my presentation;

• Podcasting on a PC Overview - my overview about how to record audio on the Windows platform.
• How to Create a Wordcast - an explanation about how to record audio directly into Word to create an audio journal.

Filed by Eric at 3:59 pm under Teaching, Technology
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I will soon be giving a presentation to the Educational Technologists of the Seattle Public Schools about how to record podcasts. A while back we had a representative from Apple do a demonstration about how to record a podcast in the iLife ‘06 version of GarageBand. Since our district mostly uses Windows, many were left wondering how the demonstration could apply to their classrooms. Therefore, my presentation will be about how to record audio on the Windows platform. Since I’ve never actually made a podcast, I thought it was time I give it a try.

Here is the file; Record Podcasts with Windows.mp3

Here are some links mentioned in the audio;

• audacity.sourceforge.net
• Lame encoder (for exporting Audacity projects as .mp3 files)
• Sony Acid Studio

Filed by Eric at 3:46 am under Podcast, Teaching, Technology
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Last Thursday I gave a presentation about blogs and RSS feed readers to the educational technologists from the Seattle Schools. You can view the movie here or here to be able to resize the movie. The slideshow doesn’t show the full presention because I frequently navigatied away from the flash movie to show examples of other web sites.

Use these keys to navigate through the movie;

• Right arrow: move forward one slide
• Left arrow: move backward one slide
• Up arrow: replay animation of current slide
• Down arrow: skip animation of current slide

To create the slideshow, I reworked some code I created for the gallery at mustardworkstudio.com, but added functions to control the animation. I didn’t add as much animation as I had originally planned because I ran out of time and energy the night before the presentation (actually, early that morning), so maybe one day I’ll do some more work on this presentation.

Filed by Eric at 2:05 pm under Teaching, Technology
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My redesign for the Seattle Basque Club is now online. This project has taken me longer than expected, mainly because it was the first project where I create a Wordpress theme pretty much from scratch. It’s great to finally see it live, and the job pays as in $!

Filed by Eric at 9:19 pm under Web Design
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I’m putting the finishing touches on my minor redesign of the Eckstein web site. Some of the new features include:

* Revisions to color scheme so navigation links are not a on blue background.
* Removed the boxpunch to allow for more white space in the main content area.
* Reworked to header image to improve image quality.
* Added a style switcher with a high contrast/large font view (see bottom of left menu”). The style switcher is written in unobtrusive javascript.

Overall, I’m quite happy that this looks much cleaner, but the most important finishing touch is the link I just added to make a donation to the Red Cross Hurrican Katrina reflief fund. I’ll leave it up for a few weeks.

Filed by Eric at 11:47 pm under Web Design
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