Blodget’s Blog

I use Google’s RSS feed reader on my iPod Touch to keep up to date on what’s new. Sometimes I want to share my findings with others. A good way to do this is to email posts to a Blogger blog and use Feedburner to let people subscribe to the blog by email.

My Blogger blog is called Jim’s Findings. Feel free to subscribe by email. You’ll get a daily email with all the things I find that day.

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VCASMO.com is a free web service that provides storage and display of presentations. The unique thing about this one is that you can display video and slides side-by-side and the slides can be timed to change with the video. Most people are using this for lectures with Powerpoint slides, but as this sample shows, it can also be used for tutorials. Besides embedding the presentation on your own site (like I did above), you can link to it on their website.

I like that you can have hot-links in the slides. I also like that the player can display thumbnails of the slides and that you can navigate to a slide by clicking the thumbnail. This gives you chapter stops. (Click the little black arrow on the right of the slide window to see the thumbnails).

The full screen playback look good and they nicely provide you with embeddable versions – a small one for you blog (like the one above) and a bigger one for full page display.

The editing is very straightforward. The video is displayed above thumbnails of the slides and arrows point from each slide to a time line. You just click and drag the arrows to position each slide. You can play back the video to check your timing and position each slide based on the audio.

You can also present other file types including audio, images, and PDF files. Presentations can also have subtitles in different languages and visitors can add subtitles.

Another cool feature they have is called “Instant VCASMO”. This lets you pair slideshow.net presentations with Youtube videos.

Altogether it’s a great feature set. The website, however, still feels like it’s in beta. Site navigation is funky. It’s hard to get back to your own dashboard. Also, there is no Help. But, hey, try it out!

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I stumbled upon directions for converting text to speech. The solution for Mac uses an Automator script.

SETUP – MAC
1. Make sure the document you want to use is converted to plain text and that your document is saved with the .txt extension.
1. Open Automator.
2. Add an action by searching for and dragging “Get Contents of
TextEdit Document” from the menu on the left to the blank box on the
right.
3. Add action: “Text To Audio File” and complete the fields: System Voice, Save As, and Where.
4. Add action: “Rename Finder Items (Make Finder Item Names
Sequential)”. In the first drop down box, select “Make Sequential”.
Select “Add number to existing name”. Place number “after name”, and
separated by “dash”
5. Add action: “Import Audio File”. Select “MP3 Encoder” and check the “Delete source files after encoding.”
6. Save the Automator workflow as “Text to Speech”. Go to File – Save as plug-in, and select Script Menu to save.

Now you are finished with Automator and only have a few more steps to complete. Continuing with the process:

7. Open the document in TextEdit.
8. If needed, make any modifications to the text at this time.
9. Select the Scripts menu located in your menu bar. It looks like a
scroll or curly “S” and choose the “Text to Speech” workflow.

You will see the status of the conversion at work in your menu bar.
When it’s complete, an audio file will automatically be added to your
library in iTunes.

I was surprised by how quickly the conversion was done. It took only about 30 seconds to convert a book length text to an hour and 20 minute mp3 file. The previous way I did it required recording the file in real time using TextEdit and Audio Hijack.

Here’s the book length sample mp3 file. (18Mb)
It’s taken from “A Conjurer’s Confessions by M. Robert-Houdin

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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How to Convert a Camera Tripod into a Painting Easel.

Necessity, who is the mother of invention.
Plato, The Republic
Greek author & philosopher in Athens (427 BC – 347 BC)

I got a set of Holbein water soluble oil paints for Christmas and after looking around the house for a bit, I realized that I didn’t have good tilt-able easel. I did have several good camera tripods. What I really needed was a device that held a canvas and screwed on a tripod. So, I searched through art supply catalogs and the Internet, but I couldn’t find anything for sale. There are paint boxes that screw on a tripod and hold a canvas, but I didn’t need a paint box. I already had a good one.

After several weeks of thinking about it and going through at least 3 different designs, I decided to build one last weekend. I had everything I needed – wood, screws, power tools and an idea. I picked the easiest one to build. It uses two 1/2 inch dowels as rails and has 3 cross pieces that slide up and down. The center one screws onto the tripod and the outer two adjust for different sized canvases.

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Today I made a how-to video about using a Flickr photo in a blog post. This is really the easiest way to add a photo to a message. This type of movie is called a screencast because you capture what you do on your computer’s screen. I used SnapZ Pro to capture a movie of what I was doing in Flickr on my MacBook. I also used Omni Dazzle to circle things on the screen as I made the recording. I recorded my voice using the MacBook’s built-in microphone. I saved the movie using the Animation codec at 15 fps. I then Imported the movie to iMovie and added a title and closing credit and some sound effects and transitions. I exported the movie as an avi file and then converted the avi to flv using ffmpegX. I then uploaded everything to my blodget.net server and used the Wimpy WASP player to show the flv file on a web page. The final flv movie is about 4 minutes long and is about 8.3 Mb. See Flickr Photos in Your Blog.

A very special thank you to Don McAllister and his wonderful Screencastsonline.com website for information on how to produce a screencast including links to all the tools he uses. Be sure to see his Behind the Scenes screencast.

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