BrianGriggs.com » Tech How To

The NY Times on ebooks in the library

Brian — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:01:34 +0000

The New York Times has an article about the status of ebooks in the library, both in the limitations that publishers are putting on circulations and a how-to for getting the books to your devices.

The author of the article talks about one trilogy having 193 holds. For a physical book, like the Hunger Games or the Gallagher Girls, that doesn’t seem like an insane wait list (when those first came out, my library had at least that many holds). It’s a long wait, but not insane. What makes it more interesting is that the article is talking about digital copies. There are no physical limitations here, just policy that the publishers are dictating.

Adding a weather forecast to your Google calendar

Brian — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:44:41 +0000

In your main Google calendar’s general settings (accessible from the gear icon), there are fields to fill in about your calendar. If you put in your zip code and then check the weather forecast button, it will add a little weather forecast graphic to your calendar. I think it’s useful, if only for the month of April in Arizona. Soon the forecast will be redundant: a slight chance of melting.

Impossible Photography – TED Talk: Erik Johansson

Brian — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:07:55 +0000

If you’ve been with this site for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of the TED Talks. Normally, it’s world-changing presentations on amazing solar cells or cures for diseases.

Check out this one from Erik Johansson using Photoshop, planning, and the human imagination to create some M.C. Escher-esque photos.

Creating a template in pbworks

Brian — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:07:42 +0000

This is a really quick tip that will save you a ton of time. When viewing a page as an administrator in pbworks, you can add a tag. If you type the word “template” all lower case as the tag, you can reuse the page as a template for when you create a new page.

Floppy drives as musical instruments

Brian — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:13:01 +0000

I just found this video of five floppy drives playing a cover of daft Punk’s “Derezzed” from Tron Legacy:

So, that’s a lot of fun, but the really cool thing is that YouTube user Sammy1Am uploaded a how-to video for how to do this with your own old floppy drives:

Six pre-made HTML 5 lessons

Brian — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:55:36 +0000

This one’s for the teachers of technology. If you are doing any instruction on what HTML 5 is, check out Microsoft’s faculty page here for pre-made PowerPoints for six lessons. The page also includes all of the project files, which gives you a lot to pick and choose from when modifying it for your own classes.

Quick Tip: FAT32 vs. NTFS

Brian — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:58 +0000

I know many librarians also delve into video productions, so I offer this quick tip. If you run into an error code 0, stopping a file transfer operation, it’s more than likely because the hard drive you are copying to has a file size limit.

I have a 320GB hard drive and I tried transferring 170GB worth of video footage to it today. Some of the video clips were huge. I knew I had enough room on the drive, but some of the individual files were past the drive’s file size limit. Thankfully I was able to format the target hard drive from FAT32, which has a file size limit of a couple of gigabytes, to NTFS, which could handle the larger files.

Here’s a precaution, though. Before you format any hard drive, realize that the contents of that drive will be wiped.

Vimeo Music Store

Brian — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:15:40 +0000

When we create videos, many times students want to use copyrighted music in their projects. We use GarageBand for students to mix their own loops (and maybe even venture into the musical typing feature), but another option is the Vimeo Music Store. You can search by cost and copyright. Some are free, so you might want to check it out. It’s blocked in our district, but maybe not in yours.

Is Netflix trying to psych us out?

Brian — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 23:36:38 +0000

edited 8/26/11 4:40pm: Clear your cookies for Netflix. Cookies store passwords and other information for websites. If you don’t want to clear all your cookies, you can check your browsing history and right-click (in Firefox) on the site in the list and ‘Forget this site’. It will look different on other browsers, but the idea is the same.

As September 1, and the new Netflix pricing, approaches, many people I’ve talked to are ditching the DVD portion of their Netflix subscription.

I find it interesting that since last night I’ve seen this on Netflix’s homepage:

Are they trying to prove that streaming is not reliable? It’s just on the website; my 360 is still streaming fine. Will the website have improvements? Is Netflix going to surprise us with a Watch Instantly library that includes more than low-budget movies from the early 90s? Is this another attack from Anonymous?

Whatever the cause for the outage, have you seen downrightnow.com? For any website, you can visit this site instead of hitting refresh over and over again (if you’re like me). downrightnow can help you diagnose if the site is really down or if it’s simply on your end of things.

Adobe Illustrator: Live Trace

Brian — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:31:32 +0000

In an earlier post I mentioned random skills that librarians pick up (graphic design, video editing, archery). I’m helping a friend convert a bitmap into a vector. Bitmaps get all jagged and pixelly when you stretch them beyond their proportions. Vectors use math (it’s all about the rays and line segments) to stretch pictures without the pixellation. If you’ve ever drawn in Flash, you’ve drawn using vectors.

I was about to manually trace the bitmap in Adobe Illustrator and then save it as a vector when I noticed the Live Trace feature.

Note: This is using Adobe CS2.

How to use it:

Click on the layer with your image.
In the menu bar, click on ‘Object’, then ‘Live Trace’, then ‘Show Adjusted Image’.
Click on your image and then click on the ‘Live Trace’ button.
It will take a bit to trace automatically. You can then click on ‘Object’, then ‘Live Paint’, then ‘Make’ to make a new image using vectors. This allows you to edit the new image like any other Illustrator file.