Category Archives: technology

technology

5 Lessons Learned From Creating Videos

33 Comments

I did my first video on December 30, 2010, when I was testing my new webcam. Since that time it seems I’ve created 13 videos, 12 from the webcam and one from my smartphone. I can honestly say I’ve learned a few things and I think I’ve gotten better since that first one.

The 5 lessons I’ve learned aren’t major things probably, but I think each of them are first steps towards figuring out how people want to put their videos together. Of course I’ve tossed my own flair in because, after all, it’s me.

I’m also doing something a little different for me in that I’m putting this same video on two blogs at the same time. I figure that in general the audience for each is different, but the video will work well for both. The video is below this, but for those who don’t watch the video, here’s the list of my 5 lessons:

1. Video’s not so easy to do.

2. One has to consider their background.

3. One has to figure out the best lighting to highlight their face.

4. One should rehearse their presentation before just sitting down before a camera and going for it.

5. If your video has anything to do with business, mention your website, including the domain, and spell it if necessary.

And now, video!


 

technology

Aftermath Of My Firmware Upgrade

18 Comments

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the dangers of updating one’s technology. After trying as much as I could to get my webcam’s working again without success I decided it was time to make some significant changes in my technology. Even with this, possibly I still haven’t learned my lesson, although, at the present time, things are fine.

I decided the router just wasn’t coming back after that stupid firmware upgrade and that it was time to buy a new one. I figured that even if it didn’t fix my camera it would be 7 years newer and under warranty, and thus the good people at Cisco would talk to me. Yeah, I went out with the intention of buying another Linksys, and I bought the one to the right here. But not without controversy; you know how my life goes by now. lol

I first went to Best Buy because I knew they had a router on sale. The router that was on sale wasn’t bad, but something in me said not to skimp at this juncture and to make sure I got a 802.11n as opposed to the “g”. The “n” is the latest wireless technology, so why go backwards, right? The difference was about $50, as I was going to get the E2000.

I also decided it was time to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium, since I had some extra cash and had suffered from another Vista lockout; stupid Vista. After I grabbed the router I went to check on the price of the upgrade, which was $119; not bad.

I had to go to the Geek Squad desk, and of course no one was there. I was customer service reps helping other people so I decided to sit on the stool and wait for them to come over. Five minutes later I’m still sitting there, and the customer service reps are to the side having a good time with some kind of conversation. What the hey?

Not in the mood to be totally ignored for once I called out “Hey, customer over here waiting to buy something.” It’s like they never knew I was there; have I happened to mention that I’m not quite a small guy and that my skin tone is a little dark? After they were startled the young woman walks towards me, then disappears. Some seconds later she comes out, followed by a guy who, though he was wearing the white shirt and black tie, looked like one of the worst representatives of customer service that anyone might ever ask for.

I tell him what I want and, of all things, they’re out of the upgrade disk. I mean, come on… how can Best Buy, the top technology store in the country (are there any others) that has almost everything, be out of the one product that most people are still buying more than any other when it comes to software? He tries to talk me into buying the professional version but at $80 more than the upgrade and with nothing in it to entice me, since I’d done my research at home, I declined, left the router there, and went to Staples.

Staples had the Windows 7 Home Premium, so I grabbed that then went to look at the routers. They had the E2000, but they also had the E1500 Wireless-N Router with SpeedBoost, at a cost of $20 less than the E2000. I love the speed boost so it was a no-brainer; that plus the lower cost.

I came home, hooked up the router, and life was great. I’m maxing out my top download speeds, over 20MBPS, and my cameras work again; whew! Happy as a clam, I still decided to wait until later in the evening to load Win 7, when my wife went to bed.

A friend of mine, who’d been trying to talk me into doing this for over a year, said it would take around 45 minutes to load. Sorry folks, but it took my computer 4 hours to load the program. Stuff just seems to happen to me. Luckily I could still get online with the laptop if I chose to but I decided to chill and watch TV instead. Made it through two movies waiting for it to finish, and around 2:45 in the morning it was done. I ran some tests, it worked pretty well, and I was happy.

Next day I started uploading all the security updates and decided to hold off for some time before loading the service pack. Good thing I did because as soon as I loaded the service pack my computer locked up and it wouldn’t let me do anything. It said I had to sign in as administrator but there was no place to logoff to sign in as anything. No programs would open, and nothing would work except to keep shutting it down and rebooting. It wouldn’t even let me run system restore. Finally I got smart, booted up in smart mode, got into the programs area and uninstalled the service pack, and all is right with the world again.

Since then I’ve been scared to try it again, and I also haven’t loaded IE 9; not sure why, but I’m not feeling it. Still, this is way more stable than Vista ever could claim, and the computer will actually shut down and reboot when I ask it to; just amazing.

Why tell this story? Because if it can happen to me it can happen to others, and hopefully folks will think about safe mode booting and other stuff instead of spending hours doing lots of other stuff that probably won’t work.

By the way, major word of warning. Before you load Win 7 or any new operating system make sure you back up “special” files, just in case. What’s special? People always remember to back up documents, images and sound files, but often forget to back up the profiles for their email and browser bookmarks, which are located under the Users area, AppData. Those folders are big, but trust me, if you lose all your email and your bookmarks you’ll be lamenting the fact that you didn’t take caution.

Okay, now I can just wait for Jessica to stop by and pick on me because I don’t have a Mac. lol

technology

Testing The Webcam

36 Comments

Lo and behold, I have a new webcam, my first ever. I was going to say that Santa bought it for me but that would be a lie. I’ve thought about having some kind of camera on my computer for a long time and decided to give myself a Christmas treat.

It turns out not to be as easy as one might think it would be, especially for someone who’s used to professional speaking. Figuring out where to look was an interesting challenge, and I was doing some things during the couple of practice runs that I had to quickly train myself not to do. Anyway, here’s the video:

There’s a few things I had to do to get the video on here.  I didn’t want to have to go to YouTube, so I installed a plugin called Embedded Video.  Then I had to switch to WYSIWYG so I could access the program, as that’s the only way it shows.  The last tab of the program allows you to pop in the link to the video, which is on my own website, and thus you see the video. Once I saw what the code looked like, I went back and got out of WYSIWYG and only used the code I saw before in my normal mode to see if it still worked, and it didn’t. So, it would seem that you can’t just write the code and add a video that way; sigh…

Also, my original file was around 183MB, so I had to upload it to my site, which took awhile being that big, but the video seems to be doing its job, and I’m a happy guy.

So, this post ends up being a great learning tool as well as you seeing my video; it’s all good. I did go back and find out that the webcam I bought today is the one I’m showing down below; it’s pretty neat and fairly inexpensive. I bought one for my wife as well today to replace her obsolete one once I got her a Win 7 machine.

What do you think?

Update If you don’t have a very fast internet connection it’s going to take forever for the video to load. I’m learning on the go, and I realize that’s a really huge file for many people. Sorry about that in advance.

Update II It turns out I actually have a YouTube account, though I have absolutely no idea where it came from. Anyway, the video is now able to be viewed by everyone; go for it! 😉
 

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell

technology

Solid State Drives – The Way Of The Future?

6 Comments

A little over a week ago I wrote a post about this hard drive that I was going to be buying for myself, the Apricorn secure hard drive. For me, it’s a needed commodity to protect some of the confidential information given to me by my clients, as well as one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Yet, there’s something else that’s been on my mind lately that I want to talk about. That’s this thing called solid state hard drives. From what I’m understanding, solid state drives are much faster, much more durable, and definitely much lighter than conventional hard drives. This last one I can easily confirm because while I was out of town, someone allowed me to pick up their relatively new laptop, and it had almost no weight to it.

What makes it durable? It has no moving parts and is smaller and more contained. You know that noise you hear when you turn on your computer? That’s the hard drive and fan powering things up, but mainly it’s the hard drive. With solid state drives, you barely hear anything.

As for it being faster, well, I haven’t seen that in person, but research indicates that, depending on what you’re testing it against, in some instances it’s a bit more than twice the speed of a traditional hard drive, and more than three times as fast in other tests.

How does solid state technology work? I have to admit that one is beyond me, not knowing anything about electronics, but I’ll make kind of a comparison. For those folks old enough to remember, televisions used to contain these big tubes, multiple tubes, which powered the television and produced the images. By the late 70’s, tubes had been replaced by transistors, kind of flat panels that could handle all of that stuff. The same thing occurred with radios, and many of us remember that we could finally walk around with these small, light radios when they became transistor radios; before that, we couldn’t easily walk around with our music.

Anyway, solid state drives are something like that. Instead of spinning plates and the like, it’s something like transistors that’s replaced them. That means you can’t shake them and damage them, don’t have to worry as much about an electric shock destroying one, and it would take a lot for it to burn out like hard drives do now, since they don’t heat up the same way.

What’s the catch? Right now, solid state drives can cost tons more than regular drives. You can get a 300GB hard drive for less than $100 in many circumstances nowadays. A 120GB solid state drive will cost you at least $250; that’s kind of steep. The price of some drives is even higher. Of course, most people will never use more than 50GB, but that’s not quite the point. We all have our reasons for wanting something different. The friend who showed me his laptop, which weighs less than 2 pounds overall, travels a lot, and he can just toss it into a shoulder bag and go on his way, instead of having to put it in a bag like mine, which weighs about 7 pounds on its own.

Think I’m kidding? Ask yourself why the laptop below costs so much with only a 128GB hard drive; it’s not just because it’s a MacBook.

15.4 MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz 2GB RAM 128GB SOLID STATE Hard Drive NVIDIA GeForce 9400M SuperDrive

Price – $2,049.00

technology

Is Your Tech Failing You?

8 Comments

I have an Epson Photo R200 printer. I like this printer a lot, so much so that I bought my wife one, and I even recommended it to my mother and a friend of mine, both of whom bought the same thing.

I do have a problem with it, though. It doesn’t like to print envelopes. Actually, the printing part is fine; it’s the feeding the envelopes through the printer part that it won’t do. I have to literally push the envelope into the feeder and hope that it takes it to get envelopes printed. If I’m only doing one envelope at a time it’s not such a big deal. But when I’m doing some of my marketing and I’m pushing through between 20 and 40 envelopes, it’s very irritating.

As I started to think back on it, I realized that every printer I’ve ever owned has been an Epson, and I’ve always had the same problems. That’s over 20 years of envelope problems, yet I keep buying the same thing. I know I’m the loyal type, but I’m thinking that’s a bit ridiculous in retrospect.

Then I started thinking about other tech things as it relates to my computing, or in some way interacts with my computer, and things I’ve tolerated over the years. For instance, I’ve had a Palm of some type since 2002. For the most part they’ve all worked pretty well. But every one of them invariably had an issue. And, oddly enough, I realized that at some point I sent each of them back to the company because something had failed; how weird is that? I love the fact that I can carry all my addresses and passwords and music and calendar and the like with me easily enough; but have I really gotten my money’s worth and had my time be really efficient in the long run with some of the technical issues I’ve had to deal with?

And then there’s my computer itself. Some of you remember my tale about getting my old computer fixed by the computer guy and the subsequent story the next day. The computer I had before that one was a terror as well. As a matter of fact, for all the complaints I’ve had about Vista, the truth is that this is still the best running computer I’ve had since the very first computer I ever had, my double floppy special back in 1987 that I never wanted, and look at all the trouble it’s led to in my life. 🙂 And I have had a few problems with this computer that I’m not sure are Vista related that makes me wonder what it is with tech companies to begin with.

I mean, is it that they’re all following what we know as the Microsoft Principle, which means put it out there even if it’s not perfect and we’ll try to make it better as it goes along? Yeah, I know, nothing’s perfect, but is there anything that any of us have bought that we can truthfully say we’ve never had even one little glitch with it?

I’ve had to replace my scanner four times. I’ve had to replace the battery pack to my laptop twice, and the hard drive once. My GPS unit just won’t update itself online through this computer, even though it’s supposed to, which means that was a waste of $65 to update the maps. I tried to update the software for the transfer of files between my cell and the computer and ended up losing access to my computer for a few hours until I figured out how to get back into it and do a system restore; thank goodness I could do that. I had to buy a USB headset because my previous headset and my microphone suddenly wouldn’t work. One of my external hard drives has bit the dust, and it was considered a highly ranked enclosure when I bought it. I can’t count how many hard drives I’ve lost over the years. And I’ve had to replace two monitors in my lifetime.

Am I expecting too much in my tech, or do many of you feel the same way? And, not that I’m going to change all that immediately, but is there a printer out there that’s not a HP (let’s not even go into why I’m not buying a HP) that will easily load envelopes so I can remove that bit of minor stress from my life in the future, that also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg?

SeeThru Hard Shell Case for BlackBerry Storm - Red

SeeThru Hard Shell Case for BlackBerry Storm – Red

Price – $25.99