In Darren's comment, posted to Prepare to Geek Out , he asked what flash player I was using to play the video in that post. Well, to answer his question requires a whole post (probably deserves more than one!).

Quick Answer
The JW FLV Player which can be found at longtailvideo.com.

Things I like about the JW FLV player:

• You can purchase a license (which I have done) or use the free, non-commercial, creative commons version of the player, which has restrictions.
• You can skin the player to have a particular look and feel.
• You can include plugins that add additional functionality, like the link or embed code at the end of the video, which they call the Viral Plugin.
• You have several monetization options, which really don't apply to me, but others may find of value.
• You have a web-based setup wizard that allows you to configure the code you will place on your site.
• Site implementation is rather straight forward.
• You can embed metadata into your player for each implementation of video on your site.
• If you want to dig deeper into web video compression, embedding, streaming, and the javascript API, they offer some really good tutorials. (Just noticed these!)

Things that tend to go sideways for me about the JW FLV player:

• The web-based setup wizard gets quirky for me by not showing the preview in the setup wizard window when I use a skin. At first I thought the skin was just not working, but it was. The preview in the setup wizard window was all that wasn't working.
• The setup wizard offers two types of code for your blog: javascript based code and an embed code. For some reason, (lack of sleep?) I had the hardest time figuring out how to get from one to the other. It isn't hard at all. I just missed the obvious, I guess.

Another Option
However, my favorite option for a flash player is SlideShowPro. SlideShowPro is unbelievably powerful and so totally slick! It can be vastly more than just a flash player you embed on your site with content. You also have other purchase options and can, for little money, purchase SlideShowPro Director, which is a complete and incredibly powerful content management system for photos and video. But with all of this power, comes a bit of a learning curve.

I've been playing with (learning) SlideShowPro on my personal site for my online photo collection, which contains over 10,000 photos, all managed through Adobe's Lightroom 2 using SlideShowPro's Export plugin to upload the photos into SlideShowPro Director and using SlideShow Pro for Adobe Lightroom and SlideShowPro for Flash to create the actual slideshow itself that then links to the content in SlideShow Pro Director. I've been dabbling with it on and off now (more off than on really) for about a year. I'm just now getting to the point where I think "I get it."

Here's a brief example of my workflow:

• Shoot photos and import them into Lightroom 2 for tagging, touchup, and organization (Or make videos and upload them to SlideShow Pro Director)
• Arrange the photos into collections (albums and galleries) in Lightroom 2
• Export the albums directly out of Lightroom 2 at full size into SlideShowPro Director (You don't have to use full size, but this has its rewards!)
• Create a flash based slideshow in Lightroom 2, using the SlideShowPro for Lightroom plugin, or...
• Create a flash based slideshow in the Flash application itself using SlideShowPro's Flash component
• Embed the flash player on your site.

Using the above workflow, the flash player can be linked to the media RSS feed from any SlideShow Pro Director album or gallery of albums. (I frequently use the exact same flv player over and over again but linked to a different content RSS feed.) As you update the contents in the album or gallery in SlideShowPro's Director, it automatically updates the content that is played in the player! And, with the options I implemented, every time an end user hits my photos in full screen mode, SlideShow Pro Director checks out their screen size and then creates images from the full size images on the server that are the exact size of their monitor--no compression artifacts and no pixilated upsampling. Total sweetness! SlideShow Pro Director is a very, very powerful content management system: smart albums based on EXIF meta data, tags, managing image focal points, etc.

The flash player you create in Lightroom or in the Flash application has numerous customizable features and looks totally professional. In fact, if you know a lot more than I do, you can dig into the bowels of the Flash and Director API and create whatever you can imagine. And, you have the ability to intermix video and photos. The photos can pan and zoom. I could go on and on about this series of products.

Rarely do I actually recommend a product, but I must say that I highly recommend SlideShowPro's entire family of products. They are affordably priced and very powerful. Installing it on my server was very straight forward. (You can also have them host your content for you for a recurring fee.) And they have had excellent support for me when I had questions. I've even had email exchanges with the owner of the company to solve a problem or make some feature requests. These guys really are listening!

But there is an issue... It took me some time, a good bit of time, actually, to get my head around how the SlideShowPro product workflow would unfold for me in a practical application on my personal website with all of my photos. As I didn't use the product consistently and have zero knowledge of Flash, the learning curve felt intense to me. But, let me assure you, for me, it was absolutely worth it! I really think I should have just hit it hard for a few days until "I got it" rather than dabbling a little here and a little there. Now, they have a very nice collection of excellent video tutorials that make understanding the process much more obvious!

Which Option to Choose?
For an occasional video embed, probably the JW FLV player would be the best option. It's less complex and more straight forward. But if you want to deliver instructional content on a regular basis, I would suggest a very close look at the SlideShowPro product line for video and photo content management. I can envision this being used to deliver online staff development in a school district. I think that even as a classroom teacher, I would be all over SlideShowPro.

So, Darren, with the awesomeness you do with your math students, if you're looking for a routine video management system for their math instruction, to upload your classroom interactive whiteboard instructional videos as well as your movies that bring math to life, I'd look seriously at SlideShowPro. Check out their introductory video at this link and imagine that being the digital hub for your math class!

For some time now, I've been perplexed about how to get a quality video that plays in the Flash media player. Most of the encoded videos I see playing in a Flash player are so heavily compressed, they look, well, quiet frankly, just awful. I know YouTube is encoding more and more of their video, which plays in their Flash player, using the H.264 codec from Apple. Those videos look awesome as the H.264 codec produces a high quality visual result with a significant reduction in file size. But how are they doing it?

After dabbling with this issue for some time, I have stumbled upon a solution. It might not be the "correct" way, but I have discovered a compression process that works. If you have a better solution, do share!

Compression Overview
Video files are large: huge, in fact. The original example file I will be using in this post was 403 megabytes for a 1 minute and 45 second video at a size of 820 pixels wide and 550 pixels tall. (This file was already compressed using H.264 when I exported it from a much larger HD movie I had created from 150 of my photographs.) Therefore, we need to compress movie files so they can be played over the internet. When you export a video file, you choose how the video file will be compressed. Compression can become a complicated process really fast because each compression option typically has numerous different parameters.

Perhaps the most important choice is the first one: which type of compression (called a codec--which stands for compress/decompress) you will use. The codec is the way the video is compressed before you upload it to the internet server (compress) and the way you decompress it to play it on the end user's computer (decompress). When a video will not play on your machine, odds are high that your video player (QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer) does not have the same codec on your machine the movie was compressed in and therefore can not decompress the file so it will play on your machine.

Player Overview
When an end user plays a video, the computer uses a media player application to decompress the video file so you can watch it. Macs typically use QuickTime. Windows typically uses Windows Media Player or QuickTime, which also works on a Windows machine. When playing a video file from internet, the browser often uses one of these players, often within a browser window, to play the movie file.

Perhaps because Internet Explorer was so issue riddled for so many years, causing QuickTime movies to fail to play in the Internet Explorer browser, many people turned to the Flash player, which works fine on Windows and on Macs. YouTube videos, for example, play through the Flash player to maximize browser compatibility. The only problem with the Flash player is that the codecs typically used for flash movies compress the video so much they create very poor playback quality.

Compression Codecs
Two of the standard codecs used for movies played through a flash player are On2 VP6 and Sorenson Spark. These codecs shrink the file down significantly! But the problem is they look, well, "compressed." You can see very noticeable "compression artifacts." To my eye, On2 VP6 creates fewer compression artifacts than Sorenson Spark. But both are just unacceptable to me.

The H.264 codec, created by Apple Inc. produces the most natural video image of any codec I've ever seen. Typically, when you have great video quality, the file size is huge. But, amazingly, the H.264 codec gives both glorious video quality and small file sizes. This has rapidly made the H.264 codec very, very popular. YouTube, for example, has started using the H.264 codec for its high quality videos.

Comparison of Codec's Video Quality and File Sizes
In the images below, you can see a comparison of the image quality and the file sizes created by the H.264 codec, the On2 VP6 codec, and the Sorenson Spark codec. The comparisons are all based on an original movie that was 820 pixels wide and 550 pixels tall even though the pictures are considerably smaller.

All of these examples were exported with a data rate of 1,200 kbytes per second, which is another parameter that has a huge impact on video quality. A data rate of 1,200 kbytes per second is insanely high for the web but produces much higher video quality. (The higher the data rate, the more bandwidth playing a single movie file will consume. Web masters typically try to conserve bandwidth as it costs them money.)

You can click on any picture to see the larger image thus seeing the compression artifacts more clearly. Notice, in example one, the QuickTime .mov file compressed with the H.264 codec is by the far the clearest with clean, crisp black borders around the individual pictures in the movie. However it is by far the largest file size!

The Flash flv file, in example two, compressed with the On2 VP6 codec is drastically smaller. But, when you click on the image to see the full size version, you will see that the black borders framing the pictures are noticeably jagged and the image loses detail.

The Flash flv file, in example three, compressed with the Sorenson codec is slightly larger than the On2 VP6 codec but is still drastically smaller than the H.264 codec result. But, when you click on the image to see the full size version, you will see that, not only are the black borders framing the pictures noticeably jagged, but the area around the cactus in the bottom right is heavily pixilated (boxy), the child's face lacks detail, and the image has become blurry.

Again, these issues are not very noticeable until you look at the images full size, in the size the movie file actually will play in the browser. So, in my mind, the question has always been, "How do I get the pristine visual clarity of the H.264 codec into an flv file format that the Flash player can play in any browser with the fewest issues?!" The answer is below!

The Solution
I took the original QuickTime .mov file compressed with the H.264 codec and exported it as an mp4 file, yet another file format, using the H.264 codec. (If I had only known this little trick when I created the original movie file of the 150 photographs, I could have created the original as an mp4 file using the H.264 codec instead of a .mov file format. Thus, I would have avoided recompressing the file and probably would have acheived even greater visual detail!)

The mp4 file format is considerably smaller than the .mov file format. And since it too can be compressed using the H.264 codec, you get excellent visual quality.

And here's the amazing part. To get the .mp4 file format to play through a flash player, it must have an .flv file extension. All I had to do was replace the .mp4 file extension with the .flv file extension, and, amazingly it now plays in the flash player! But best of all, it is now the smallest file size of all: only 16.1 megabytes!

Keep in mind, as you watch the video below, that the file is actually twice this size. It was designed for a larger window size (820 pixels wide) that will not fit in this blog's post area (about 500 pixels wide). So you are seeing it much smaller than it was intended to be seen.

Warning Label: This post condenses a lot of thinking into a few words. It's a tad political but addresses some big issues.

I have long lamented the death of liberal arts education. I have even begun to wonder if the liberal arts could exist in a world inundated with terabytes of data overload heaped high in a technological nano second. In the world I see forming before me, the human being, the well being of which should matter most to all of us, can hardly begin to construct significant meaningfulness, can not build real information from all of the data, to address really significant people problems. We are people, not data. We are humans, not numbers.

Our nation seems to have become powerless to determine our own destiny as people, as human beings. The politicians, the public relations firms, the entertainment industry, the media, and others sway our attention and attempt to build some artifice of tolerable consensus while the unthinkable has been happening all around us. We live in the fog of "freedom of choice," but having the most choice about the things that matter the least while ignoring all of the elephants in the room.

I've seen the media, trying to find its way in the newly emerging social networks that appear to be abandoning traditional media forms, treating everyone as the professional expert, giving the uninformed their 15 seconds of fame. And, I see over and over, that most Americans lack the reasoning skills, the knowledge of or even access to facts, the depth of curiosity, the transformational flexibility of thought, the commitment to the common good to make a meaningful contribution.

We have become overwhelmed and stupefied, incapable of recognizing, celebrating, creating, and sharing beauty in all the multifaceted forms beauty can take. Our K-12 education system, more and more narrowly focused on less and less, is producing a product that is perhaps more easily governed, but can not govern, problem solve, or create. This education policy which places increasing emphasis on outsourcing education to private industry, is, in the long term, absolutely unsustainable. And the market place, as we have so explicitly seen in the last 18 months, is completely incapable of handling matters critically related to our common good as a nation. What if Social Security had been privatized before the crash of Wall Street? Do we want to place public education in the hands of for profit corporate America?

This is the heart of the matter for me: the process of creating--creating beauty. It is action. It is imagination. It is valued. It is liberal arts education.

I marvel that, in a time when we have the affordable technological capacity to create virtually anything we can imagine in our minds, our minds, detached from our hearts, have lost the capacity to imagine anything worthy of creation. This is the tragedy of an education system, once the envy of the world, that is focused solely on the memorization of a minimum body of information detached from the reality of the significant issues facing our world and the world our children will adopt.

I read many education blogs. We are all guilty of pumping out megabytes of bandwidth about what is broken in our field.

Enough already.

It is time to begin imagining what can be, what is now possible. This is the hard intellectual and creative work on which we must focus our insight, our talent, our passion, our imagination, our expertise, our collaborations, and our deepest convictions about the common good.

I think educators needed to vent our frustrations. But that time is done.

Bennington president Liz Coleman's February, 2009, TED presentation, a call for reform of higher education, is, for my mind and heart, refreshing and invigorating. She speaks brilliantly, for those who have an ear to listen, about transforming education into action-oriented artistic expression focused on the common good. She uses carefully chosen vocabulary and provokes thought designed for action. This isn't CNN: You can't just hear her and "get it." You must think carefully about what she is saying. Her words are as weighty as her message. The presentation is below. Here are just a few ideas from her 20 minute presentation about Bennington's action plan:

... The more powerful our reach, the more important the question: about what. ...

The continuum of thought and action are [the new liberal arts] life's blood, knowledge honed outside the academy becomes essential. [Experts in the field will join the faculty] in this wedding of liberal education to the advancement of the public good. Students in turn continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly. ...

The most important discovery we made in our focus on public action was to appreciate that the hard choices are not between good and evil, but between competing goods. This discovery is transforming. It undercuts self-righteousness, radically alters the tone and character of controversy and enriches dramatically the possibilities for finding common ground. Ideology, zealotry, unsubstantiated opinion simply won't do. This is a political education to be sure, but it is a politics of principle not of partisanship. ...

We intend to turn the intellectual and imaginative power, passion, and boldness of our students, faculty, and staff on developing strategies for acting on the most critical challenges of our time. ...

The glacial silence we have experienced in the face of the shredding of the constitution, the unraveling of our public institutions, and the deterioration of our infrastructure is not limited to the universities. We, the people, have become inured to our own irrelevance when it comes to our doing anything significant about anything that matters concerning governance beyond waiting another four years. We persist also in being sidelined by the idea of the expert as the only ones capable of coming up with answers despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The problem is there is no such thing as a viable democracy made up of experts, zealots, politicians, and spectators. ...

[We need those who pursue a very highly defined area of inquiry, but...] This single-mindedness will not yield the flexibilities of mind, the multiplicity of perspectives, the capacities for collaboration and innovation this country needs. ...

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed. Well, you have two things. You have a mind and you have other people. Start with those and change the world.

Her TED talk:

For some unknown reason, microphone explorations have been foist upon me of late. I have no idea why! Sort of odd, really...

But, I recently was introduced to SwitchEasy's ThumbTacks micro-microphone. This little microphone (only slightly larger than an actual thumbtack and of a very similar shape) is inexpensive and easy to use. You just plug it into the headphone jack of the iPod Touch 2G or an iPod Nano 4G.

SwitchEasy states that they carefully selected the actual microphone unit to capture quality audio at a reasonable price. And how does a list price of $12.99 (as of this writing) sound for an iPod microphone? I decided I would take one out on a test drive. Below you will find a recording using three microphones: the Shure MPA-3C Music Phone Adapter for iPhone (used on my iPod Touch—not on my iPhone), Macally's iPod Audio Recorder Black (IP-A181), and the SwitchEasy SW-TT-B ThumbTacks Micro-Microphone. You can check out the price of each at the links above. (The ThumbTack is less than half the price.)

The test: in a single recording using the iTalk application (Griffin offers a free version) on my iPod Touch, attach each mic, one at a time, place the iPod Touch in my shirt pocket, say which mic I was using, read a sentence, take the iPod out of my pocket, place it on pause, change mics. I added a sound clip at the beginning, end and between each sentence to make the recording a little more interesting.

I clipped the Shure mic on my shirt on the same horizontal line as the top of my shirt pocket. The Shure mic was still, however, maybe less than an 1 inch closer to my mouth as it was near the shirt buttons and not the shirt pocket.

I was rather surprised by the outcome. But I'll let you hear it for yourself (1 minute, 40 seconds).

I have always preferred the Shure sound quality. It's excellent and in stereo. The sound wave from the Macally is clipped and little can be done to correct clipped digital audio. I suspect that if you only heard the recording from the ThumbTack, you would just turn up the volume a little and be a happy camper. (I also noticed that since this mic is so small, the ThumbTack was a little below the top of my shirt pocket, which would block some of the sound coming at it. I'm fairly confident I would have achieved different results had I held the iPod Touch in my hand in front of my face.

So, for me, in this simple, unscientific test, the Shure has the richest sound quality, but the TumbTack, at less than half the price, isn't a bad choice at all. For some reason, the Macally clipped the digital audio and achieved a poor sound quality as a result.

In the example below, I normalized the audio from the ThumbTack. (This is easily accomplished in GarageBand or in Audacity.) The volume of the sound is therefore significantly boosted, but with the desired audio comes a minor amount of background hiss, which also got boosted by the normalization. One could spend an extra minute and remove much of the hiss. I didn't. (41 seconds)

So my positive take on the ThumbTack: I really like the price. (In fact, I am unaware of a less expensive option of any quality.) The sound quality is more than just satisfactory for school projects; it's actually good. The mic appears durable with no wires to wear out or get tangled. It's simple to plug in and out. The size requires little storage space for a class set.

My negatives on the ThumbTack: It's so small and cute it could easily sprout legs and disappear. Kids would love to have one of these. Is it a choking hazard for really young children?

Bottom line: You can afford a class set of these and achieve good sound results!

Disclaimer: I am not endorsing or recommending any product. I am not being paid to say anything about any of these products. Your results may vary.

I absolutely love, and regularly use, my computer keyboard's numeric keypad. I find typing numbers using the numeric keys above the alpha key set cumbersome and inefficient. (And I must also confess to wishing the telephone and the computer numeric keypad had the same layout—preferably defaulting to the keyboard's numeric layout!)

Problem: My laptop keyboard lacks the numeric keypad. I could travel with a USB keypad, but that completely defeats the point of owning a laptop: portability.

Solution: I just discovered my newest bit of application love: the NumberKey application for the iPhone and iPod Touch from BALMUDA design LTD. This application turns the iPhone or Touch into a keypad. And, a really nice "touch," it looks great, as if it belongs next to the laptop. The iPhone or iPod Touch connects to the laptop (via WiFi) through a small free application running on the laptop called "NumberKey Connect," that I have auto launch when I log in to my laptop. NumberKey on the iPhone feels natural and is responsive with no apparent delays between what you type and what you see on the computer screen. The look (skins: for example—make it match your white keyboard) and functionality of the application can be customized. And while the iPhone/iPd Touch's key size is somewhat smaller than a standard numeric keypad, using NumberKey is vastly superior to using the numbered keys on the standard alpha keyboard.

Tim likes!

photo credit: CC by momentimedia @ flickr

Thought 1: I posted several months ago about some unusual school settings, but mostly, as I travel, I find school is school the world over. Classrooms look pretty much the same. Fortunately we find some very noteworthy exceptions. But below you will see a pano of an abandoned school room in Russia. How many school rooms have you been in that looked very much the same as this?

Thought 2: I love photography. I also really enjoy 360º panoramic photography. I would love to see some 360º panoramas of schools. In fact, why not make a virtual tour of your building using this technology? New students to the school would be able to learn their way around the building before ever walking into the school. (You might want to password protect access to these for security reasons.) You can check out this pano from Mabry Middle School.

For those who are not really familiar with what a 360º pano is, you can explore the two included below. The first comes from an awesome site started by the Martin brothers in 2007, 360cities.net, that is well on its way to becoming a repository of 360º virtual tours of the planet. Social studies teachers, this is good stuff! 360cities is off to an amazing start with over 15,000 panoramic images that are also linked into Google Earth. The site's browser plugin absolutely rocks, especially on really large monitors--think interactive whiteboard here. And now they are hosting panoramas up to 65,536 x 32,768 pixels in size. That's really, really big! Check out their YouTube video to get a sense of what the Martin brothers are doing.

Jeffrey and David are presenting about their work on May 21, 2009, at Where2.0.

Click on the word "Fullscreen" on each pano to have an immersive experience. Remember you can zoom in/out using your keyboard, and you can click and drag in the picture with you mouse to move around in the image. The antithesis of the school room pictured below, in the world according to Tim, classrooms need to be interactive and immersive places that provide saturated engagement in deep, relevant curricular issues that just gobble up every child's attention span.

Inside abandoned school (floor 2). Physics. (Marino) (2009) in Russia

palace garden Karlsaue Kassel Nordhessen in Nordhessen

I am migrating to a new hosting service. I've been with DreamHost for several years and have decided to try mediatemple. The process of switching the Domain Name Server (DNS) settings has now begun. This means you will soon be hitting my site on the new server. It also means that my email is in a state of transition from one server to another. I will do my best to avoid losing any emails. But if you have sent me an email and not heard from me by week's end, you may want to send it again in case it got lost in the move.

The migration process has been fairly straight forward, but the email migration is a bit more complicated.

Update: Well, things didn't go quite as smoothly as they appeared to be going. The email server change has especially been problematic. Hopefully those issues are now resolved, I didn't lose any emails (resend if I haven't responded or you got the email returned to you), and you are seeing this page! Technology! :o)

AT&T and the Ma Bell monopoly... Hmm...

I recall the difficulty my grandmother had attaining her phone service after my grandfather died, and she moved into a maintenance-free apartment. The newly split up phone company set the stage for innovation but confused and frustrated her simple efforts to get a phone. In the days of divesting upheaval, she bemoaned the difficultly of just getting a physical phone, a phone line, a wiring service plan, deciding on the calling feature set, picking a calling plan... I recall seeing in her face how difficult this was for her at that time in her life.

I dabble a lot in the digital world, but I suspect that the changes I will be forced to confront when I am the age my grandmother was when she was trying to wrangle with new phone service, will be far more daunting. I already find myself more frequently and more intensely annoyed by the onslaught of digital noise in my life, by the rapid upgrade and update paths, by the latest digital ventures, by the pace of change. I seem to spend increasing amounts of my energy abating distractions. The younger crowd finds this all so energizing. I am increasingly annoyed. I guess I'm getting old?!

This morning (or would you call it tonight) I read this thought-provoking and well-written article in the Wall Street Journal by Steven Johnson. For those who love to read physical books, this digital transition may well put you in a completely different world from everyone else. Will the world of the digitized book be a better world of greater clarity, insight, and meaningful possibility or just more overload, more fragmentation, and more disengagement? Will this inevitable transition bring greater wisdom or simply the micro-monetization of the word. Yes.

Hopefully these little citations will entice you to read the entire article, linked at the bottom.

...the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels ...

Every word in that library will be searchable. ... the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. ... Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet. ...

[With the eBook reader] the bookstore is now following you around. ...

... an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and ... the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for... attention.

... print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading [thinking??].

... when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against ... distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

The Kindle [an eBook reader] in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting... No doubt future iterations ... will make it ... easy to jump online...

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. ...

Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter ... You'll read a puzzling passage ... then instantly browse ... comments from readers ... annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning. ...

Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote ...

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked...

... citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. ... will undoubtedly change the way books are written ...

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. ...

For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down ... The Kindle doesn't even have page numbers ... because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. ...

Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters. ...

[Source: How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com]

This short article, from makeuseof, gives 10 great YouTube URL tricks. I've posted before about one of them but had no idea you could do all of these things with a YouTube URL. Check out the above link for the details on how to:

1. View high quality videos
2. Embed Higher Quality Videos
3. Cut the chase and link to the interesting part
4. Hide the search box
5. Embed only a part of Video
6. Autoplay an embedded video
7. Loop an embedded video
8. Disable Related Videos
9. Bypass Youtube Regional Filtering
10. Download Video

Nice!

File conversion... that necessary added layer of unwanted complexity. Most computer users are aware of the fact that our computer programs create their own file types (and compatibility issues) when we save documents. Microsoft Word creates the .doc document file type. The newer version of MS Word creates the .docx file type. Adobe Acrobat creates the .pdf file type. Web pages are in the .html file format, and so forth.

When you get into audio and video files, you come into a whole world of file formats: .mp3, .aiff, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, .avi, and on and on and on. Depending on the file format, some users may not be able to even open your file to read it, or listen to it, or watch it on their computer because their computer program may not work with the file type you created.

Creating audio podcasts for the web is a good example that's easy to get our head around: many programs create .wav audio files or .aiff files--like the ones on the older CDs that would only hold a small number of music files. But to stream audio over the internet, .aiff files are much too large. The mp3 file format is typically used for streaming audio over the internet as you can attain a much smaller file size and still maintain good sound quality.

But how would you get your giant audio .aiff file into the smaller .mp3 file format? Naturally, a number of solutions exist. Zamzar is one such solution--an online, web-based solution. You upload your file, choose the new file format you want, and Zamzar does the magic. You then download your new file format.

But the magic doesn't stop there. This month Zamzar added a new twist. Now you can mix and match seemingly unrelated file formats. For example: you can now upload a word processing file and have Zamzar create an audio .mp3 file from it. Yes, you got the idea: Zamzar will read your text out loud and convert that sound file into an .mp3 file format for the internet.

The currently supported text file formats you can convert to spoken audio in the mp3 file format are:

• doc - Microsoft Word Document
• docx - Microsoft Word 2007 Document
• odt - OpenDocument Text Document
• pdf - Portable Document Format
• pub - Microsoft Publisher
• txt - Plain Text document
• wpd - Wordperfect Document
• wps - Microsoft Works Document

Unfortunately .html (web pages) are not currently supported as URLs; so, I can't enter a web link and have that webpage returned as an audio podcast. But, hopefully, that functionality is in the works.

Talkr, however, does that. Sheer awesomeness. Click the "Listen to this article" link at the end of this post for an example of Talkr reading this post to you. Talkr works by generating the speech synthesis "on the fly." You can actually create an audio podcast series of your favorite text blogs if they use Talkr. To subscribe to a Talkr generated audio only podcast of my blog, click on this link. Talkr is free. Set up your own blog to use the Talkr speech engine for free. As you can hear, she sounds rather natural!

But, back to Zamzar... I could cut and paste the text of this post into a text file and upload the file at Zamzar, as I did to get this mp3 file: Click here to listen to Zamzar read this post. For Mac users who have grown accustomed to listening to Alex read text on your Mac, the Zamzar voice is a bit mechanical sounding.

And for those Mac users who aren't yet aware: your Mac can read just about any text you have displayed on your screen. If you can highlight it, your Mac can read it to you. (Windows will do a similar thing.)

On the Mac: Highlight the text you want to hear. Go up to the name of the application in the menu bar. In the "Services" menu, select "Speech" and then "Start Speaking Text." Alex takes a breath and starts reading. Yes, if you listen carefully, you can literally hear Alex breathe between sentences. I think Alex is one of the most realistic computer generated voices I've ever heard!

I use Alex reading text to me a lot while I multitask; for example: having Alex read me a longer blog post while I skim through my RSS feeds. I don't feel like I'm being rude when not paying complete attention to my computer while it talks to me. :o) In fact, I use Alex reading to me so often, I've assigned a keyboard shortcut to the "Start Speaking Text" command. (You can do that under System Preferences, --> Keyboard & Mouse, --> Keyboard Shortcuts.)

You can listen to an mp3 recording of Alex reading this post at this link.

The full list of file types with which Zamzar currently works are listed on the right. Zamzar offers a free service with file size limits and paid plans for larger file sizes along with additional features.

Last week I posted about some wireless mic options teachers can use when recording screencasts. Dr. Andy Brovey, from Valdosta State, shared in his comment about USB wireless mics (which I had never even heard of before) the xTag by revolabs. I was so curious about this little device, I ordered one. It arrived last Friday, and I used it today when I presented to a group of educators gathered in Orange County, California.

Not much larger than a tube of lipstick, the microphone has a clip on the back which is used to easily attach it to your shirt pocket or a supplied lanyard. Today I attached it to my shirt pocket. It's really small.

The base station is used to charge the mic. Simply place it into the base station, which is attached to your computer through a supplied USB cord. It's small. It's very portable.

After first charging the mic for 8 hours, you must pair the microphone to the base station before your first use. Revolabs says this is a one time event. However, in my experience today, I had to repair the mic with the base station again, after having already done the "one time only" pairing after the initial charge.

I had left the directions for pairing at home--big mistake. Pairing is not at all an intuitive process! It's not a difficult or time consuming process. The procedure just is not something you would ever figure out on your own! We downloaded the manual from the Revolabs website and followed the steps. Done!

I like to walk around a lot when I speak. This wireless system has a range of 65 feet. It worked flawlessly without noise, dropped areas, or interferance. Listen to a small section of the audio recorded in the screencast of the presentation presented below. It sounds really good! For portability, price, size, ease of use (just plug it into your USB jack–no drivers with which to worry), cost, range, and audio quality, this little wireless mic is a winner!

I have a new friend!