All posts by Scottie

I'm a fortunate geek who fell in love with his high school sweet heart before she could learn of my geekdom. We've known eachother since we were 15 years old and are now blessed with two little girls. Macy is 4 and Eliana is 2. We have both lived in MN all our lives and have no plans of leaving. I hold a Bachelor's of Science degree in Management Information Systems but my true passion is with the Mac. My first introduction was on an original iMac in the 90's. I never touched a Mac with OS X until 2002. After that I quickly earned my certification in OS X and joined the Apple Consultants Network. I have a small Apple Consulting business on the side when I'm not daylighting as the "Computer Guy" for Great Clips, Inc.
OS, Social, webapps

dimdim for dumdum’s

Dimdim

OK… not really. But I wanted to share with you all a new web conferencing tool that I discovered. Patrick and I tested it the other day and we were relatively impressed. It is an Open Source solution which any geek can get behind. It’s called Dimdim.

This service, like many web conferencing services allows you to share your desktop with others. Dimdim also also allows you to share PPT and PDF’s right within the web conference which is nice. You can use the annotation tools to mark-up the ppt or PDF that you are reviewing as well which comes in handy. You can use the Whiteboard within dimdim to collaboratively share ideas or to highlight things as well.

Dimdim also has VOIP built into the service as well along with video. The video service is not included in the free version but the voice is. You can have up to 4 people I believe all with voice at the same time in the dimdim web conference. The things I liked the best were the ease of use and the nice GUI. A lot of these web conferencing tools today are powerful but don’t allow the user to manage them well and don’t give the user or the participants anything good to look at. And… it’s cross platform. There is no plugin to install when using this tool because it uses Flash to power itself. Pretty cool.

Go check them out if you are currently looking for a web conferencing tool. They have a couple different flavors of their service, one of which is of course free. And if you really want to geek out, since it’s open source you can take the entire application, download it and install it on your own server to use. Pretty cool stuff.

/dev/random, Audio/Video, Hardware, Question

Audio/Video Recording on Windows

2 Comments

Hello Geeks. I have a friend who is looking at doing audio/video recording on Windows. What software is the best for doing such a thing? I know on the Mac the most simply way to get A/V out to someone is the podcasting creator inside of Garage Band. Very simple, anyone can do it. On the Mac of course you have the professional tools you can use but those require a little bit more skill.

Bottom line…. does anyone know of a personal or professional level piece of software to record, edit and publish A/V content?

Thanks geeks.

/dev/random

Flip Frickin’ Video

2 Comments

I handed around a new toy I purchased before my trip to FL at the Geek Gather last night. It is a little video camera from Flip Video called the Flip Video Ultra. If you are a person that is tired of dragging out the big video camera to take short videos, or tired of finally pulling the camera out and the battery is dead or just tired of all the features they pack onto video cameras these days then the Flip Video recorder is for you. It records an hours worth of video directly onto internal storage. It has a “flip” out USB connector on the side to offload at anytime the videos it records in AVI format to you machine. Instead of requiring a lithium battery that needs to be charged, it takes two AA batteries. I took 3-4 hours of video on my trip and I went through only 4 batteries. There is three buttons on the back and a directional pad. Play, Record, Delete are the buttons. The directional pad allows you to cycle through your recorded video and allows a 2x zoom.

I have one video that only took me an hour or so to put together on my site at:
Macy Swimming

This was my first attempt at using the video off the camera. I realized that iMovie didn’t like AVI files so I had to compress the files to QT files. I originally compressed them to mpeg4 which lost some of the quality of the video which is why some of the water scenes appear a little pixelated around Macy as she swims. This is my fault and not the cameras. Rookie!

Bottom line, do yourself a favor and fall in love with taking video again. Pick this little bad boy up for $139 for the 30 minute model or $179 for the 1 hour model. Don’t be a pussy… buy the 1 hour model. Now I tried to search 5 different Best Buys and 4 Targets before I left for vacation trying to find a black or Orange Flip Video. Let me save you the trouble by sharing something I learned… you can’t get the DAMN colored ones in the stores! They only carry the white one in the retail stores. It’s the same cost online so if you want a colored one just buy it online.

That’s it… happy videoing!!

/dev/random

GGM – Tuesday, February 12

2 Comments

Hello Geeks. I haven’t heard any buzz about GGM being held at anyone’s home this Tuesday. So, I’m assuming we are heading back to the Chatterbox. Maybe we can order in some of those wings that Patrick brought last time. Damn those were good. We probably won’t need them because the Chatterbox food is excellent but…. damn those wings were good. Hope to see everyone there. I got my hands on a 16BG iPod Touch which I will bring if people want to play with it.

  • Geek Gather
  • 6:30pm
  • Tuesday 2008.02.12
  • Chatterbox Cafe, Saint Paul, MN

Directions are here Google Maps if anyone needs them.

/dev/random

Happy Holiday’s Geeks!

1 Comment

Just a little message to say Happy Holiday’s to all you geeks. I hope you get every gadget on your wish list this year! The January Geek Gather should be a fun one! Hey Tim G, when are you having us over for Geek Gather at the new place? :) Or maybe it will be a “Geek, Gather and Paint”.

Job Posting

Sr. UI Developer Needed

Hello Geeks… Please read the following message from buddy Ryan and if you are interested or know anyone that is interested please send him an email at: rpayne@ibsys.com

You could have a lot more if you “Got Geek Friends.”   You know the types – life of the party, strikingly good looking and fascinating conversationalists.

We have been searching high and low to find top quality Sr. UI Developers for the past several months and have been coming up short. These are people who are exceptionally strong in the realms of technologies like AJAX, FLASH, JSON, XSLT, XML as well as are thinking about new display methods and page/client/object integration.

Didn’t understand a word I just said?  Then YOU need to hang with the cool tech cats more. 

It’s simple – refer someone that fits the above description, we hire them and they stick around 3 months – I’ll give you $2K.

Good luck,
Dave Abbott, CTO
internet.broadcasting, inc.
1333 Northland Drive, Mendota Heights, MN 55120
(651) 365-4109
dave@ibsys.com