Video Tutorials for Work
Next week we will be responsible for supporting a new two factor authentication system for our campus portal. If you are familiar with how Bank of America's online banking works, you already know what this concept is. This is a pretty major change for our facuty, staff and students, so I have had the priviledge of making video tutorials for the new process. I have to say that it was a lot of fun making the videos. I really wanted to copy the look and feel of the best lynda.com tutorials, but in my opinion fell much closer to some of the worst. I learned a great deal about what I was doing and hopefully can do more in the future. If you want to check out the videos below I would love any comments.
For students not signed up for password reset:
For students signed up for password reset:
Subtracting Hulu Plus
I am not a big TV person these days, but there are a few shows that I really like to watch. I usually catch these shows using the online video site hulu.com. It has been a great place to see the latest episodes of my favorite shows like Eureka and Burn Notice when I get the chance to. It has been one of the biggest reasons I still carry my laptop when I go out town instead of just my phone. Well, this week I finally got an invitation to Hulu+. Ever since it was announced I have been waiting to get an invite. It was not worth the wait or $10 a month ($120 a year plus commercials!).
My current list of shows added to my queue for Hulu each week are Psych, Burn Notice, Warehouse 13, Royal Pains, Wipeout and Eureka. Of those shows, Wipeout is the only one available with Hulu+ for mobile devices. It is also the one I really could care the least about. This information is buried near the bottom of the Hulu+ site. I think that was what really irked me. If I had known that most of the shows I watch are not available, I wouldn't have paid the $10.
I didn't just give up on Hulu+ immediately though. I tried it out for a bit. I have now attempted to watch Wipeout on 4 different occasions using my iPhone. The first three times it crashed out either before it played the first add, or just as the first add finished. The forth time I had much better luck. It played almost all the way to the first commercial break before completely loosing sound and 10 seconds later crashing back to the home screen. The first two tries were on WiFi, while the one that worked the best was on 3G. To say the app is a bit buggy is an understatement.
I am not really sure what Hulu+ brings to the table outside of mobile viewing and it really has failed at this so far. I know it also brings a large catalogue of back episodes of TV shows, but so does Netflix and for a dollar less per month, no adds, and a larger catalogue. I have really loved the idea of Hulu and hope that someday it will wake up and realize that what consumers will pay for is ease of use and quality. When it figures that out I will be one of the first in line to sign up.
Awesome Origami
Quick Weekend Recap
This past weekend was a busy one for the most part. Friday I went and picked up Kim in the morning. We had a few errands to run, such as finding a birthday gift for my niece Kate. We wanted to look around the Jonesboro road area, but she had a headache so we headed back to the house for her to get some advil and rest a bit. About 3pm we headed to the Stonecrest area to look for stuff. We went that direction because my sister and her family were coming in to watch my cousin Bradley play baseball for GSU and that is where we decided to meet. We went all over the mall and the Toys-r-us, but nothing was looking good for Kate. That all changed when we went into Borders. There was so much stuff there. We spent almost an hour and a half picking stuff up and then swapping it. In the end we ended up getting Kate two books. A book for girls for to doodle and a pocket sized one for the car. Hopefully she will enjoy them.
Two 8 bits in a row
PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. - Watch original web videos.
Flip UltraHD 120
We have had a time the past few years with classes being assigned video projects, but the school not offering cameras for them to use. This has led to a lot of opportunities for the HUB. Students can check out VHS cameras from media services, but they have no real way to get them on their computers. They will sometimes use a digital video camera, but have no way to get it on their computer. Worst of all they will use a camera that stores video on some weird tape or DVD. I have taken it upon myself to look into this and figure out if their is a better way. Enter the Flip UltraHD 120.
This little wonder is four and a quarter inches tall by two and a fifth inches wide, yet it shoots 2 hours of 1280 x 720 (720p) video at 30 frames per second. It has 8GB of internal storage, but really only about 7GB available for video. So where did that extra gigabyte go? Preloaded on the device is an editing app for both Windows and Mac. No need to have anything else. Speaking of not needing anything else, the camera has a built in USB connector so you don't even need a USB cable. I would absolutely want one myself as the camera seems to just dangle in the air when connected to my desktop. Doesn't seem like a good idea to me.