CyberKen
A Weblog for Learning and Leading in Cyberspace

When I upgraded my wife’s and my Mac Minis to the latest operating system, OS 10.5, called “Leopard,” I noticed a considerable loss in speed on the Internet.  I ran a test, I comparing my PC with the Minis and found that the broadband speed was fine for my PC, but lousy for the Macs.  This was so even when I by-passed the router and put the cable input straight to each computer.
 

What was wrong?  I Googled to see whether other Leopard users were experiencing the same problem using Comcast as their ISP, and found that indeed many were, and that the problem was traced to the inability of Comcast DNS servers (the computers that enable your computer to resolve web addresses) to keep pace with code changes in Leopard.  In my research I also found a fix:

1.  Unplug your cable modem and your router.
2.  Let both remain unplugged for at least 30 seconds.
3.  Plug in the modem and wait for all the operating lights to show a steady connection.
4.  Plug in the router.

Now, here’s the step I had missed in prior attempts:

5.  After you have rebooted your modem and router by steps 1-4, under the apple menu, click on “Network” , then, on “Advanced”.  In the drop down window marked “Configure IPv4″ select “Off” in that menu.  Then, in that same drop down menu, select “on”, thus rebooting the connection at the computer level.

After these steps my Mini ran much faster on the Internet.  Summoned pages resolved very quickly.  Hope this solution works for other Leopard users.

Blogged with Flock

So, you’ve taken some digital shots and you want to post some of them on your website. What are the work steps?

• Well, first you’ll want to sort through them as quickly as possible to select the best ones for posting .
• Then you’ll want to cut away the not-so-important parts of each (that’s called “cropping”), and dress them so that they look their best, for instance, by brightening or adding contrast, or sharpening; and of course, removing red eyes from pictures taken with flash.
• Then, you may want to alter your photos, say, by combining part of one with part of another, or adding special effects such as vignetting (darkening the corners of the photo), or superimposing text. Such creative work will probably require tools not included in the software that came with your camera or computer. You’ll need something a little more powerful. I have several suggestions that won’t cost you a penny!
• Then, when your pictures are ready for posting, you’ll want to cut them down to a size that’s appropriate for web pages. This is called “sizing” or “scaling,” and it’s necessary because most digital cameras take pictures far too big for web pages.
• Finally, you’ll need a way to place your photos on your web pages. This requires either a web page editing program or an online service that does the same work.

So, what are some inexpensive and easy-to-use tools for accomplishing these tasks?

There are lots and lots! I won’t try to be comprehensive in this report, but only mention several that I recommend from personal experience. I won’t cover the photo editing tools that come with your computer’s operating system, such as Mac’s iPhoto, and Windows’ Photo Gallery, because there are adequate help files about these in your computer’s pre-loaded software and on the Internet. Instead, I’ll cover some tools that you may not have heard about.

Let’s start with the sorting step. If you’re rich enough to own Adobe’s Creative Suite, the Bridge part of that suite is a superb photo sorter. But, what if you’re not rich? Well, use the software that came with your camera. (And if you’ve lost that software, you can usually download what you need from the manufacturer’s website, searching by model number). This basic software usually has a way of assigning keywords to each photo as you view it. Assign a special tag to your best shots. You could tag them, for instance, “1″. Then, when you’ve looked at the whole batch, search for a “sort” or “filter” command. This will enable you to see just your photos tagged “1″. When you have these in view, you can drag them into a folder that you’ve created for your work steps.

Another great sorting tool is Irfanview’s thumbnail view. When Irfanview installs it places a shortcut to thumbnail view on your Desktop. Open the thumbnail view and then navigate to the folder where your imported photos are. When you open that folder you will see, eureka!, thumbnails of all those pictures. Double clicking on any thumbnail enlarges it. If you see a picture that you want to keep for further work, right click on its thumbnail and select “copy”. Now, create a new folder on your Desktop to contain the photos you want to work on. Open that folder and right click again, this time selecting “paste”. This puts a copy of that picture in your work folder.

By the way, you don’t have to use your camera’s import software if you don’t want to. And, if you’re traveling and using someone else’s computer, you can still download your photos, as long as you have a cable or a memory card reader. If you’re using a Mac, when you connect the camera and turn it on, the contents of of your camera’s memory card will show up as an icon on your Desktop. If you’re using a Windows computer, the icon will show up in the “My Computer” or (with Vista) the “Computer” place under the Start menu. Within each of those choices, look for the “DCIM” folder (DCIM stands for digital camera images). That’s where the icons of your pictures will be.

O.K., so, you have your very best shots in a work folder and now you want to dress them up. Following are some great tools for doing that. I’ll mention first the ones that are free, which you can download to your own computer. Then I’ll talk about the online tools.

Free, Downloadable Programs

GIMP (which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program; I don’t have space here to explain GNU. Look it up in Wikipedia). You download GIMP from http://www.gimp.org. Gimp is a comprehensive image manipulation program that can do almost everything Adobe’s Photoshop does, but for free! It’s a very old program that has gone through lots of refinement and has oodles of tutorial and help files on the Internet. You can use GIMP for simple or complicated and creative tasks. If you have some familiarity with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you might prefer to use GimpShop (http://www.gimpshop.com), which is another version of GIMP with menus similar to Photoshop’s.

Picasa2 (http://picasa.google.com) is a Google product. It’s a fairly sophisticated but easy-to-use program, and it integrates nicely with Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com). If you use Gmail as your email program, the photos you process and save with Picasa will be only a click away at the top of your email screen.

While I’m speaking about Picasa Web Albums, they are a great way to share your photos with friends and colleagues. Let’s say you shoot an event and you want to have the host of the event review your photos to select the best ones for mounting on Web pages. If you use Picasa to process them, you can easily save them to a Picasa Web Album and then send your friend or colleague the web address (url) of that album. He or she can even download the photos he or she wants from there.

IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com) is a free image viewer for Windows computers. It has been around for a long time and gone through lots of refinement, so it is stable and will perform a host of tasks, including making slide shows with music!

NVU (http://nvudev.com/index.php) is not a graphics manipulation program, but rather, a web page editor. (So, you would use it for the last step of the work process outlined above). NVU is a “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” editor (or, usually anyway), which makes it very easy to compose a web page much as you would with a desktop publishing program. NVU has a built-in File Transfer Protocol (ftp) function which automatically publishes your web pages to a server that you designate. NVU is not as sophisticated as expensive editors like Dreamweaver, but with it you can easily create and maintain a simple website–and free is hard to beat!

Online Graphics Manipulation Programs:

My favorite one in this category is Picnik (http://www.picnik.com), which is still in the testing or “beta” version; but I have yet to find a problem with it. Picnik is extremely easy to use, and has more than enough tools even in the free version to accomplish most photo doctoring tasks. I especially like the “Quick Fix” tab, which brightens my dark photos tastefully and even seems to remedy most white balance problems (corrects for the color of white in a photo). For $25/year you can buy access to a host of extra creative tools. Some you would probably not use often; but others, like adding drop shadows and frames to your photos, would be very handy indeed!

If you haven’t noticed yet, productivity software is moving from your personal computer to server computers on the Internet. Bill Gates realized that. That’s why I think he retired early
: ) Nowadays there are more online photo editing services–largely free ones–than you can shake a stick at. Here are some examples: Pixmate, FotoFlexer, LunaPic, Pixer.us, Fauxto, Picture2Life, Preloadr, PXN8, Snipshot. The reviews I’ve read say that Picnik is leading the pack. So I haven’t bothered to try others. But if you want some other options, Google: “review free online photo editors”.

O.K., back to the work steps. Now, which of these programs would I advise the remaining steps? Well, if you have a fast Internet connection (cable or DSL), I suggest you use Picnik. When you’ve finished editing your photos you can save them on the Picnik server and share them with others in the way I explained earlier with Google albums.

If you don’t have a fast Internet connection, then the online services are not a practical option. So, use IrfanView, Picasa, or GIMP instead. You can use each of these programs, both the online and offline ones, to doctor and downsize images. That takes you to the place-my-photo-on-a-webpage step.

For this step, NVU is a free tool preferred by many. Another excellent solution is to open a free wiki website (I like Pbwiki at http://www.pbwiki.com). With a wiki you can edit web pages with tools similar to word processing ones.

Finally, you could choose to use web page templates that will give you structural, styling, and color tools that impart to your web pages a uniform look; and templates are generally very easy to use. Many Internet Service Providers provide simple templates to subscribers as part of their standard member package, and also a modest amount of web page storage space for no extra charge. Before you buy web page templates, see whether your ISP does.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: onlinegraphics editors” “free graphics editors” “scaling images” “preparing Web pictures”

Communities of faith should consider uploading sound files to the Internet as a way of publishing their messages far and wide. A report in May of last year indicates that by the year 2012 sixty five million people will listen to podcasts; and of these, 25 million will be regular listeners. It used to be that mass media, such as television and radio, cost a bundle. But not now. Your community of faith, no matter how large, can publish its message on the Internet, via text, sound, and video, for very little money, or even free!

Here are some beginning instructions for publishing podcasts:

1. Record your sound file. The most commonly used format is .mp3. You don’t necessarily need a digital recorder to make your sound file, though that is best. What I do instead is video a speaker with my pocket sized point and shoot camera, and then use the sound track from the video for my .mp3 file. If you drag a video file onto the time line of a video editor which has an extra track for background music, the video portion will fall away and you’ll be left with just the sound, which you can then export as an .mp3 file. You might want to edit that file, perhaps to add some beginning and ending theme music. A good, free editor is Audacity. It works on Macs, Windows, and Linux computers.

2. Upload that .mp3 file to a server, that is, a hosting computer that will make the file available to eager listeners on the Internet. Free servers are available; or, since the files are not large, you could use your personal space which almost every Internet service provider, such as Verizon and Comcast, provides subscribers as part of their monthly Internet connection fee.

3. Put a link to that .mp3 file into an .xml page which contains some information about the file’s content and makes the file available to people looking for podcasts that interest them. The easiest way to perform this step is by using blog software. There are several good free blogging programs, such as WordPress and Blogger. (WordPress is widely used and well regarded, but I find Blogger much easier to set up and operate). Blogging software gives you a structure for commenting about the sound file’s content, and publishes the necessary .xml page. If you have someone in your congregation who owns a Mac, the program iWeb is handy for this step. It provides very easy to use template pages for podcasts and video casts.

4. Publish the availability of your podcast so that people can subscribe to it via an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to their Web browsers. A free web service called FeedBurner helps with this step. I just signed up for a FeedBurner account myself and found the registering very easy.

Here is a page with more of this basic information, and some jump-off links: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/podcast_quickstart.

–TCDavis

Blogged with Flock

Tags: podcasting”how to publish a podcast” “media literacy for faith communities” podcast

I never got much interested in birding earlier in life because I found it difficult to identify a bird upon recollection of a mere glimpse in the field. Now, with telephoto lenses I can record what I see and identify it later. Great fun!

Shooting birds with a camera has made me much more aware of the details of nature. While I’m looking through the lens I sometimes see and hear a bird singing.  I easily come to associate the song with the bird. So now I know several birds by their song and can detect their presence long before I see them, which gives me a warning to get my camera set. This has been especially so with the Cardinals, who are so beautiful, and almost always travel in pairs, the female first in view, most often.  My wife says she’s the navigator, of course  ;< )

The day before yesterday, out birding, I had the awesome pleasure of watching a couple hawks work a draw. There is a place bordering the Brandywine River where two adjacent hills make a funnel down to the river. The afternoon’s blazing sun lit the open end of the funnel, and there was no foliage to hide the hawks’ prey, so they perched in the very tall Tulip Poplar trees lining the funnel walls and surveyed the easy pickings below and worked the area back and forth. They criss crossed the area from tall tree to tall tree, and I learned their spooky call as I watched the drama. One of the hawks flew overhead with something in its talons and I followed it with my camera. Moments later a small bird dropped about ten feet from me. It seemed hurt. I moved toward it, but was preoccupied with the hawk; so I took my eyes off the small bird and lost it. Was it the hawk’s intended dinner? Don’t know. Anyway, I found this experience absolutely awesome! When you see the interrelationship of creatures this way you don’t know whom to root for, and you’re absolutely enthralled with the complexity and grandeur of it all.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: birding”nature photography” hawks

Wikipedia defines media literacy as “. . . the process of accessing, analyzing, evaluating and creating messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms.” The Internet is a super educational tool, and can be used for great good. However, it can also be a dangerous place where people’s goods are stonen and reputations destroyed. To use the Internet justly and well requires media literacy. I aim to help communities of faith and other community groups acquire media literacy. CyberKen is a means toward that purpose.

CyberKen will be a place to share discoveries of great resources from the Web. There is so much crafty, easy-to-use, and inexpensive stuff out there! I’ll share what I’ve found and offer a humble opinion about how useful it may be to you. I hope my readers will do likewise by responding to the posts.

I want CyberKen to be more than a techie tidbits smorgasbord, though. I want it to be a place where visitors contribute their gifts of images and sounds and writing toward more loving, just relationships. My central purpose is to use digital media for peacemaking. Another place where I’m working on that is at Interfaith Tech Associates, a social network for interfaith peacemaking. Stop in!

–TCDavis

Shared with Flock - The Social Web Browser
http://flock.com

This week a member from a neighboring church emailed me to ask whether I knew of any Presbyterian resources on Internet saftety, expecially for children. I told him that I was going to a conference in Dover on February 9th, sponsored by Hearts and Minds Film of Wilmington, and Delaware Verizon, on Internet safety, and that I would get back to him.

It was a fabulous conference, attended by Governor Ruth Ann Minner,  and several other prominent Delaware leaders. I learned that Delaware has one of the most vigorous internet safety projects in the nation, and that there are ample resources locally and online to help you teach others how to keep kids Internet safe. This brief article shares some of what I learned. Stay tuned for more information in subsequent postings at CyberKen.

Delaware’s Attorney General, Beau Biden, recommended that you teach your children the following:

• Don’t give out your personal information.
• Never send a picture of yourself to someone you don’t know.
• Always be careful of who you meet online.
• Don’t agree to a face-to-face meeting with someone you met online without telling a parent first.
• Neverdownload an E-mail attachment from an unknown source.

The Attorney General’s office lists the following helpful links for Internet safety:
www.safekids.org

www.safeteens.com

www.netsmartz.org

www.ikeepsafe.org

A savvy and lively Internet mom, Robin Raskin, was on the conference panel. She runs a helpful website for parents at: www.robinraskin.com.

Another great resource is i_Safe. i_Safe (http://www.isafe.org) runs an excellent Internet safety training program for community leaders who want to learn about Internet safety themselves and then teach others. It combines curriculum with activities for community outreach and youth empowerment. The teaching is done via online videos. Here are the steps to schooling yourself to train others:

1. Register at www.isafe.org.

2. Log on to ilearn.isafe.org using your iSafe user name and password. Click on “Create an Account.”

3. Watch the “Personal Safety” video in its entirety.

4. Submit an implementation plan to teach the “Personal Safety” lessons.

5. View the other videos in their entirety.

6. Submit an implementation plan as an i-Safe Certified Train-the-Trainer.

Well, that’s enough for now. Please stay tuned for more media literacy tips.

–TCDavis