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Some time ago I came across this video here. Scientist Johnny Lee used the Nintendo Wii remote control to create his own virtual white board. Now I’ll be honest when he did this I thought I have got to try this. So being the gracious scientist he is he open sourced the code for connecting the wii to a computer. This has since taken off on the web and turned into a fairly active project. You can check out that project here. I found the mac version of the software and promptly downloaded it. All that was left was to build my IR pen to send the signals to the remote. So that adventure started today. Below are the pictures of what I’ve got so far. It is working and I can use it like a white board. I did a little demonstration for some colleagues and had some fun along the way. I haven’t finished the case for it yet to pretty up the packaging but you get the idea. What’s neat about the project is that with less than $100 and even far less than that will a few parts readily available you could have a fully functioning white board for a computer. Forget paying $2000+ for one I would rather build it on my own anyways. By the way the cold heat soldering iron is by far the greatest invention ever. It’s truly amazing. I know there are some die hards out there that will think I’m crazy but I don’t care. If you’re interested in where I got my information from there’s a nicely compiled place here.

Recently Google updated some features in its documents software. In case you haven’t been introduced Google has made free to anyone the ability to write documents, create powerpoint like presentations and even build excel like spreadsheets online. Recently they added some new features to their excel spreadsheet software that I’m very excited about. Go check them out.

1. You can now use the Trendalyzer software purchased from Gapminder to graph time data. This is a very nice flash animation that lets you show how data changes over time. It’s really one of those things that you have to see it to understand how cool it is. There are some great videos over at ted.com where a guy uses them to talk about developing countries.
2. The ability to create forms that people can fill out online. The data from those forms is stored in the Google spreadsheet. We’ve already begun to use it to organize our data and to build forms for people to use in registering for events. With the added reporting and sorting features out jobs just became a whole lot easier. No longer are we having to hand code such forms for instructors.

I’ve not written in a while but I’ve been pretty busy so now with the Easter weekend over I hope to do some more writing. I’ve been playing around a lot more with Skype lately. If you haven’t heard of Skype it’s one of many voice over ip or VOIP solutions out there on the web. It was bought up by eBay some time ago and allows for computer to computer phone calls as well as the ability to use your computer to call land line and mobile phones. Computer to computer is free and the calls to land lines and mobile phones are relatively cheap. My friend John who’s currently in Grenada has been using it to call me for some time now. The other day I finally downloaded the client on my laptop and John and I talked while he showed me the sunset over the beach near his school. Now I have to admit that it was a lot of fun talking to my friend that way. It’s neat to think how far we’ve come with technology in such a short time. I am in my living room in TN talking wirelessly to my friend in Grenada watching a sunset on the beach. It may not be the real thing but it’s not too bad. The delay is hardly noticeable and the sounds is crisp and clear. Even the video was nice. If you’re out there and you want to Skype me you can download the client and search me out. I’ve installed it here at work and at home. I have a web cam at work so try that out if you want to actually see me in action as we talk.

A while back I wrote about the use of FreeNAS as the software we used for our network attached storage system where I work. This was where we shared files and did backups of our documents. I liked its ease of use but over time I’ve noticed some quirks about it that I didn’t quite like. I won’t got into too much detail but using it with Windows machines sometimes meant having to do weird things to make the files read/write for everyone besides the owner. Other than that and some other minor issues when I was using Windows Vista it worked like a charm. Now we are taking some time to redo our setup and we’re going to be trying Openfiler. I’m going to be using a raid 1 hardware setup with two 500 gig drives and we’ll see what kind of performance we get out of it. After looking it over it looks like a little more configuration but a lot more granular control. I’ll post in the future how it goes.

Back in August of 2007 I began talking with my wife about starting a small group that would meet at our house. The purpose of the group would be to reconnect with friends, create an atmosphere where people burned by “church” could come into a community, and hopefully spend some good time in study of the scriptures. We have no name for the group or ever intended to try and classify it. Sometimes it acts as a bible study and sometimes it functions like a much deeper community. Thankfully I think more and more the traditional definition of church is being challenged by groups like these. When considering how to structure our time together I’ve found that the most successful groups are ones that remove as many barriers to immediate discord as possible. If I had chosen a book to study or a topic there’s a good chance that scripture would not be the driving force behind our theological shaping but likely our egos. So instead I opted for asking the members of our group to come together to read scripture aloud in the hopes that it would be the catalyst for our discussion. Read the rest of this entry »

I must say I’ve been very impressed by the creators over at ustream.tv. Ustream.tv is a wonderful Web2.0 startup that allows you to take any DV camera or webcam and broadcast yourself to the world. The features are rich and the price is right (right as in free). So what do you get when you sign up for an account at ustream.tv? Well first off you get an excellent and easy to use interface for creating your own shows. Secondly, the options seem endless in that you can customize the experience from having user moderated forums to password protected feeds. When the stream is up and running you embed the show into a website using there easy to use embed code or give a direct link to a website where people can watch. You can broadcast and record all at the same time as well as control a variety of features through the pop up interface. After you’re finished you can choose to leave the pre-recorded events up for later viewing as wells as transcode the video for download and later use. I don’t know how they did it but they’ve made personal broadcasting a breeze. Hopefully I can throw up some content in the near future to let you see what I’m talking about. I can already see a lot of potential for use at the University. I am hoping that we can begin broadcasting forum discussions, special presentations, and maybe even some classroom instruction.

I wrote about this last year before changing web hosting companies and just now got around to bringing this post over to my new blog. For sometime now I’ve been using Google’s co-op tool to create customized searches. When I was tasked with creating a repository of tutorials for our e-learning software I needed a way to make it quickly search-able of both the website and our expanding wiki site. So I turned to Google, like I do for so many things, to see what they had to offer. What I found was a wonderful way to make customized searches. Google coop lets you specify exactly which items are safe for the search engine to use. I control which sites it crawls and in what format it gives the results to the students. So far I couldn’t have been more pleased. As I began to play with this more I realized what a great tool this could be for educators of all content areas. Now instructors can choose to create customized searches that are appropriate for the students to use. So if you’re a history teacher looking to create a portal for students to search the web with this is your answer. If you’re a Literature teacher that’s asking the students to write about poetry here’s your chance to create a custom Poetry search. This search can be integrated into wikis, blogs, or any old web page you might want to create.

So I stumbled upon a great little tool today called ZoomIt. ZoomIt allows the user to zoom in and annotate on a specific portion of the computer screen. I wrote recently about how I’ve been using Jing to record videos and images from my screen for help desk questions from instructors. Jing allows you to annotate a picture but provides no ability to annotate a video. This being it’s only real setback ZoomIt gives me greater control over what I’m recording and focusing on as well as the ability to annotate live. I’ve included some video below of me using it. I’ve just started playing with it today so I’m still working it out but you get the idea at least. What’s nice too is that with the tablet computers we use and support this works well with the pen touch interface. Did I mention it’s only 44K?

Video Link

I would have to say one of my favorite tools that Google has bundled with their Gmail service has been the Google alerts. Google alerts are really nothing more than predefined daily searches of the web. What’s nice is that with Google alerts any topic that’s of interest to me on the web will be neatly condensed into an email and given to me in my inbox every morning. So whether it’s a few authors that I like to keep up with or searches related to my job I can always find new and interesting articles, blog posts, videos and more on the web. What I like is that it takes the short description of an RSS feed and allows me the flexibility to adapt it to whatever my interests are. Below are some pictures of how I use the alerts. I’ve also set up filtering and labeling in Gmail to be able to easily organize and manage the alerts in one place.

Okay the title’s a little dramatic but I thought I would just give a shout out to my awesome wife Amy Chapman. She’s been getting more and more into the photography number and is actively pursuing wedding photography and other various genres of digital and film. She recently worked photography for the Gulfcoast Getaway weekend and had one of her pictures featured in the Christian Chronicle. Check out the picture it’s a pretty classic pose of Chris and Randy. We’re currently working on setting up her website and hopefully before too long we’ll be ready to release it out of Alpha and Beta stages.