Archive for the 'Tech Tips' Category
Fun with simple technologies
Andy March 19th, 2007
One of my most recent projects at home was to help my wife with the technical side of creating a “talking” literary map.
A normal literary map involves linking books to locations on a map. Most use images of the book cover or of the map location as reference points. My wife decided to have her students create a literary map of Washington DC. Her twist on the assignment was that she asked the students to not only submit an image for a pop-up window, but to have a voice recording of the students describing the point of interest.
The plan was for the students to prepare and record a script which would then be tied to map of the area.
The first challenge was to capture the audio. This was solved by allowing the students the option of recording themselves on their own computer or to call a free voicemail service to record their snippets. Only 1 of the 22 students recorded their own audio, with the rest relying on a K7 voice mail line.
As the tech person responsible for getting this project online, I had a few challenges to work out. Those being,
1) Clean up the K7 audio files to remove background noise but preserve the voice as much as possible. After trying several solutions, I was able to get some remarkable noise reduction from Soundtrack pro. It even beat out SoundSoap on this particular task. Several people on the Yahoo podcaters list suggested using the Levelator which I found to be the wrong hammer for this particular task.
I also got the best results on a 16 bit 44.1 aiff file than on the raw 8 bit wav file from k7. So step 1, was to convert all 21 wav files to aiff files using QuickTime Pro. Next was to open each file in SoundTrack Pro to clean the noise.
Once I got into a rhythm, I was able to take only about 3-4 minutes per file. The main reason being each file needed to be tweaked individually. Although the noise reduction was in the same 30-50 hz range, no 2 files had the same exact noise floor.
Once cleaned, the aiffs were converted to MP3 using iTunes with the same settings that I use for encoding all of our podcasts. I am quite pleased with the results. You can still hear that it’s a phone call, but it’s still listen able.
Ok, with, the most time consuming part completed, the rest of the map would come together quite nicely…and it really did.
I pulled a map of the appropriate area into Adobe Illustrator to add highlight boxes corresponding to the locations the students designated their books were referring to.
This map was then exported out of illustrator as a PNG file and then pulled into Photoshop to resize to fit an average sized monitor.
Once finished in Photoshop, the image was imported into the Shareware application YokMap to create the image map HTML to allow hyperlinking to the various locations.
YokMap was extremely easy to use and very straight forward. I was able to fairly quickly create all the “hot spots” on the image and save out the map information to an HTML file. Perfection.
The next task was to display an image the students supplied with their audio. One method would have been to create 22 individual files and link off to them. This would have take much longer than it would be worth.
I created a little perl script that would take in a single value and dynamically create an HTML file with the image and then play the audio file.
We mapped all the locations and assigned them numbers. I then renamed all the images to correspond to the location number and the MP3 were also renamed to match the locations ie 04.png and 04.mp3.
The last little part was to create a little javascript code to create the popup window and display the results of the perl script within that window. It took a little trial and error to get the window size and location right.
The final piece was to great a home page and drop the entire contents on our webserver.
The final results can be found at http://www.bazmakaz.com/lit_map_dc/
If you are interested in a copy of any or all of the code used, let me know, I’d be happy to share.
Although I was primary on the nitty gritty, Viv was equally busy gathering all the images, mapping them all to each location and creating the graphic on the splash page. All totaled, we spent around 9 hours time on this project.
Technologies used :
K7.net : Voice Mail
SoundTrack Pro : Noise Reduction
Adobe Illustrator and PhotoShop : Image Manipulation
YokMap : Image Map creation
Perl : Dynamic HTML creation
Javascript : Pop-up Window
and some good old Canadian Know-How!
illustrator, javascript, k7.net, literary map, perl, photoshop, soundtrack pro, Tech Tips, YokMapUnderimpressed by MacWorld Keynote
Andy January 9th, 2007
Well the well hyped and highly speculated MacWorld keynote by the head Apple, Steve Jobs, has come and gone. For the first time ever, I’m under-impressed. For the first time ever, I was not driven to immediately run to the Apple store and place an order. For the first time ever, Steve Jobs has not “wowed” me.
And this troubles me.
I’m impressed with the announcements…the Apple TV DVR type deal device and the ultracool Apple iPhone are very cool and very “Apple”…but…they don’t call out to me.
Maybe it’s a problem with me. I don’t think I fit their target demographic anymore. Being a 40 something family guy is not who Apple is targeting with their latest offerings. They are trying to hit the 20-30 somethings that are single or attached but with ample disposable income.
I’ve always wanted Apple to come out with a PDA device. The iPhone is it. All the PDA functions one would expect from Apple complete with iTunes integration. This also gives it the ability to download and play videos and movies as well as pictures. It has a doc connector and will surely be capable of utilizing the existing array of peripherals on the market.
Sure it’s cool and with a phone built in. I should be chomping at the bit to get one. I should be the guy that’s camping out at the local Apple store pitching a tent and waiting until June when the device is expected to be available.
But I am not.
I guess I’ve finally come to the point in my life where I have enough “stuff”. The things that I want more than anything right now is the health and safety of my son and wife. I don’t need a whole lot of “things” anymore.
My reputation has always been as an early adopter. I currently have (or have had) just about every sort of handheld PDA you can imagine….a Psion 3a, Palm 3, 5, 7, Handspring Visors, Prism, Sharp Zaurus, Windows CE and Windows Mobile devices. I’ve also been fortunate enough to have (or had) just about every type of iPod Apple has offered. I should be drooling at the new iPhone. It’s what I expected I would want…it’s OS X based and has a freaking 2 megapixel camera built in too boot….but I am lukewarm to this great device.
It’s a flash based device with an expected retail of $399USD for a 4 GB model and the 8GB model running at $499USD. Plus, you’re obligated to a 2yr Cingular contract with unlimited packages at around $20/month that’s nearly $1000USD over the course of the 2 years..about $75.00 /mth for the 2 years.
It’s not just about the money…I think I’m getting too old to be this excited about a hunk of hardware….
Now…my son getting over his cold…now THAT excites me!
apple, Daily Stuff, iphone, keynote, macworld, Rant, steve jobs, Tech TipsOn the Blackberry
Andy June 29th, 2006
This post is part experiment, part update. I’m using the Balckberry browser to input this post. I’m trying to find a way to make posting easier for me. Using the Blackberry gives me some extra flexibility so that I don’t have to be at a computer per se. Is anyone even reading this. I’m half temped to just take this site down and maybe put up a forum instead. I like forums abit more anyway. We shall see. I thank any and everyone for partcipatingl
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