Chris Hamady

I recently presented at the 2011 Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education conference in Nashville, Tennessee. The presentation focused on our school's new media production facility that we designed and built in the summer of 2009. If you are interested in the contents of this presentation, you will find a .zip archive of my Keynote presentation here:

Keynote slides

Powerpoint slides here:

PPT slides

A video demonstrating some of our live video streaming productions is here:

Video Production Video 

A video reflecting a recent foley audio editing student project is here:

Foley Project

This facility was co-designed by myself, Mark Bunce (recording arts instructor for BGSU), and Brian Hanley (student at Full Sail University).

CH

Well...not really a nightmare. I just don't like spending 4+ hours troubleshooting an issue that shouldn't be this difficult to correct. Some background:

4 of our administrators use and share a MobileMe account to sync and share their calendars with one another. Three of them also sync their calendar from their Macintosh computer to their iPhone using iTunes. Recently, Apple offered iCal/MobileMe users the choice of "upgrading" their calenders to a newer version. One of our administrators took advantage of this choice and after upgrading his calendar, all manner of bad things began to occurr.

For starters, the other computers would no longer sync to MobileMe. We began our troubleshooting by attempting to upgrade these computers to the latest version of MobileMe calendars. First hurdle- 2 of the 4 Macs were running Leopard instead of Snow Leopard. In an effort to save time re-configuring the calendar data, we decided to upgrade these computers to Snow Leopard. The first thing we did was sync and backup all of the iPhones to each Macintosh, and then backup each user's calendar to a file on the desktop (In iCal do File-Export-Export). We then removed all calendars from the user's iPhones.

After Snow Leopard was installed, we removed all of the computers from syncing with MobileMe and trashed their iCal "Application Support" files, "Cache" files, iCal preferences (.plists), as well as any MobileSync preferences and files that we could find.

Once we had a computer that was completely clean, we re-imported that user's calendar into iCal and tried to sync the calendars back to the iPhone. Nothing we did would accurately sync the calendars to the iPhone. We kept ending up with old calendars that were no longer in iCal, or duplicate calendars. We trashed iTunes prefs, Sync prefs, cache files, iCal prefs, all of the above simultaneously. Nothing helped. Just when we were about to give up, I finally hit on a solution.

It occurred to me that the sync data on BOTH the computers and MobileMe must be corrupted. No matter which location I used to replace the other's data, the result was the same. Bad data. Here is what I did to fix this mess:

I created a new user account on one of the computers and re-imported the original user's calendar into iCal. Now that I had pristine sync data with a user's calendar on it, I replaced all of the data on MobileMe with this sync data. Next, I replaced all of the data in the original user's account with the new good data from MobileMe. It worked. Sync to iPhone was flawless. I then replaced each other computer's sync data with the good data from MobileMe and then re-imported those user's calendars as well.

After 4.5 hours of work, we were finally able to go home and those four users are once again using their MobileMe calendars with their Macs and iPhones. If only MobileMe had another setting that said, "Reset all sync data on both this computer and on MobileMe," this nightmare might have been averted.

Ok...I'm being dramatic. Not really a nightmare. Just doing my job.

CH

Creating an iTunes account without a credit card attached to it.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2534

Ryan Collins instructions for iOS

http://sites.google.com/a/kentoncityschools.org/ios

I recently presented a session entitled "Cost Saving Strategies to Maximize Your Technology Budget" at the 2011 eTech Ohio technology conference. Here are links to my slides in both Keynote format and PPT:

Keynote Preso

PPT Preso

Here is a link to the free open source software page I mentioned during the session.

FOSS Page

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the content of this session or if you might like more information.

CH

I was recently contacted by one of my Twitter followers who was interested in our school's media production facility. He was in the process of desiging a similar project at his school, and I assured him that I would help out in any way possible.

Sometime last week he contacted me once again and informed me that most of his equipment was ordered, but that he was missing one small piece of the studio design. He needed a communication system for his facility so that the director could be in contact with everyone (camera people, audio engineer etc.) during the production. Our school, Toledo Central Catholic, uses a TELEX system, something I highly recommend, but it cost us over $2000.00.

He asked me if I would be willing to come up with an economical way of creating a such a communication system. I pondered this for a couple of hours. Wireless walkie-talkies would work, but are limited in that they do not do full duplex communication and usually require push-to-talk.

In the end I came up with something that I hope will be a viable, full duplex, yet inexpensive solution. It revolves around using a standard mixing board as the basis for the communication system. A Mackie 1202 VLZ is one example, and many other inexpensive mixers would probably work just fine.

Next one would need to buy 5 (or more) of these inexpensive headsets:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/689922-REG/Cyber_Acoustics_AC_101_AC_101_MONAURAL_HEADSET_MIC.html (or better headsets)

And 5 of these headset/laptop adapters:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/740841-REG/Woodees_VOIPAD35_VoIP_Laptop_Adaptor.html

Some headphone jack splitters:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/252296-REG/Hosa_Technology_YMP_234_Stereo_1_4_Male_to.html

and miniplug to 1/4 inch adapters:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/202553-REG/Hosa_Technology_GPM_103_GPM103_Stereo_Mini_to.html

Next, connect the headphone audio jacks to the mixer headphone jack (with splitters and extender cables) of the mixing board. Connect the mic jacks using extender cables as well as 1/8 inch to 1/4 inch adapters to the audio inputs on the mixer.

1/8 inch extender cables can be found here:

http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102968#

Technically, everyone should all be able to communicate in full duplex at that point. The director could mute specific audio inputs so that everyone is forced to hear only the director, or she/he can unmute if a question needs to be asked of one of the crew. Volume for all headsets would be controlled by the headphone volume control on the mixer. All this for around $400.00. A schematic is here in PDF format.

I'm interested in how well this works if anyone puts it together. Please make suggestions on how to improve this project in the comment section of this blog post.

CH