Good-bye Posters

Just a quick FYI. Lots of people have printed posters here in the lab and then never picked them up. We'll be throwing out any and all posters left in the lab on May 16. If you have a poster here, please pick it up ASAP.

Missing Video Equipment

Hi All. We've had a wildly successful semester in terms of our equipment lending program. Never did we imagine that our video cameras and audio recorders and tripods would generate so much interest!

Unfortunately, we're missing several key parts of the equipment we lent. If you borrowed equipment this year, please check at home to see if you have a power cable/AC Adapter, the top plate to one of the tripods, a user manual, a windscreen for an audio recorder, a USB or firewire/iLink cable, or any other part of a kit that you may have accidentally forgotten to return. We'll be glad to take them back, no questions asked! :)

In the case of some of these parts (notably the power adapters for the video cameras), it has reduced our ability to meet existing equipment reservations, since there is no way to charge the batteries or plug in those cameras anymore, please double check at home before you move out for the summer! Thanks!

Lab Schedule

Here are our hours up to the beginning of Summer Session I. Note that startnig after Finals, we will be closed on Sundays through the end of the summer.

Mon 5/12 9am-10pm
Tue 5/13 9am-9pm
Wed 5/14 10am-5pm
Thu 5/15 10am-5pm
Fri 5/16 10am-5pm
Sat 5/17 11am-5pm
Sun 5/18 CLOSED*
Mon 5/19 10am-5pm
Tue 5/20 10am-5pm
Wed 5/21 10am-5pm
Thu 5/22 10am-5pm
Fri 5/23 10am-5pm
Sat 5/24 11am-5pm
Sun 5/25 CLOSED*
Mon 5/26 CLOSED

2008 Video Mashup Winners!

Congratulations to Emilie Froh, Vince Levy, and Andy Cao for their respective 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place wins in this years Video Mashup Contest. (Right now the page only has the winning videos up, but I'll get the videos from the other contestants up soon.) Emily won a brand-new Video Camera, and both Vince and Andy won an iPod shuffle.

We also had a guest speaker. Leah Kauffman is the singer and songwriter behind the massive YouTube video hit "I got a Crush on Obama" which now lists over 7.5 million downloads. She is the singer and songwriter for the "My Box in a Box" video which now lists over 3.7 million downloads on YouTube. (Personally I like the Ann Coulter one better.)

Mashup Contest Awards and Creator of Obama Girl, Thursday, April 17, 5 pm

Please join us for the Mashup Awards Event 2008 Thursday, April 17, 5:00 pm in the Class of '55 Room in Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center. Dr. Peter Decherney, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and English, and Chair of the Weigle Information Commons Faculty Advisory Group, will moderate this event.

Leah Kauffman is the singer and songwriter behind the massive YouTube video hit "I got a Crush on Obama" which now lists over 7.5 million downloads. She is the singer and songwriter for the "My Box in a Box" video which now lists over 3.7 million downloads on YouTube. She has created several other viral videos with the group BarelyPolitical.com as well as on her own. This Temple University undergraduate student's creations have been featured in several national magazine articles as well as on national TV shows. She released her first album "Folk and Fantasy" in 2005. Leah will share excerpts from her videos and her insights on what makes a YouTube video successfully "viral", attracting millions of viewers and national attention.

We will announce the award winners of the 2008 Mashup Contest, followed by an informal reception and viewing of all the entries in the Weigle Information Commons. The Mashup Contest, sponsored by Penn Libraries, the Cinema Studies Program, and College Houses and Academic Services, celebrates student creativity with video and multimedia.

Please register online to reserve your seat now!

For more information, please contact Anu Vedantham at (215)-746-2659 or send email to wic1@pobox.upenn.edu

Learn to use Garage Band!

GarageBand allows you to record multiple voices, add music tracks, add still images, and create podcasts with chapters. You don't even need any musical talent to create some fantastic songs. Apple Systems Engineer Michael Wolk will be presenting on this powerful but simple piece of software this Friday, March 21, from 12noon-1pm in the WIC Seminar Room, just down the hall from the Digital Media Lab. Feel free to bring your lunch.

Obama in 30 Seconds

First of all, let me make it clear we're not taking sides here. But this is such a cool contest that I wanted to make sure all of our lab users know about it. It's sponsored by MoveOn.org, and the goal is to make a 30-second tv ad for Barack Obama. The winner gets $20,000 (that's twenty thousand dollars) in video equipment, and gets their video aired nationally on television, so whether you're in it for the fame, for the money, or just to make a difference, this contest has something for you.

Moveon.org even provides resources for finding collaborators (locally or online) in case you want to participate, but don't want to go it alone.

Deadline is April 1st. Check it out at http://www.obamain30seconds.org/

Thanks to lab user Jessica Manlove, who brought this contest to our attention! If you know of similar contests for other candidates, let me know and I'll be glad to post them here.

Don't Forget the Mashup Contest!

Ok, I've put signs all over the Information Commons, added a slide to the plasma screen presentation, and even put flyers on the various kiosks and bulletin boards around campus, so frankly I don't see how you could have forgotten, but just in case you did: The deadline for the 2008 Video Mashup Contest (March 17, the day everyone returns from spring break) is fast approaching. You just need a 3 minute video. And if you're reading this, then chances are you've already done something for a class assignment that qualifies for entry into the contest, so why not submit it? It's free, and you might win a video camera. (Last year's winner made THIS with the camera he won.) You've still got more than a week left, and it's not like classes are in session, so you really have no excuse not to make a video. We'll even show you how; just ask us!

What Do You Want?

As we start to plan for next school year (yes, we really plan this far in advance. We'll probably make many of the purchases for next year sometime in the next 3-4 months.), we're looking at various possibilities for upgrading existing hardware, adding new functionality to the lab, buying new software, etc.

It would be very helpful to know what YOU would like to see us add to the lab. Is there a piece of software you think we should have? Have you been dying to see us add an 8-track deck so you can make mp3's out of your parents' obsolete music collection? Maybe you think we should add a combination Bluray/HD-DVD player. You want us to start lending portable hard drives? Do you think we should have a couple midi keyboards available for lab users? Well this is the time to tell us! (And no, we're not installing a jacuzzi, so please stop asking. You know who you are.)

We really do take your feedback into account when we make these decisions, so please email us (wic1@pobox.upenn.edu) and let us know what you'd like us to do to improve the lab.

Portable Hard Drives

Let's talk hard drives. If you're working on a project in Photoshop, or Illustrator, or Dreamweaver, or even GarageBand, a USB flash/thumb drive is probably all you'll need to transfer your files, or back them up. But if you're working on a video project in the lab that will take more than about a week to finish, we strongly encourage you to buy a portable hard drive to save your files onto. You should expect to use about 13GB per hour of standard, DV video and 40-50GB per hour of HD video.

There are 2 types of hard drive to consider:

1) There are the tiny portable ones, that fit in your pocket or almost into the palm of your hand, and only require a USB or Firewire cable to connect them to your computer. These tend to be in the 100GB-200GB range for $75-$150 depending on what brand you get and where you buy it. They're extremely convenient, and if you don't mind paying a premium for their extra portability, they're probably the best option.

2) There are the bulkier, heavier drives that tend to be a couple inches thick, and require you to plug them into a wall outlet in addition to connecting them to your computer via USB/Firewire. They tend to range 300GB-750GB for $100-$200, so you get a lot more bang for your buck, but you can't just throw them in your pocket, and you need an electrical outlet to use them.

You can find refurbished hard drives a little cheaper, but in my opinion, it's not worth risking your data just to save a few bucks.

You can buy both types of drives at:

• The Computer Connection (on campus, located at the NW corner of the Penn Bookstore. Tell them we sent you. It won't save you any money, but it makes us look good.)
• Amazon.com
• Buy.com
• Newegg
• TigerDirect

Three Days

Although we would love to be able to store all of everyone's files forever and ever, we just don't have the storage space to be able to handle it all. So we have a policy that we will store your files on our networked hard drive for up to 3 days. And if you come back during that time and work on them some more, we'll keep them for an additional 3 days. And so on. And so forth. Etc. Etc.

Until now, we've managed to be pretty liberal with this policy, deleting files only when we run out of space, and we've kept files for weeks, or even months past the promised 3 days. But recently we've seen an explosion in the use of Hi Definition video in the lab, which takes exponentially more room than plain old DV video. Anywhere from 40-50GB per hour, in fact, compared to the 13GB per hour for standard video. So our User Storage drive is filling up much faster these days, and we've been forced to start following our deletion policy much more strictly. (Today, for example, I deleted over 150 GB of files to make room for the people working in the lab.)

So if you're working on a project in the lab, be sure to come back every 2 or 3 days to work on it to avoid risking deletion. And please consider buying an external hard drive to store your project on. This gives you total control over your files, and you never need to fear that we'll delete them when you need them most. More on external drives in a future post, coming soon.

Car-struck

Our very own Nick was hit by a car this afternoon on his way to work. (see artist's depiction, complete with sound effects.) He's alive and seems to be ok. Or at least as OK as Nick ever seems. If you see him, please give him your sympathy.

Penn Humanities Forum - Siva Vaidhyanathan

As part of the Penn Humanities Forum, media scholar and cultural historian Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk at the museum tonight titled The Googlization of everything -- One Company's Disruption of culture, Commerce, and Community. It was a great discussion of the effect Google has on our lives, on the information we consume, and on the way we communicate. I'm posting it here because I saw several library staff and regular users of the lab in the audience, so I'm guessing it has a fairly wide appeal among our blog readers. I'll link to the event page in anticipation of PHF posting footage from the event. The library also has a couple of his books if you're interested in checking them out.

New to Using a Mac?

New to using a Mac? Switched recently from a Windows PC? We'll offer tips to use your Mac productively, perform basic trouble-shooting and housekeeping tasks, and easily move files between Macs and Windows computers. Feel free to bring your Mac laptop with you.

Friday, Feb 29, 2008 , 12pm - 1pm
WIC Seminar Room, Van Pelt Library
Register Now!

Presented by Al Matthews and Jason Watkins from SAS Computing.

Edit Audio with Audacity

Learn to work with audio with Audacity, a free, open-source program for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. In this class, you'll learn to combine music and voice, improve sound quality, and create polished podcasts. There are still seats available for our class this Wednesday, February 27 from 10am-noon. Register free online.

Cheap Flash/Thumb Drives

Just wanted to point out a couple places online that are currently selling a 4GB USB Flash drive for only about $17. Keep in mind we're not endorsing any vendors here, but Amazon.com and Buy.com and NewEgg have this thumb drive available at a price that makes it difficult to turn down.

Music 258 Students

If you're in Music 258, please be sure to tell the lab consultant on duty when it comes time to save your files so that we can save your work on the appropriate hard drive for your class.

Apply for $1000 Technology Grant Soon!

Thanks to the generosity of Jeffrey L. Seltzer and Ana L. Seltzer, the Penn Libraries (Weigle Information Commons) is proud to offer undergraduate research awards for up to six students to conduct research using new media and information technologies. Each award will provide about $1,000 worth of equipment (both hardware and software) and supplies to support a research project for up to one year.* These awards include special consideration for students enrolled in the Huntsman Program. After one year, equipment purchased through the award will return to the Weigle Information Commons for general use. Some examples of technology items that could support research projects include: digital videocameras, audio recorders, virtual reality camera peripherals, microphones, scanners, mobile devices, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

http://www.upenn.edu/curf/research/research_grants.htm#seltzer

Happy Lupercalia!

Yeah, the rest of the country (and much of the world) is celebrating Valentine's Day, but here at the Digital Media Lab, we celebrate a different sort of holiday. No, we won't be sacrificing anyone, but I put some chocolate out which you can enjoy while it lasts.

Possible World Record

Ok, i've been known to exaggerate. But it's still pretty impressive--or at least long overdue. As of this morning, we have all 11 Macs in the lab up and running again! This should help a lot as we head into finals, making sure we have as many workstations available as possible.