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.

Spring Robot

I've had at least 2 people ask me when we're going to put up a new robot sign on the door of the lab. One of them even noticed that the one we've been using was just a re-use of the robot from last Spring. Well, at long last, we've put up our new robot hours sign for Spring 2008. Thanks to Jesse, our robot-artist-in-residence, for the new sign!

The Ultimate Steal

This was just too good a deal not to let y'all know about. Microsoft is making MS Office 2007 Ultimate Edition available to any and all university students for $60. That's sixty, not six hundred. Even the educational price for this package is usually over $200. You just need a .edu email address andyou have to be enrolled in at least 0.5 credits worth of college classes.

Office 2007 Ultimate includes:

• Access™ 2007
• Accounting Express 2007
• Excel® 2007
• InfoPath® 2007
• Groove 2007
• OneNote® 2007
• Outlook® 2007 with Business Contact Manager*(see Obtaining Software below)
• PowerPoint® 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Word 2007

I don't even know what half of those programs do, but they still sound pretty cool. More info at http://www.theultimatesteal.com (yes, this is an official Microsoft website, despite the funky url)

Also, they say "Office 2007," not "Office 2008," which probably means it's a Windows-only thang, at least for now. Definitely check it out if you've been wanting to get office, but you haven't wanted to shell out the $239 it would otherwise cost you as a student.

Thanks to Neal at the Computer Connection for the hot tip! (also, thanks to Neal for showing me the new Macbook Air. Day-am! That thing is thin! Go check it out if you haven't seen it yet.)

User Storage Down!

Our user storage drive is currently unavailable due to a hardware failure in the lab consultant's workstation. This means that any files you've saved here in the lab are not accessible at this time. We are hoping that the files themselves are unaffected, but we won't know for sure until we can get the machine up and running again. We know how important it is to our users that this problem gets fixed ASAP. We've alerted the Library's systems department that this is a top priority, and we hope to have access to everyone's files again by the end of the day.

[update: We've got everything up and running again. All the files on the drive appear to have survived intact. Thanks to Doug for his speedy response!]

Improve your Memory

Well, we improved ours, anyway. In response to user requests, we've doubled the amount of memory in all of the Macs here in the lab. Each machine now has 4GB of RAM, and the performance improvement should be immediately apparent to anyone who has used the lab before. As I write this, we still have one machine left to upgrade, but we expect that to be done by the end of the week. Keep those suggestions coming!

Stay Up Late

So now, not only are we getting up early to make the donuts *yawn* but we're also staying open a little later each night. Starting today, we'll be open until 10pm every night of the week (update: except Friday and Saturday: til 9pm). Please thank all of the lab consultants, who clearly have nothing better to do at night than hang out here.

Newest Lab Consultants - Ariela and Ned

Please welcome the newest members of the Vitale Digital Media Lab family, Ariela Nurko and Ned Eisenberg (you'll have to figure out which one is which from the photos below). You'll be seeing plenty of them here in the lab during the coming months, so make sure you say hi to them when you see them.

Yawn... Time to make the Donuts...

9am. We're now opening at 9am. So we have to get here at 9am. Yeah, I know, it's a perfectly normal time for most people to start work, but we'd gotten so comfortable sleeping in, having enough time in the morning to enjoy a lazy cup of coffee at La Colombe, and opening the lab at 10am. But because we're so dedicated to you, and because the lab has doubled in popularity over the last 12 months, we're opening an hour earlier on weekdays.

iMovie and Photoshop Workshops, Spring 2008

We're offering more workshops on how to use iMovie and how to use Photoshop. The workshops are very introductory and assume no prior knowledge of the software. Be sure to sign up for a spot online, or see our other workshops HERE!

Creating and editing movies with iMovie

• Wednesday, January 23, 2008 , 2 PM to 4 PM
• Thursday, February 21, 2008 , 10 AM to 12 PM
• Tuesday, March 04, 2008 , 10 AM to 12 PM
  
• Thursday, April 24, 2008 , 10 AM to 12 PM

This class will provide an hands-on introduction to using Apple's iMovie software, which is available for Penn students, faculty, and staff in the Vitale Digital Media Lab. You will learn how to capture video from a DVD, VHS tape, or from your own video camera. You will learn to organize or delete video clips, add a new soundtrack, add subtitles, and create special effects. All sessions are identical and will be held in the Digital Media Lab.

PhotoShop I

• Wednesday, January 30, 2008 , 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM
• Wednesday, February 20, 2008 , 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM
• Wednesday, March 19, 2008 , 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM
  
• Wednesday, April 23, 2008 , 1:30 PM to 3:30 PM

A basic introduction to this powerful image editing software. Learn how to open image files, use the toolbox and palettes, convert formats and manage multiple layers. All sessions are identical. (note: Photoshop classes are now held in the Seminar room, just down the hall from the Digital Media Lab)