Posted by Jerry on March 16th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Technology
It worked for a while, then one day I logged in and it stopped – no sound from YouTube videos! I tried a diagnostic check with Nortons, still no sound. I tried shutting down and powering down to clear the cache. Still no sound. Well, when all else fails, read the manual. I looked up the Mac forums to see if anyone else had had the same problem with a mac running OS X (10.4). And they had. And there was a solution.
For some reason, macs seem to reset their midi audio output sample rate to 96,000.0 hertz, and that cuts off the sound fro flash movies. Interestingly, iTunes still worked okay and so did the midid player on barfly, but YouTube videos were vision only. The fix is easy.
Open the Applications folder, then the utilities folder and find an app called Audio Midi Setup and double click to open it.
The audio output is on the right hand side – and you’ll notice a small blue rectangle with a down arrow. Click there and a drop-down selection appears.
Select 44100.0 hertz
And close it all up – now your YouTube videos will have sound again! Yay!!
Just thought I’d share that with you in case you’re having the same ‘issue’.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 15th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
In a classic error of form being conflated with content, it seems there is a proposal in the UK to ban phone masts from church rooftops – because new generation phones can access the internet and the internet might transmit pornographic images!
Of course this was relayed in a news medium that references some rather early electronic telecommunication systems – the Telegraph…
I wonder how long it will take the Anglican Church to realise that neither service providers, nor basic infrastructure providers are responsible for content on the internet. It also ignores the valuable service provided by mobile phones – in an era when public phone booths (landline) are fast disappearing from our streets. How then would an emergency phone call be made?
It also ignores the 2006 content analysis that showed that pornography is only a very small part of the web content – about 1%, which is about the same as the amount of Government information online. And do people really search that much for adult content? Actually only about 6% of searches. So the web is quite staid really. The study was conducted by Philip Stark – Professor of Statistics at University of California at Berkeley.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 14th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
Evelyn Rodrigues has hit the proverbial nail in the right place when talking about slow marketing, slow travel, slow food – you name it. If web 2.0 is about people then it also has to be about taking time for people. It is not a coincidence that modern management is talking increasingly about work/life balance – meaning focus on the important relationships and people will work happier and be more productive. Creative tension is passe – and ineffective.
Technology may be about speed but innovation requires time out, time to recontextualise – remember Archimedes taking time out in the bath…? Let alone the orchards of Isaac Newton and Viginia Woolf.
Whatever happened to letting an idea marinate – go through a few iterations first before releasing the bug-ridden beta product on the unsuspecting public?
The speed of technology is a great enabler, but that is a means of delivery, not of exploration. We have bread-making machines, but even they have to take time out to let the dough rise. There are times when people just need to talk to each other. And that’s the rich part of web 2.0
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 13th, 2007 — Posted in History, Journal, New media, Technology
There are continuing discussions over web 2.0 – on the issue of tagging and tag clouds (all forms of meta data) – so I thought it timely to revisit an idea I first explored in 2004. The internet has come up with a range of standards in relation to information about information – meta data standards. The best known of these are the Dublin Core meta data standards But the issues that led to the Dublin core standards are not new. The Rosetta Stone (196 BC) – just 200 years after Plato, and – significantly – during the Greek administration of Egypt, revealed something really interesting – the existence of meta tags almost 2000 years before the Internet.
The two languages in three scripts on the stone revealed the difficulties of applying consistent language standards across an empire. Just as Web pages today specify a language an script to be applied, so too, the Rosetta stone includes as part of the inscribed decree, the stipulation that it is to be set in hard stone, in the three scripts: heiroglyphic, demotic and Greek.
What we have in fact is a meta data standard that specified the platform (a stele of hard stone); the language versions; the authority of the specification, (Ptolemy V); and its URL (each of the first, second and third rank temples). In web language these would look like this in the head part of the cartouche:
In other words about half of the Dublin Core meta data standards are incorporated into the Rosetta Stone. This must surely provide us with an insight into something fundamental about the nature of information, and the nature of official discourse. What is needed to establish the intelligibility and authoritativeness of a piece of text when it is removed from the body (speech) and placed into a third-party medium? This is not a new question – and goes to the heart of what it means to be part of a speech community, and indeed part of the virtual community of human culture whether online or face-to-face.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 12th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, New media
A little while ago, new media literacy analyst Angela Thomas set a mystery challenge. In June she would be heading off to… well, that was the mystery. The first clue showed a window – with Classical architecture overtones.
The second clue suggested it had something to do with chocolate. I figured it wouldn’t just be any old chocolate – perhaps European or American, but not your bog standard Cadbury – nice though it is. Again could be almost anywhere from Adelaide to Alsace.
It was the third clue that clinched it. A photo of a mermaid fountain. I searched Google and found lots of references to mermaids, but I needed to narrow down the search. Try Flickr. If it was a genuine clue, there would somewhere be a photo of this fountain. About five pages in and I had it. The photo was a plaza somewhere in San Francisco, USA. Surely not a plain old Herschey bar?
I had the name of the plaza, Ghirardelli, but still not the significance. So I googled the name and came up with the chocolate factory that gave its name to the plaza. And being in the US, this chocolate factory had a decent website – complete with links to Google Maps, which gave me the street address and the final piece of the puzzle – which precise building would provide a view of THAT window in a setting that involved chocolate.
Amazingly, it took someone in Australia, a mere 350km from Angela to pinpoint within a few meters a mystery spot that must’ve been instantly recognisable to countless US residents in SanFrancisco!
Is it a question of web literacy? Is it the amazing tools that are available to the online researcher? Perhaps it is the combination of all these. For me it came down to a search strategy – what kinds of information might I find where?
Interestingly, the initial google search only provided fog. But once I had located the image, then I could use Google effectively to locate the mystery spot – and to find information about the Japanese-American artist who designed and built the fountain and had it cast in bronze in 1968 as part of a Civic commission.
So web literacy is not just about being able to use advanced search functions on Google, or about stumbling across intriguing mystery location challenges on someone’s weblog, but about being able to use the appropriate tools across both visual and textual information to achieve the desired result.
What began perhaps as a fun way to get people engaged in a blog by eliciting audience participation, actually wound up challenging people to engage the combination of literacies that go to form web literacy or new media literacy.
Hmm… since I’ll be travelling at about the same time, perhaps I should set a return challenge – watch this space 😉
Thanks to Angela for setting this new media literacy test 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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