Chris Hamady

Thank you to those of you that attended my recent presentation. You can download a PowerPoint presentation of my slides here:

eTech 2010 presentation on streaming video

Some video of our media production facility, behind the scenes footage, and examples of final broadcasts.

Video Footage 37 Mb (Requires the Free QuickTime Player)

Our sporting event broadcast workflow in a mind map:

Workflow (pdf)

CH

My daughter and I wanted to watch a DVD tonight. Each time we put the DVD into my Mac Mini, the Mini would spit the media back out. I'm still not sure what the cause of that was.

Next I tried ripping it on my MacBook Pro with HandBrake. It ripped into an m4v file but the sequence of the movie was all scrambled. This wouldn't work either.

I told my daughter the bad news. She looked at me and said matter of factly, "...just put the DVD in your MacBook and play it over on the Mac Mini." A brilliant idea if it were possible. I initially told her that it wasn't possible, but then I remembered Apple's Remote Disk Sharing feature that is normally used to install software on the MacBook Air and other computers that do not have optical disk drives.

I went into the Sharing section of my MacBook Pro's System Preferences and turned on "DVD or CD Sharing." I next went to the Mac Mini and waited. Nothing. Remote Disk is supposed to show up in the sidebar of the finder window. Nothing.

It turns out that this feature is not enabled on some Macs. After a bit of Googling, I found this:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2009012605560521

Open terminal on the computer that needs to access the remote DVD drive and type:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true

And then:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

I logged out of the account and then back into it again. Now I could see the remote disk (DVD) loaded on the MacBook Pro while looking at the finder sidebar of the Mac Mini. Great! I opened up DVD player on the Mac Mini, navigated to the remote DVD and received an error that the disk was "...copy protected blah blah blah."

Googling more I found a number of posts stating that this procedure could not be done due to the copy protection restrictions put in place by Apple. I was just about to give up hope when I thought of VLC (Video Lan Client). I opened up VLC, browsed to the remote DVD, and lo and behold, IT WORKED! We are now watching the DVD on the Mac Mini as it is being played on the MacBook Pro's DVD drive.

My daughter has mad skills!
CH

P.S. This got me thinking. Why doesn't Apple just allow this by default? I'm jumping through way too many hoops just to play a movie that WE LEGALLY OWN. *sigh*

This Christmas we went to visit my inlaws out in Chicago. As we were approaching our destination, my wife received a text on her iPhone, "Ask Chris what we should do with the Mac Mini. When we try to boot it up, it gets stuck at the Apple logo."

Long story short, this Mac's drive was shot. The drive not only wouldn't boot properly, it wouldn't even mount in target disk mode. I could boot the Mac in singler user mode (restart holding down command+S) which enabled me to see the files via command line so I knew that they were still there. I just couldn't get to them. To make matters worse, my brother in law then informed me that he had very important files on the computer related to an audit that he was involved in at work. No backups. Not good.

Here's what I eventually had to do to recover the files. I connected a FireWire drive to the Mac Mini and booted it up off of a retail Mac OS X 10.5 DVD. Once I could see the Utilities menu, I opened up terminal and ran:

cd /Volumes

and then:

ls

This returned:

Macintosh HD  FireWire HD

Now that I was sure that the two drives could be seen via command line, I did:

cd Macintosh\ HD/Users/

then:

cp -R brotherinlaw/Documents/ /Volumes/FireWire\ HD/

Once the cp command completed, I did:

ls /Volumes/FireWire\ HD/

This resulted in seeing that all of the files that my brother in law needed were now on the FireWire drive! I'm still in the process of backing up data. I'll update this post as soon as I know one way or another if I was completely successful.

One very strange behavior ocurred in that the failing drive (Macintosh HD) wouldn't show up in the Mac OS X Installer until I opened up Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and clicked on its root partition. After I did that, I quit out of Disk Utility and eventually it showed up in the installer. I could then see the drive when I did a:

ls /Volumes

These commands explained for those of you new to Unix:

cd = Change Directory

ls = List Files

cp -R = Copy Recursively

 CH

UPDATE: It worked.

Over the past few weeks with increasingly more regularity, my Twitter account has been locked when I try to access it. When I attempt to log in, I get the message:

"Locked out!
We've temporarily locked your account after too many failed attempts to sign in. Please chillax for a few, then try again."

I know my login information and have it saved in my web browser, so what could possibly be causing this? I believe that the answer lies in the ever increasing amount of Twitter accounts that are being hacked and exploited for spamming.

Could people be attempting to hack into accounts using brute-force hacking methods? I'm sure it's possible, and probable.

Twitter's answer to this issue, however, is extremely vexing. Because someone is trying to hack into "my" account, Twitter locks ME out of it!? Um...is this really the best solution to this problem?</sarcasm>

Why not use IP address restrictions instead of globally locking down the account. If someone types 3 bad login attempts from an IP address, refuse all login attempts from that IP address UNLESS that IP address has been used in the past to successfully log in. In that case, make it 5 unsuccessful log in attempts before that IP address is locked out. How about allowing users to force Twitter to ONLY allow logins from specific IP addresses?

Don't like these ideas as default settings? How about making them an optional checkbox in the Twitter settings?

[  ] Use IP address login restrictions.

[  ] Only allow logins from the following IP addresses

etc...

All I know is, getting locked out of my Twitter account when I'm increasingly relying on it for communication and learning is a real pain.

Could someone be silenced for their views on Twitter? Absolutely. All someone has to do is try to log into an account over and over again and that user is locked out of it. This doesn't seem very functional, dependable, or even usable.

Twitter is many things to many people. If they want many of us to rely on it for professional social networking, IMHO they need to make it more robust, consistent, and designed with mission critical uptime, connectivity, and "loginability" in mind. (Ok...loginability isn't a word. Put the word or phrase that I'm looking for in the comments.) :)

I hope Twitter fixes these login restrictions real soon.

CH

This past summer was nearly entirely consumed by the design and creation of a new media production facility for our school, Toledo Central Catholic. The facility includes a full television production area where we produce and stream via the Internet the daily announcements for our Irish News Network, an instructional area where students learn multimedia creation on apps such as iMovie and Final Cut Studio, and a full multitrack recording studio where the students have access to Apple's Logic Pro, GarageBand, and DigiDesign's Pro Tools.

Recently, I asked the students in my Digital Audio Recording and Production class if they would record a radio commercial for our school. They agreed and were given a script that was prepared by the Director of Marketing for CCHS, Lisa Bowling.

We looked at the script together, and I assigned students to play the different characters in the script. Once that was done, I let them take over the entire project. One of the students acted as the recording engineer, and the rest did the voiceovers. Once they told me that they were finished, I was completely blown away by what they had done.

Check out the radio commercial that they created entitled, "Just say yes!"

Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments so that we can improve with the next one.

CH