October, 2009Archive for

Blue Snowflake – Review

I finally got the chance to try out my newly acquired production microphone this evening, the Blue Snowflake is a USB condenser microphone with a cardioid pickup pattern. It is widely acclaimed as one of the best professional portable USB microphones and is suggested by many as a great microphone for voice overs, podcasting, narration and portable recording - pretty much everything I need then :D Setup was quick and painless, simply connect the microphone via USB and change the input selectio...
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Level 26 Dark Origins

New media is something that interests me greatly, I consider it one of the most important ongoing developments of my life time. It is great then to see it mature and innovate in such fantastic ways. Level 26 Dark Origins is the first example of what is being termed a digi-novel, a combination of text based fiction, media elements (in this case video bridges) and a social community. I have just purchased the iTunes version which ships with a whole heap of extras and weighs in at just over 1GB. It...
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Blue Snowflake

The podcast has been put on hold for the past few days but I feel it is probably a good idea for many reasons to get an episode out this week. For one it will help raise awareness of the ScreenFlow 2.0 competition and indeed give me the opportunity to voice some audio thoughts on some recent developments. To date most of my audio recording has been done using the MacBook Pro integrated microphone, which works fine for the most part, but having recently experienced the awesomeness of the Blue Sno...
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ScreenFlow 2.0 Competition!!

In conjunction with an upcoming e-learning event to be held on November 11th the very kind people at Telestream have provided me with a copy of ScreenFlow 2.0 to give away to one lucky winner. The competition is open to viewers of the blog, listeners of the podcast and to those attending the event on the 11th November. To have a chance of winning all you have to do is identify how you would use ScreenFlow in your daily work flow. All entries will be judged in terms of creativity and usefu...
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Dragon Age Origins – Preview

"Sword and fantasy, with depth and detail on an unprecedented scale..." Dragon Age Origins is a game of humans, elves and dwarves; their neccessary alliance in the face of extraordinary evil with a good amount of adventure, magic, death, lust and sacrifice thrown in for good measure. No it's not likely to win many awards for originality yet it presents all these elements in quite a unique way. As easy as it might be to make DAO sound like a traditional RPG it really is a very unique and chall...
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ScreenFlow 2.0 – Review

In the past few weeks I was lucky enough to be given the opportunity to participate in the ScreenFlow 2.0 Beta. For those that are new to the blog and perhaps unfamiliar with ScreenFlow it is a screencasting development application for the Mac platform. I have been a user and admirer of the software for some time and use it extensively in my daily work flow as an academic, it provides what I consider the best screencasting development solution available and is pivotal in my development of e-lear...
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ProfCast

With my recent switch to the Mac platform came excitement, a sense of discovery and the challenge of finding new software solutions to cater for my daily work flow. For the most part it was fairly easy to discover equivalent or indeed better ways of doing things but in some cases I actually discovered completely new tools to aid in the development of learning materials. One such tool is ProfCast - a versatile, powerful, yet very simple to use tool for recording lectures including PowerPoint and/...
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Left 4 Dead 2 – Preview

I love most things that involved zombies; films such as Night of the Living Dead, books such as The Zombie Survival Guide and video games such as Left 4 Dead. The survival aspect of each, which usually pits humans with limited resources in a dire situation against an army of the undead, makes for great entertainment. The first Left 4 Dead game did exactly that, players were presented with a series of co-op scenarios with up to four players taking on the zombie horde. Levels were set in varying e...
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Plans – For What They Are Worth

I hope to get a lot of cleaning done tomorrow - this place really needs a good clean out & then continue with development. I have a few days where I don't have to attend work now so I want to make the most of them, there are lots of things I need to get done before I return. Tonight I have some quite time to myself which is exactly what I need, I intend to spend some time watching TV, I have new episodes of both Stargate Universe and Flashpoint to watch. I also want to get caught up with som...
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Videocue Review

I have considered implementing a regular news based video podcast for a while now, not to replace the weekly GeekCaster podcast (which is currently on hiatus) but more to reflect on the day gone and give my take on what the daily news. There are a few productions that have inspired me to this concept, Webb Alert & The Morgan Minute both featuring the lovely Morgan Webb were long time favourites of mine and Cali Lewis does a fine job in condensing tech news down into daily segments on GeekBri...
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Autumn TV

Now that we are entering into the dusk of the year the new season of TV is well and truly upon us. Old favourites have returned and some new blood has joined the schedules in an attempt to warrant our time. There are probably five shows that I now watch regularly: Fringe Stargate Universe Doll House The Big Bang Theory Flashpoint The discussion on the above that follows may contain some spoliers - read only if you are up to date with each show... Fringe Probably my favourite...
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Creative Commons

There are about a million things going through my head at the moment but I need to focus on something else to give my head a break. I hope that makes some kind of sense, so with that thought in mind I thought I would spend some time looking into the use of Creative Commons for future projects I am working on, blog content etc. After doing some research I have decided that certain future developments will be catergorised under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Li...
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